A friend asked me what makes Czechs different from other nationalities. As I'm on the cusp of getting dual citizenship I've been thinking about that often. Because I like lists, I came up with three things.

I told her that Czechs seem to think that a lot of negative things that make them unique are actually… just human things. Or anyway certainly not restricted to Czechs. For example they say that they are very bureaucratic, or that the bureaucracy is slow and inefficient, and while I do agree that I have had to stand in my share of lines here for a lot of fancy rubber stamp action, it's not really any worse than your standard US visit to the DMV, and the Japanese obsession with rubber stamps is simply unparalleled. And they talk about Czechs being xenophobic … well, there is a fear of foreigners, sure, in terms of job-stealing and culture-smothering types of things. But Czechs are not lining up at their borders to shout at children, and even though I know that's not really a majority in the US, I mean: I can't imagine ANY Czech doing that. Rude waiters, incompetent or corrupt civil servants, sexism? Maybe even this is not a distinguishing characteristic, but it does seem to me that Czechs will regularly tell me something negative is typically Czech when in fact I think it's just people, and I don't feel like most other countries claim the negatives as distinguishing them. 

The second thing is that I think Czechs, certainly compared to the US and possibly compared to other Europeans (haven't seen enough of other continents to say) are really loyal. They make friends for life, honestly. This MIGHT be a remnant of Communism, the sort of lack of trust from that time, where you had to know somebody for a really long time before you trusted them and so if you'd known somebody for a really long time, you didn't let them go. I have friends I only see once or twice a year, but I know they'd come in a heartbeat if I was in a crisis; I have other friends who took me in 20 years ago and I know them like my hands. It does take a long time for Czechs to open up, in my experience, but past that first opening is such warmth and generosity that when people say Czechs are cold or closed I feel nothing but baffled. 

Finally, and this is the one that I hope getting citizenship will magically bestow upon me: Czechs are incredibly good at accepting individuals as a whole. They may judge a group harshly, and the ease with which people express racism here sometimes stings me horribly, but they are so forgiving and even loving of individuals. This is something I see on a personal level — people putting up with their friends' flaws with an equanimity to which I can't even aspire — but it's also reflected pretty broadly in their art. Most of the "typical Czech" films have to do with people (people who look like regular humans, too, for the most part) who are oddballs in one way or another, finding love and acceptance (not even tolerance: acceptance), not despite or because of their oddity, but as a whole. One of the things that really delighted me when I first came here was how people could be friends with each other even while disagreeing on major issues — lifestyle, politics, art, hobbies — I mean, they can have, to my mind, NOTHING in common other than a few shared values, and they manage to get along on that basis and see past the differences. The main requirement seems to me to be that the person must be kind; if they are, then all the other things don't matter. It's not that they don't see all the other differences, it's that they see past them, somehow. I see this tolerance less in the younger generations, but still more than I see it in myself: with me, if somebody likes a musician with a sexist song I'm not sure we can still be friends. I'd call it discerning but there is in it an element of snobbery that I'm not entirely comfy with. And yet in Czech literature and films, and in Czech pubs, I see over and over someone who has strange habits, or is relentlessly stupid, or smart and screwing up royally, but as long as they're well-intentioned towards their fellow human, they're loved, handed tissues, treated with kindness.  

Now if they could just make the weather as consistent and warm as their hearts, it'd be perfect.

You can make the joke about the people who think that Frankenstein was the monster, if you like. Although, in truth, he was. But this is you, now: creator and creation. You were always only pages away from putting yourself on an ice flow on the best of days, the horror of your wretched face when you were young, the repulsive sour cynicism of your middle years, and now this. Seriously: SCARS. From you who have always liked the damage to be on the inside or at least self-inflicted, this is a new level of weird. And yet here it is, here you are, wrapped in gauze and stumbling from room to room or standing blankly in front of doors in the hopes that they will open. 

Created in a woman's dream about something she'd lost, who are you now? A nightmare story told to a shivering fellow traveler: here was my childhood, here my arrogance started, bloomed, here I went astray. A vile insect who nevertheless insists on having some right to happiness. Do you really think so? A right to happiness? Might you even go so far as a right to be loved? Certainly not, that would be too far. Just…

I think if the creator could not flee in terror this time, but at least stick around until the bandages come off, then a truly victorious Victor could result; the narrative would shift, and when you see your reflection in the pool you will realize it's not so bad. Justify the creation or don't; this is you and this is your work. No need to burn anybody's cottage down if they don't like it. Now hold it close to you and teach it to read. Put your arms around it and show it how to dance. 

