One Winter in Prague

or: how not to get lost in nostalgia

I’m beginning to get tour dates together for the release of The Sapling Cage, and I’ll be announcing them soon. In the meantime, it’s not to late to pre-order a signed copy through Firestorm Books.

I promised that half the posts on my substack would be “more personal,” and this one is about as personal as it gets. Hope you enjoy it.

One Winter in Prague

or: how not to get lost in nostalgia

I spent awhile last week lost in memories. I’m a forty-one year old woman living alone in the woods, so I try not to get lost in memories, but there they were, in a box of old photos my brother dredged up in our parents’ basement. About ten rolls of undeveloped film, too, which I sent off to a darkroom somewhere. I spent hours sorting stacks of prints into photo albums, and looking back on my youth I have to say: my god, I used to be good at getting my heart broken.

I have if anything even more love in my life in my forties than I did in my twenties. Some of the people in those photos I still know, I still love. I’m better at telling friends, family, and partners alike that I love them, and I’m better at meaning it. I’m better at unconditional love. I’m better at understanding the difference between infatuation and love. The love I have in my life now is deeper, more stable, more fulfilling.

But in my youth, love was raw. It was sharp-edged. It hurt. Heartache gave my life its direction… often literally and geographically, as I ran from heartbreak to heartbreak, in some competition against myself to see how much emotion I could wrangle out of life.

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There’s a story about the Czech Republic that I like telling and another that I don’t.

I like telling the story about leaving on a bus, twenty years ago now. All the money I had in the world was the $100 or so I got out of Sony Pictures after the Screen Actors’ Guild threatened to sue them for putting me in the movie Rent without my permission (okay, this is another story I like telling, for a different day). That hundred bucks was more than enough for a bag of muesli, a bottle of Fernet Stock, and a ticket to Amsterdam on a cut-rate bus.

It was an overnight trip, and I was asleep when we reached the German border. I was woken up by a blonde German soldier standing at attention and shouting “guten tag!”

My first thought, raised in America, was of course “oh fuck! A Nazi!”

But he wasn’t a Nazi, he was just a border guard.

He looked at me and the other long-haired boy on the bus, who if memory serves was Argentinean, and pulled us off the bus at two in the morning to comb through our belongings with a fanatical thoroughness. I would frankly be the worst person in the world to use as a drug-runner. I have been searched far, far more times than I could possibly count. In my youth, hitchhiking around and loitering for a living, I was searched nearly daily. So I didn’t have drugs on me—and didn’t do drugs, then or now, drugs are bad kids, don’t do drugs.

At long last, the guard got to my accordion case. “Do you mind if I open that?” I asked. “It’s fragile, it’s an accordion.”

“Oh!” the not-a-Nazi border guard cried out. “You’re a musician!”

It’s as if everything clicked into place for him. There had to be some reason I looked so strange. Criminal or artist. 

He didn’t even open the accordion case. He let me back on the bus, and I went back to sleep, and I woke up in Amsterdam. I wandered the streets until I found a squatter I knew, and soon enough I’d moved back into my old squat, safe and sound in a mansion of a rowhome my friends had stolen from a mafia boss while he was in prison.

Ever since, I’ve learned that it’s easiest to go through life offering people a category to slot me into, lest they decide something different for themselves. At least when I deal with authorities. Carry an instrument.

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That’s the fun story to tell about the Czech Republic. It’s the story that makes me sound cool, I think, and has a neat little moral at the end about how humans behave and how to get away with looking weird.

It’s not the main thing I remember about the place.