If I press gently enough, if I let the tips of fingers brush patiently along printed lines, I convince myself I can feel the grooves. The impression of an A, the swooping tail of the Y. It is not enough to read the written words of a friend, left on a thick and touristy postcard; I must escape Time by returning to a snippet of myself that is past.
The air is older in Prague. It smells of medieval battles and carries the whispers of rusalki myths. So different to the juvenile air of home, the still-realising opportunity of Australia. My fair-haired friend takes up her pen in this European air, writing on a postcard we had gathered during our earlier promenade. A new addition to our growing collection of sweet pastries, an amber ring, and a tiny woman made of Bohemian glass.
Half-empty cups and plates featuring soft-boiled eggs hide her written word from my curious eyes, so I attempt to translate her movements. Her wrist sharply jolts left, surely to cross off a T. The pen comes down pointedly – to dot an I or end a sentence?
We sit on a wooden table in open air, a quiet breeze dancing by as my lips greet the foam of coffee. The sun embraces the yellow walls that separate the cafe’s outdoors from its indoors, exposing plaster peeled back in spots where the wind and rain sought to reunite with once-hidden bricks.
No.
We sit on a wooden table neatly placed against a wall, the overhead light casting down its clinical brightness. This kitchen, a room hidden away in Na Bateriích, is five generous strides wide and maybe two strides long, for shorter legs like ours. We are only here for five nights, but when our bodies begin to ache from the day’s sightseeing and I ask “Should we head home?”, this is the place our mind’s eye summons.
Thumb lingering at the bottom of the postcard, I feel the indents of her sign-off: “With love”. This fair-haired friend had first put pen to paper while haloed in sunlight. Yet, by the time she concludes with those last eight letters, my memory has placed us in our borrowed kitchen, skin cushioned in pyjamas after a day well spent. Or did she find the pen in our room, down the hall, and write her words while she sat cross-legged on the bed?
The where of this memory becomes my fixation. I grasp at every potential truth and uncertain lie my mind is feeding itself in attempts to remember, eyes stinging hot as I keep catching air. But to surrender my search, waving that white flag tall and high, would mean it is gone for good.
No returns.
With my fingertips retracing her handwriting, I inevitably pin the postcard further against the wall where it sits for my frequent reassessment. The dusty pink paint — I was raised within dusty pink walls — is not this card’s first home. A year ago, it had sat on a wall painted in unifying white, the postcard itself a mark of individuality in a row of English university flats.
Often, when the day sits heavy on the shoulders and the moon decides to hide its face, the deepening in my chest craves for those white walls back. Connected by touch, in a state of reverence, I wonder if the postcard has a preference. White or pink? I ask.
A postcard doesn’t respond.
The cave in my chest splits jaggedly, torn, in both directions.
Desperate for clarity, I put a hold on vintage Prague and turn my inquiry to greyscale Iceland. Different to its companion, Iceland is a thin card of sharp corners, styled in a sketch-like fashion with a back devoid of a written message.
White or pink?
Iceland looks away.
Cosied up in the backseat of a local guide’s four-wheel drive, I link my arm with a new friend, the lavender tattoo just above her elbow squeezing against me. Our eyes are glued to the scenery playing outside the car window: the rushing of grand waterfalls, beaches with silky black sand, caves made of water frozen in place. Neglecting the rotten teeth that had begun to sink into the skin of my reality – a pre-emptive grief for relationships that would not withstand my return to pink walls – it was too easy to lose myself in sightseeing this foreign land.
I cannot consciously be hypocritical now, so I must allow Iceland to neglect me, as its new reality, in return. Why exchange magic for mundanity? There was only during or after Iceland, for this postcard.
White or pink was not its question.
Malta, however, welcomes my enquiry with an oil pastel artwork boasting bright reds, greens and blues. Again, this cream-bordered postcard holds no sentimental words, but it is not a stranger to them. Unlike the other two, Malta had first been a bookmark before becoming wall decor.
I carry it with me, pressed between thin pages, as I sit across from two dear companions on the ferry – the lavender-tattooed girl again, barely a month after Iceland, alongside the radiant laughter of our cheshire-grinning friend. With our skin newly sun-kissed and the ocean’s salt still stuck amidst our strands of hair, our minds are all sun-dried up. Concerns give way to carefree considerations: the promise of pasta drenched in red sauce, seafood freshly caught from the Mediterranean Sea, and the habit of one friend’s evening cigarette accompanied by the other’s spontaneous singing.
Sitting outside a restaurant, our plates empty and hearts full, I watch them speak. Gazing to the left, my eyes finally take the time to ghost-trace each line of a lavender tattoo. A tribute to her late grandmother, the ink on her arm has begun to stretch from years spent living. To the right, I linger on the yellow accents of a floral dress. This dress was a consolation gift – my cheshire-grinning friend has merely days before returning to her own version of pink walls – so I admire the way it complements her golden, glowing skin while I still have the chance.
