A Dead European Darling

Kill your darlings, they're always saying. This one's still warm.

From my suburban Brisbane bedroom, I dive behind a Street View camera and into a Prague New Town alley. Retracing the path I trod in those early days is an uncanny experience, like discovering my memory preserved in a digital archive. The record isn’t perfect—checkerboard cobblestones have lost their icy skin and the sky holds a sun I never saw that February. But Google has kept countless details I have all but lost.

Next to my hostel door, the brown Antikvariát still displays its dusty stock of quiet brown books. Clicking forward, I pass a Triple-A Taxi, its more-trustworthy-than-average driver staring straight at me. On my right, the gate I never saw opened stands as impenetrable as ever, strewn with the same scrunched graffiti that unsteadied my newcomer’s confidence. The gate’s high wall decays back through its history, scraps of white paint hovering over plasters and concretes in assorted greys and browns, layers exposed like geological strata right down to the crumbly brick of who-knows-when. I remember running my fingers over those layers before I found gloves, and I’m starting to remember a lot more. As I pass the blurry images of some not quite anonymous Central Europeans, I can feel again what it’s like to be a teenager shivering in the middle of a continent of strangers. After two years and across thousands of kilometres, I am that hungry boy again, looking for a meal on his first real winter night.

At the end of the narrow street, I emerge from concrete and graffiti into postcard Europe. The Gothic loom of Jindřišská věž still hovers to my right, and I take the glance I took that night before turning left towards the centre. Two trams are frozen on their tracks, one heading towards me, one away. I can hear their bells trill. Despite the photographed sun, I see everything lit by the dense orange of Prague’s sodium street lamps. The Google images fade into my own accelerating memory as everything comes rushing back. Across the street, the chain bakery I’d thought charmingly local looks no less welcoming than it did. But I want something heartier, something more Czech. I click past a mobile phone shop, another bakery, and a dozen parked Škodas, until I come to the restaurant. Set in a plain yellow building, its green wooden front, stripy awnings and selection of window menus and signs leave it looking somewhere between imitation French bistro and Irish pub. But it must have looked Czech enough for me that night. One piece of advice I wish I could send back to myself, staring in that restaurant window: keep walking.

  

This chunk I've just cut intact from my 800 word memoir. 500 words of introduction doesn't work so well there. But it remains a darling.