a city full of red signs showing oncewas communist greyness and cars named škoda - czech for pity. a sometimes (and across different borders and tongues) milácku traded in for long silences and awkward regards. promised springtime weather, nowhere to be found. but snow and wind find easily their mark through scarves to hard hearts. a small lexicon is filled disproportionately with heavy words like lítost, which, although untranslatable, is apparently necessary for understanding the secret history of men's souls. time here, it seems, spent silently, sadly, with a book of laughter and forgetting.

one bright exception, a bursting of black on black and a smiling face of eastern splendor on tram ten. myself not the only one thrice caught staring. however, czech words (the fifteen with which i am armed - or teethed) fall less than elegantly from my lips. myself without the courage to make a phrase or even a simple smile. i think she knew though, that somehow somewhere, and not just then and there in tram number ten, i was in love. perhaps a laughable love, but some sort of a love nonetheless, for my heart and stomach did not release their butterflies but after an hour of walking and another of dreamsomething thinking of my cold hands upon her neck:

myslim na tebe