Leaning sideways, I let my hand rummage through my bag. Malta is there, privy to our dinner chatter, watching as I skip past the book it currently calls home and, instead, wrap my fingers around a camera. I position both friends within a rectangular frame.
A memory now retold by a photograph; experience held consistently in time.
At least I can return to this.
Looking at Malta, blu-tacked on a pink wall, I wonder if it recalls the specifics of our conversation. Had this been the moment my cheshire-grinning friend expressed her worries about returning home? When the lavender-tattooed girl teared up at the thought of us indefinitely separated, was it during this meal?
Photograph or not, the details are lost to me.
Amongst pink walls, I am forced into white-flagged surrender. Again.
The version of myself experiencing Malta, however, would have these answers. Just like the version of myself in Prague would know exactly where my fair-haired friend had penned her message. The girl surrounded by white walls, and the collage of experiences she had growing wildly across them, would know with confidence. Only the length of a flight, the time it took to unpack, and the few weeks that intermingled between every trip separated her from the soil of each country.
The escapades too fresh to even be called memories, the paint of their picture still drying, the meat still raw and almost moving. The girl of white walls was a fusion of the comfortable foreigner in Prague, the desperate explorer in Iceland, and the expiring vacationer of Malta.
Can the same be said for the person now in pink, hundreds of days and thousands of hours later?
I abandon the postcards. I seek reassurance, instead, in a miniature, crystalline face.
If I could reach out my hands and give her my pulsing heart, I would. I fear it would be too messy, too gruesome of a gift, however, and so I let my heart continue to beat against its familiar cage.
Such reaction is the reason I rarely allow myself the pleasure of admiring her, of letting my eyes wander along and through her transparent form. It is why I had paused in a bustling street in Prague’s Old Town, suddenly transfixed, to look through a glass panel that barely protected her delicacy from the sharpness of this world. I knew I should have surrendered the five-hundred-and-ninety Czech Korunas then and there, I knew it as I let the day’s schedule resume my previous pace, as I struggled to read by lamplight later that evening. I returned a few days later to do exactly that.
This veneration for her featureless profile, for the way her limbs curve like strands of hair in Mucha’s Art Nouveau, for the gown of her dress – textured with a glass-making technique that escapes the limits of my imagination – is a trait the girl in Prague and I still share. This little figure, barely the length of my palm, a suspended life too easily breakable, is a tangible token for an intangible bond. When she looks at me, I know she sees the eyes of Prague, of white walls, of pink walls, staring back. In these moments, time folds like a paper map, and a hole is punched right through the centre, running through all three selves. I am one.
Within these pink walls, I am a victim to, and rebel against, time.
There is a park, not far from Na Bateriích’s five-and-two strides kitchen, where four concrete statues can be found. One sits pleasantly reaching for her hair, another wrapping herself in a solid shawl – each woman is eternalised in a separate act. Secretive, gentle smiles play on their frozen lips. Turned towards the nearby creek and the magnificent willow tree reigning within it, these women of suspended life seem to entertain – and be entertained by – the wavering organic life before them.
When my hand reaches out across the continents in search of the self I left in Prague, I envision her here. She is doing what I never had time for, spending longer than a second amidst her frozen sisters. Joining them in their small-smile glory. The air still carries birdsong and brings the scent of blossoming trees. The willow remains in flourishing green and the sky is paused on a forever blue day. Spring is the only season she and that city will ever know.
A version of myself caught in a version of Prague.
I am not Time’s only victim.
The white-walled university room, where a part of me still stubbornly lives, was left to be rewritten by another. Strands of my hair, going rogue, will never again be found in the folds of warm bedsheets I had bought and later donated. Those walls will not absorb the sound of my voice or the laughter of several guests I had introduced them to. Has the spot between windows forgotten the colours of Malta? Does it miss the pointed corners of Iceland?
Time itches forward and a place homes other things, learns other names, bends and stretches in work. A victim, but also a rebel. Time does not erase defiant dents left in the carpet and hidden scratches under a desk.
In pink walls, I press against a postcard. Halfway across the globe, white walls feel the echo touch.
I cannot exist as I was, then. Each place that homed me, cradled or shunned me, cannot exist as they were, either. There is no reverting or reclaiming. Time forces an exchange and all members are cheated. No returns, remember? Yet, a kind of victory, a comfort in shared loss.
I raise the white flag to Time, not simply in resignation, but as a truce. Those versions of myself surrendered, exchanged for relics of the places flattened in my postcards. Taking inspiration from a fair-haired friend, I sign off on this treaty:
“With love”.
