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Prague has been celebrating the arrival of spring since the end of March. But spring lingered. When it came this morning, I was already exhausted.
Spring in Prague is sudden. It's heavy, it's tough, it's a big chunk of everything: wood, light, green, salt, water, moon. It tastes like black olive. It's a long shot with a naive pan, like in Vivre Sa Vie, when Nana talks to her colleague at the record store, the camera pans to the window, to look at the painful street.
I saw a girl crying at the Old Town Square, out of the Candy Captain. She wore a blue sweater. It's all irrelevant. When Prague spring fall on us, it doesn't crush. It simply melts into a gulp of sorrow.
I know why she cries. Spring is unbearable.
One February morning I woke up in my apartment in the street of Mala Stepanska, I saw my white chair sitting in the kitchen. Suddenly I understood why Duras wrote “the heartrending two chairs at the end of the time” in Summer Rain.
Several years ago, in late April, before spring ended, I went to Hangzhou with the man I loved. We wandered around the West Lake, till evening shrouded and there was no place to go. We walked into a small restaurant. The waiters were watching a TV series from a small television hanging on the wall. He opened a bottle of Coca Cola, inside the bottle cap it said “you won another bottle”. We never got the other bottle. I think he is still keeping the bottle cap.
I didn't realize until today, that life is not a pearl necklace of events. Life is a handful of white cobblestones of epiphany scattered in the thick walnut drawer of time. Whoever tries to string them in a wire of causality will lose. Only the ones who look at them respectively like Antonioni, or the ones who smash them like Woolf, have tasted a sip of sweet poison from eternity.