Three months ago in Prague I meet her in a three level steampunk nightclub on the outskirts of the city. We walk the wrong direction back to where I am staying. Like all cities, I think I know where I'm going when I don't.
Finally she calls a cab and we ride in the backseat together to her apartment.
Up many flights of stairs, she invites me into a studio that is sparse and simple. For a pet, she has a Japanese fighter fish. She shows me how when she presses a compact mirror to the aquarium, the fish starts instinctively attacking its own reflection. The Japanese fighter fish smashes its head into the glass over and over again, hellbent on destroying what it thinks is an enemy, but is only itself. She slides the mirror off and the fury subsides. Then the fish drifts off and melts into all the other abstractions of the room.
She whispers stories to me of her time living in the mountains as a kid when the communists were in control.
I walk home the next morning with lazy bones hingeing like antique doors. As with any morning after making love my body and mind feel more receptive to what the world is trying to tell me. So here is what I am noticing before the world falls apart again. Here I am walking in a foreign city I won't ever truly know. The election is not for another month. I am all alone and faraway like I want. All I have to do now in these moments is concentrate on moving through the space that time is affording me while in this functioning body. All I have to do now is find the determination to not go hurling myself at whichever version of me appears next.
