Back in Prague

I keep thinking about that Prague trip. Hotels destroyed, clubs at 3 AM, the kind of drinking where you lose track of time and stop caring. We were old enough to know what we were doing, young enough that nobody really stopped us.

Someone filmed the whole thing. Four hours of it. The footage is shaky and blown out, which feels right—it’s not trying to make anything look good, just documenting what happened. The biggest disco in Central Europe looks the same as everywhere else when you’re on your second loop and the night hasn’t ended.

The strange thing about having video is it becomes more real than memory. I can’t argue with what’s on tape. The party, the destruction, the pure stupidity—that’s how it was. Video fixes it in a way my own brain won’t. Memory keeps trying to reshape things into something with a point. The tape just says: this happened, this is what it looked like.

What actually sticks isn’t the grand moments. It’s the small ones. A hallway at 4 AM. Someone’s face when they realized something was broken. The particular clarity of being completely gone but still aware of how gone you are. You can’t get that back. You can watch it but you can’t recreate it once you’re older and consequences matter.