More than half a lifetime ago, this metaphor stopped eating meat. Mostly because some patchouli-scented hippie told her that the panic animals feel when they're slaughtered is held in their bodies and when you eat them, you eat this fear. The metaphor was having horrible mind-sucking nightmares at the time and would seriously have given anything to make them stop, so she stopped eating meat, and while she still has perfectly bad dreams, they are not the kind where she wakes in sobs, soaked in terror, so: it works.

Every once in a while she'll take a run at meat again — a bite of something that someone else says is amazing. Or sometimes it's accidental, like when everything was getting accessorized with bacon. Or delicious melted cheese stuffed with inexplicable chunks of ham. She usually tastes it and spits it out in a napkin or something. It makes her queasy but that could be psychosomatic so she doesn't consider it data. Mostly she doesn't eat it and she doesn't miss it, and along the way she's realized there are lots of reasons beyond the nightmares she remembers still so vividly to not eat meat: unsustainable farming practices, cruelty to the animal, health, heart disease, all the chewing, the bloated feeling of indulgence, etc. It feels safer to just avoid it altogether, and honestly veggie burgers are pretty delicious. Stir fry. The metaphor has learned a lot about spices.

Then one day someone gives the metaphor a steak. A grass-fed cow, massaged daily, prepared by an expert, perfect. While she would never have ordered it, it is somehow different if it is offered, put on a plate already. And the metaphor forgets some of her reasons and rationalizes the rest away. The metaphor pulls the plate towards herself and breathes the warmth that rises off of it, and her whole body responds to the smell, primal. It is tender and juicy, the knife reveals the subtle shadings of red, beautiful as an oil painting, and she only wishes she could chew for longer, the salt flesh wonder of it between her teeth, the taste she didn't know she was missing. 

That night the metaphor curls into bed, nestles a pillow against her warm full belly, sighs with contentment. She cannot even believe she thought she didn't want steak! And she falls asleep dreaming of a future with more steak, burgers, breakfast sausages, all the things she realizes she'd been denying herself. Of course she wakes screaming, the terror again, wracked with pain. Choked with guilt for betraying herself. Of course she does. But it's okay, because she's just a metaphor. 

The metaphor goes back to her vegetarian dishes; for a couple weeks she can't eat but then the appetite comes back. The metaphor's friends tell her she looks great, radiant even, pleased with her rediscovery of various spices, how it feels to burn and ice. And she is fine; the creativity required by the familiar is delicious and the nightmares fade. After all she doesn't even know what to do with meat, having spent nearly her entire adult life without it. There is a picnic with cheese and wine and grapes, and the metaphor closes her eyes against the summer sun and sees the light through her eyelids, that particular blood red, and her breath catches, but she doesn't have time to think about that anymore, and she opens her eyes and takes a perfect piece of cheese and holds it in her mouth, feels it dissolve. 

Sometimes it is anguish, the feeling that I have to keep learning the same lessons over and over, the wail of despair, the whywhywhy, the gut punch of it. I will never be any good at this, I will never be any good, and I want to smash my body into a wall, my clumsy hands into pulp, it just seems pointless to keep trying. I'm right back to dancing with myself, slowly, and it's horrible. 

And sometimes it is just exasperating, to see in my mind who I want to be and yet not become that person. I say to my heart: rave on! But my heart can barely pull at the right strings. Thick fingers and tongue fumbling lost and hopeless, my mouth that cannot form the words, not even nonsense words and sleeping lions; at best I will only ever be able to articulate exactly what I am doing, which lacks poetry. 

But sometimes, sometimes, blessed, I realize that while I am not who I want to be, I am getting better, stronger, that same lesson over again is awful but it snaps into place faster, the rhythm is better, and I can even sing a radio war, the missed chord shorter and I keep on playing, I play right past it. 

