The Carpet Was Already Ruined Before We Got There
The carpet in that Plattenbau hotel was already destroyed before we arrived. We just made it more thorough. Shisha coals on synthetic fiber, a T-shirt that caught fire briefly, a floor that had survived thirty years of socialist-era hospitality before a group of Bavarian seventeen-year-olds showed up with burning things. Prague, 2005. I still think about that trip more than is probably warranted for something that happened in high school.
There’s a kind of friendship you only build under specific conditions: a long bus ride, a sealed space, nothing to do but talk and smoke behind motorway rest stops and figure out what everyone is actually like. We were a mixed class—some people who’d known each other for years, some new arrivals—and the distinction dissolved somewhere around hour three on the highway. By the time we reached Prague, we were just one thing. The city received us accordingly: an enormous temporary playground, all medieval streets and brewery cellars and discos willing to admit a group of German teenagers if you pushed slightly.
Hannah and I ended up sitting in the hallway outside a room full of girls in their underwear, grinning at each other. We talked about the things we were going to do—plans that mostly didn’t happen the way we imagined, but that’s what eighteen-year-old plans are for. Between conversations we threw empty beer bottles out the window into the dark. There was a brief internal debate about whether this was responsible. There wasn’t a long one.
The image I keep is the drive home. A snowstorm came in out of nowhere somewhere between Prague and the Bavarian border, and the world outside went white. Everyone was exhausted and a little wrecked and pressed against each other on those cramped seats, and Manu—small, quiet Manu—took out a guitar and started picking out Californication. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, through a bus window, in a snowstorm. André was there. Meggi was there. Our bus driver Heinz, who was extraordinary in a way I still can’t fully articulate—something about his patience and his quiet willingness to be briefly complicit in all of it. We were hurtling toward home inside something that felt finished.
Someone had a camera running the whole time. We cut it into a short film before graduation—rough, low-res, perfect. I’m the one with the long greasy hair and the wet mouth. It was 2005. I thought that was a good look. The footage disagrees. I’ve made my peace with it.