There was a hint of autumn in the air on Friday. Not in the temperature, like the chill in the air that came about a couple of weekends ago, but in the appearance of the landscape. The sky was cloudy but it was still warm. Hot infact, despite Thursday night's storm.
As I walked back up the hill from Václavske náměstí I noticed the yellow leaves all across the path of the little park by the museum and they were still being blown off the tree as a gust of wind pushed them right towards me.
It was strange to see that without the accompanying cold feeling.
There's something about the onset of autumn that kind of scares me even though I am a winter baby and I have better winter and autumn clothes than summer ones. I think it must be to do with both the sense of horror of that 'back to school' feeling that has somehow never left me and also that dread of the dark mornings that are worse here because everyone starts work at 8am and getting up at 6am is distinctly worse than getting up at 7am. Particularly when the nature of my type of work usually dictates working evenings too, so there is no corresponding end of the working day at 4pm to compensate for the early starts. Which I hate. I really don't do well on 6 hours' sleep.
Maybe it's also the reality of the fact that September, October and November don't bring anything to look forward to. Funds are so low that I can't plan a really sumptuous evening meal out somewhere I can dress up for. Maybe it's partly because the cowboy doesn't know how to savour anything. When I do make an effort to buy a nice bottle of wine for us and a good film to watch, for example, he gulps down the wine in a bid to finish it because it's Saturday night and the next evening we'd be driving back to Prague. (And on Friday nights we're just too tired from all that 'only 6 hours' sleep a night' problem.) He somehow doesn't think it's safe to put the cork back in and bring the rest of the bottle back with us. So he always wants to finish it off, whereas I'd rather savour it and enjoy sitting on the sofa with him, relishing a quiet moment of peace and a bit of a romantic atmosphere.
But maybe it's been my fault that I haven't managed to find good enough films to watch that suit his taste. Or maybe it's because the flat is missing the black shiny piano and soft woollen throw for the sofa that would make me feel truly welcome. Maybe I just want too much. Or we're just too different. For example, he never listens to music except in the car, is always (almost constantly in fact) watching TV and he likes to wear super-casual clothes for walking in, while I like dressing up a bit. Except, even when I do have an opportunity where he would want me to dress up, he always finds something that's not posh enough about me. Like my shoes are a bit too scuffed or I haven't had my hair cut in over 6 months because I can't afford it. Or the posh dress I'm in is the same one he's seen me in before because I never have enough money to spend on clothes and certainly never on a really good dress.
I think it's really the lack of piano that makes all the difference. Then I'd put on a posh dress and heels and drink red wine and play my heart out all night. Until the cowboy realises that the heels are damaging the wood floor as I'm pedalling at the piano and orders me to take them off.
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Saturday:
The thing about the homogenisation of shopping areas, cafe chains and department stores is that you now can't tell where you are at first glance. Everywhere looks the same. I could be in London, Prague or even Chicago. (But for the missing American flags that would be the one main difference in the latter.) And in some cases, you can't tell when you are. In the Czech Republic, for example, the clothes store C&A never went bankrupt, so I can sit in a generic coffee chain cafe and look across at the C&A shop front in this shopping mall and this could even be London, circa 1998. Somehow there are things my brain is willing to take on as true, when logically they cannot be. This cannot be 1998. And no matter how many times my brain half-sees it, ex-partner cannot be the next older guy coming around the corner. He's not here. He doesn't even live in Prague. He doesn't love me anymore. He doesn't even look like him anymore. Not the him I knew. That version of him has gone and been replaced by a body double with a few more years behind him, an earring and a bunch of tattoos I'm not convinced make him look edgy and rock 'n' roll, but rather more 'sailor dude'.
So why does my mind trick me like this and imagine him being about to pop in and find me after he's just been to get something in another shop? It's as though my brain is capable of erasing the last 4 or so years and can just take me back to the beginning of 2008 when things still had a chance for improvement. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless. I must confess, I still try to buy bottles of wine from 2008, as though doing that might supplant me into a better, more optimistic time and space. And yet I know, deep down, that our relationship could never be absolutely right. Even one that caused me to feel, as Alina Reyes puts it in her book, 'When You Love, You Must Depart', "I know that I love him because with him I have fun. A simple walk in town becomes a real party, the world is a universe overflowing with dreams to be realised, with people and places that are either extraordinary or infamous, but never unimportant, with him everything is funnier and larger than life, with him, everything, everything is better", wasn't enough. It was a relationship that cut me off from some quite important things. And towards the end, it did not make me feel the above scenario at all.
But neither does being with the cowboy. I don't normally feel that places are transformed when I am with him. They are simply the same. Sometimes they even feel more restricted because of him. Sometimes however, on a rare special occasion that no-one planned, we find in the midst of a totally uninspiring location, that we can have a good laugh about something within our experience that takes us away from the drudgery, that transports us from the mundane world surrounding us and reminds us that we are not trapped here. That we can go home and have a laugh or get on a plane and hire a car and drive across a foreign country and muddle through together pretty well and at least still be alive by the end of it. He and I haven't had a lot of laughs lately, that's true, and I have been having a prolonged bout of homesickness for London as well as, strangely, for New York and Chicago, but there was that one redeeming moment last night when I felt like the place we were in was better and less damning because of our being together and I would never have wanted to be there alone. And that's got to count for something.
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