The Forgiveable Journey Of The Cheated

30. Full Speed Ahead

Eve is on a holiday and is going to be alone for 7 days. 

This is a scary thing because she will be alone with her heart and her head, and the resolution to not let her bubbling thoughts and emotions overflow into messages to Liam. He has taken his distance, is sorting his own things out, and it’s time for her to do the same. She is not sure how this will settle in her, if at all. 

The trip actually starts out really well. She watches a few movies on the plane, takes advantage of a stopover to pack in a few sights, and upon arriving in Prague, she struggles to find her car rental kiosk. It is nighttime and she is tired and jetlagged, but the pure foreignness of the language, the street names and the people reassures her that she will be spending much time just trying to figure out a whole bunch of things and being travel stressed rather than listening to her pain and ruminations. Ten minutes after getting in her car, she is thoroughly lost and the GPS in her telephone doesn’t appear to be compatible with the satellites. Signs are poorly lit and unreadable, and the nighttime lighting is disorienting. She stops and asks a taxi driver for directions to her hotel and he offers to lead her there for a price. She instead gets back on the road and drives until something looks familiar according to the map she studied before leaving the airport and basically moves forward on hunches, arriving at her hostel 14 km from the airport, 3 hours after renting her car. She buys a Coke and Mars bar at the front desk, devours them, gets into her bunk bed and immediately falls asleep. 

Nope, she had had no time for over-analysis, philosophical reflections about love, or feeling angry or sad. It had been such a nice break. Plus, she doesn’t have to be false with the people she meets. 

Upon waking, she feels some of her familiar nausea, which is immediately overwhelmed by incredulity at the site of a man on a lower bunk, who only moments earlier was sleeping and snoring lightly, is now sitting up and drinking a king can of beer. He looks up at her on her top bunk and offers her some through hand gestures, which she refuses. The smell of cheap sausages frying seeps into the dorm room. It makes her want to gag, and she almost wretches when she reaches the communal kitchen from where the stench is coming. She is starving and tries to heat water to make oatmeal but could not figure out how to work the stove and finally eats it cold while thinking that maybe there are more Mars bars for sale at the front desk. She studies the map and tries to memorize a route that would lead her out of the city as quickly as possible. 

She is glad to see that nothing has been stolen when she returns to the dorm and is not surprised to see that the beer drinking man is now on a second king can. She gathers her things and heads out the door towards her car. The streets seem less threatening in morning light but she has forgotten where she parked the car and spends another 20 minutes walking back and forth down streets looking for it, only to find it parked directly in front of the hostel entrance. She had been looking for her own car, not her rental. 

Exiting the city actually goes really well. With the sun to provide some orientation as to the direction she is heading, combined with her good visual memory of the map and a dose of intuition, she quickly embarks on the highway leading east out of the city. She listens to the radio, hoping to figure out some of the words and gives up after 20 minutes. Once she feels confident that she is going the right direction, she decides to stop at a gas station and get some coffee. The machine is perplexing, so she observes three people use the coffee dispenser before daring to try it herself. She then pays without even trying to convert the cost to dollars. She would have paid 10 dollars for it, that’s how badly she wanted it. 

It is only 9:15 a.m. and not a single thought about Liam, Charlotte or the whole saga! 

Well, actually, she had made this observation a few times, which in itself is a thought about them, but her observations remain observations and not doorways to cognitive overdrive. She is resolute to take this break from thinking, so for the rest of the day, she stops at every Lonely Planet mentioned tourist attraction along the highway she has taken, absorbing herself in the many interesting facts, and spending a lot of time singing out loud to every song on her 182 song playlist.