Cassandra sits in a rocking chair in a large, circular room. It has the slightly stale air of a room rarely visited. The sunlight filters down through the skylights; dust motes dance in the sunbeams. The shelves are lined with mementos, and fingerprints in the dust show which ones have been recently looked at: the wooden mask of a monkey, a perfume bottle, a puzzle box, shells and stones collected from the beach, an urn. There are books on the shelf, too: poetry, some prose, all thumbed at the edges, stains of red wine and coffee, marginalia. One book full of little scraps of paper that fly out from the pages and scatter across the floor when you open it. What was marked? It doesn't matter. Cassandra rocks in her chair and the creak on the wooden floor says what she is tired of saying, hates to say: Told you so, told you so, told you so.  

The moat the drawbridge the tower the turret the little holes where the archers peek out… you know, the usual castle features. You can embellish it up, make it a superfancy metaphor, where the moat is your tears and the turret is where you hide your fragile heart and the archers are, oh I don't know, those catty asides, sarcastic barbs, your explosions of wit and cruelty. High walls, one assumes, well defended and whatnot, not to be scaled by the cowardly. Also vines from years of neglect. 

Everybody wants a castle and by everybody I mean you. You wanted a castle, you built it, you carried in the cold smooth stones and fixed them into place; the fortress the buttress and you the mistress. Walking the ramparts, then. Surveying. Taking the measure. Games of strategy in the throne room and needlepoint by candlelight. Remembering all the stories you once knew.

Well that's all very fine but what now? You should probably have a conflict of some sort. You can't have a story without a conflict. You can't have a conflict until you lower the drawbridge. You had thought you wanted a wonky spell cast upon the walls: nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out, except that gets boring after a while. Perhaps a horse of the trojan variety or maybe some circus performers could come by. A bard, singing songs of other castles, everybody likes a little peek at the neighbors and if the wandering minstrel (wandering minstrel!) beds the queen at night well that just livens up the tapestry a little, doesn't it.

Of course there is a part of you that is frightened; not everybody comes out of every story alive. Digging your nails into the rough wooden underside of the banquet table to stay calm; the shadows of strangers against the walls turn into monsters by firelight and pebbles have been carelessly skipped across the moat as if it doesn't hold the history of a thousand sadnesses. It's still okay though; you wanted a story and now you are getting one. Quick, look or you might miss something. 

It is difficult to have deliberately chosen to be a certain way because it is easy and then wonder if perhaps you shouldn't have chosen a different way, or no way at all. To have chosen to stop tasting the foods that make you sick, and then wonder when standing at a table laden with meat whether you really really didn't like it or if you just decided at some point to stop wanting it. 

When it was winter it was winter forever, it had always been winter and it would always be winter. The bleakness of it, the relentless overcast, the ugliness of yellow snow, black ice, gray icicles dripping from the eaves and in doorways. And yet you chose this, and there were small pleasures: snow piled on the heads of statues, the swoopmarks of mittens on car hoods, and the cozy sweet warmth of indoors, watching snowfall through a window, being safe. It was never your favorite season but it had some nice bits. And it was going to be winter forever, whether you liked it or not.

And then suddenly spring, rebirth, awakenings. The shock of buds unfurling, light warm rains that misted your hair, fluffy bunnies and chicks and a near-cloying sweetness that you, with your memory of tears frozen in your eyelashes and one foot still in the snowpile of winter, viewed with something between wonder and suspicion. But it was never going to be summer, never again, never, and sometimes at night the empty cold of winter swirled in, a dust cloud of snow, and things too early planted died in the frost.

And now here is summer, predicted for you for years against your brave smile and your insistence that winter was forever, and part of you still doubts, still wearing winter boots that are worn at the heels and scraped at the toes, watching the girls in their summer dresses parade by and it's very nice for them but you have learned to trust the wardrobe of winter too well to let go of it too soon, and yet you find yourself thinking of changing over your clothes, putting sweaters into cedar and mothballs, you find yourself thawing out just a bit more every day, opening the curtains to let in actual light that shines sometimes as long as all day. Here is a summer you never thought would come: this is a good thing.

And yet your winter heart. And yet you scan the horizon for clouds, find them and stare at them with… what? A child's rage at the unfairness of it: can't I even just for five minutes have an unbroken blue sky, a hot trickle of sweat down my back, a pink in my cheeks that isn't chapping and burst blood vessels? Child, it has been winter for half your life. Give things a little time. Go buy some new shoes, for summer's sake.