Incompatibility, fantasy and time travel - (two days for the price of one!)

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.

Looking after myself and birthday blues

Tiredness is getting the better of me, but I'm glad I had a lie-in this morning and forced myself not to work today.  Coincidence has meant I might not see my boyfriend for more than half a day on my birthday (it's a bit of a chunky one this year) which is tomorrow, due to the fact that he's got extra work to do today and on Monday morning to try to secure a new job.  But this not only comes at the same time as my 35th birthday, but also at a time when I've been unable to avoid frequent thoughts of ex-partner as well as my sort of homesickness for west London. 

I've recently picked up a couple of bits of writing work and begun to open my mind a bit in a 'fake it till you make it' way about the possibility of one day having a proper budget for things like clothes - something my sister has never gone without, but I've done for years.  Which has only made me miserable.  The contrast with yesterday, when I finally spent some leftover Christmas money was immense.  I bought a top I really wanted and some jewellery too.  Amazing.

Today I finally bought myself a big glass vase as well as some files to organise my work a bit better from now on and I bought myself some red roses too, so that when the architect fails to buy me any flowers at all, let alone the kind I like the most, I won't need to feel sad about it, as I'm doing my utmost to cover the shortfall.  Which is vital, in order to avoid the waves of grief and sadness that might otherwise drown me in seeing the depth of what's missing in this relationship, compared to one I know is possible for other people, so why not me?

Off to play the keyboard now to see which songs vie for attention now that I need music again somehow....

Homesickness and attempts to run away

I never thought I'd actually feel homesick, but lately I've been ashamed to notice that I miss my Sunday lunchtime option of being able to pop to Portobello Road or a handful of charity shops and second hand places in and around Notting Hill.  I miss the overcrowded cafe I sometimes used to go to for scrambled eggs on toast or a pain au chocolat, and the bookshop around the corner where I found big Moomin books and other delights.

Of course, I also miss the company I used to have when I went on those little trips, although I sometimes went on my own too.  Maybe it's because of the enormous invasion of privacy I'm having to withstand at the moment due to builders marching in and out of my flat at will, to do more ,rekonstrukce' [renovation] but it feels more like 'deconstruction' to me.  It's been over two weeks now (the time they said it would take to finish was two weeks, so I can take comfort in the fact that my cynicism that this estimate would turn out to be a total lie was well-founded) and I'm fraying at the edges in every conceivable way.

I have no washing machine, no cooker, no sink (so I'm washing dishes in the washbasin in the bathroom) and I even had to clear my desk the other day so they could get to the holes they made in the walls to fill them in again.  Clear my desk?!  Are you mad?  There's stuff that hasn't seen the light of day since I moved in well over a year ago and you want me to clear it all up?!  Consequently it's not only my rooms that are in disarray.  My brain is probably starting to resemble the same walls that surround me now.  Momentarily it holds together, until the next unexpected quiet trickle of wall dust comes tumbling down onto the floor to remind me that all is not well...

So, I have endeavoured in this time of turmoil, to escape to cafes wherever possible.  First it was the old haunt of Palac Knih Luxor, full this time of Czech intellectuals and arty reminders of London suddenly and unannounced-ly on the wall:

Their hot chocolate is the best and cheapest in all Prague-dom though:

Then there was the resorting to a coffee chain place for the sake of free internet, but I was lucky to get the best spot to sit in with a good view out onto Vaclavák and the candles around the statue that are still commemorating Havel:

And then, today, I really had had enough of no hot food, constant drilling and dust everywhere as well as general lack of nice surroundings, so I hot-footed it to a tip-off of a bookshop cafe in Prague 1, which looked rather lovely on their website but was rather smaller and in the case of the bookshop, less well-stocked than I had hoped.  The cafe was good, however, and I was so grateful for a hot bowl of chilli and a safe place to sit and write on my laptop:

But I felt so tired and so low, I couldn't even face speaking to anyone, even though the people around me were all Americans or speakers of English no matter what their nationality and one very loud and confident Australian.  I somehow didn't feel any more at home there than in the Czech bookshop.  Perhaps even less so.  Infact, when it came to paying the bill, I was so confused by being able to speak in English again, I sometimes slipped back into Czech when it was totally unnecessary and I even tried to follow Czech conventions for paying the bill, which made the waitress think I was mad.  I felt like a lost lamb.

You see, this is what happens when you make a concerted effort to integrate yourself into a new society, a new culture, a new language.  If you try really hard, you can get used to all the right conventions and the right kinds of expressions for certain situations, but then, when you go somewhere that's a bit 'in-between' culturally (either an American bookshop or indeed somewhere like the French Institute) you can end up feeling utterly lost.  Nothing is quite right, things don't quite fit in and the thing that fits in the least is YOU.

So that's how I came home, in the uncharacteristically drizzly Prague rain, feeling utterly alone and without even a physical place to call home, as I got in and found the builders still finishing up, having done only a bit of painting and patching up, none of the hard work stuff, which they strongly assured me will all be finished tomorrow.  Somehow, I think this may be another lie and another opportunity for me to feel pleased that I am a total cynic and no matter what language you lie to me optimistically in, I'm not going to fall for it.  At least something's still intact, eh?

Unlike my flat: