Between Walls, Something Waits

I didn’t come to Prague to follow a map.

I came looking for someone who was never meant to be found easily.

I thought her name would guide me.

That streets would open, that corners would make sense.

Instead, the city resisted.

It folded inward.

Prague doesn’t welcome — it accumulates.

Stone over stone.

Time over time.

Faces, names, gestures pressed together

until meaning thickens and orientation dissolves.

I walked without direction.

Corridors became passages, passages became pauses.

Statues watched —

not as guardians,

but as witnesses,

heavy with what they had already seen.

The city did not respond to questions. It only observed.

At times I felt watched myself.

At others, absorbed —

as if the walls were slowly learning my shape.

I mistook weight for answers.

Memory for truth.

History for presence.

And still, I kept walking.

Rain blurred the present into something older.

A car from another decade passed quietly.

Trams stitched together eras

without caring

which one I belonged to.

The sacred and the ordinary

shared the same wires.

I lost her there — completely.

Or maybe I lost the idea

that finding meant arriving.

Something shifted

when the city stopped insisting on coherence.

When modern glass bent beside ancient stone.

When nothing tried to resolve itself.

Only then did I understand:

this was not a search forward, but inward.

I sat.

I watched reflections replace certainty.

The river carried nothing away —

it simply continued.

And finally, through glass and layers and quiet misalignments,

I saw her.

Not as an answer.

Not as an arrival.

But as recognition.

I found you at last, Milena.