How the hell did I end up here?!
I’m standing in the bowels of the Earth surrounded by the ancient remains of 40,000 humans, and suddenly I’m questioning every decision I’ve ever made. I’d always been that person who heard stories about the catacombs in Paris and thought Nope, not for me. I’ve walked through peaceful cemeteries on bright sunlit days and not been able to shake the awareness that there were skeletons sleeping beneath my feet. And yet something had possessed me to get onto a train and head an hour into the Czech countryside, just to see a church basement that is littered with human remains.
These calcium artifacts are artfully arranged, dripping from the ceiling in macabre approximations of chandeliers. Holey coccyx and winged hipbones fuse themselves into enormous empty vases. Femurs are strung up like birthday streamers, punctuated here and there by the monochromatic spheres of skulls; absurdly, I think of how they would be significantly harder to pop than the latex balloons they almost resemble.
It’s easy to get sucked into the art of it all, despite and perhaps even because of the chilling nature of the medium. Every time I find myself admiring an arrangement, I have to catch myself and remember that each of these tibia and scapula and coccyx once were animated by flesh and electricity, that each identical-looking skull once housed a unique mind that was filled to the brim with dreams and worries and love. I force myself to look into the blind pits where azure and emerald eyes once shone, trying and failing to imagine the lives attached to each one. Who were you? I wanted to ask each of them. What was your ambition? What desires truly lay in the deepest corners of your heart? Fortunately for me, the skulls did not reply; their yellowed grins remained frozen, standing as eternal gatekeepers to a million answers and secrets that are all but lost to the world of the living.
The math alone is part of what makes this place so incomprehensible; I’m surrounded by 20 skeletons that are still warmly enshrouded in living homes, and 40,000 that are not. I simultaneously feel like I’m adrift in a lifeless pit and drowning in a sea of spirits. Only the dull tones of sepia and gray remain, like the colors started to seep out of this underground world shortly after the life did. Dust is the lone smell, with a hint of decay that may just be my mind playing tricks on me. Even the spiders have vacated their crumbling and empty webs. Each of my exhalations briefly coalesces into a pearly apparition in the cold and lifeless air, the only warm ghosts in the entire place.
Occasionally I became engrossed in framing the perfect photograph, trying to breathe temporary life back into these old bones, and forgot the reality of where I was. Once I extracted myself from the abbreviated world of the viewfinder, and found my gaze captured by the dusty blank stare of a skull affixed to the wall just inches from my right shoulder. It was the visual equivalent of suddenly feeling a slimy something coil itself around my naked ankle while swimming in a murky lake. A tiny scream clawed its way up my windpipe, making it almost to my mouth before my infallible pride strangled it and wedged it fast next to my wildly racing heart. I negotiated with my lungs and firmly reminded them to inflate as I slowly inched away, the more logical part of my mind trying unsuccessfully to rein in my desperate fear.
Finally I emerged back into the color of the living, suddenly grateful for the deep emerald of the pines and the warm maroon of the bricks, seeming brighter than they actually are on this gray day. Although the low-slung clouds threatened rain and my knees had yet to recover from the hills of Italy, I decided to walk into town.
The streets on the outskirts of Kutna Hora are lined with communist-era buildings, some crumbling and abandoned, their black windowless eyes reminding me of the skulls I’d just left, but others had been brought into the twenty-first century with colorful paint and facelifts. Many people prefer flawless buildings, the timeless kind with perfect paint jobs and spotless windows that show no signs of wear or age, like those that line the proud streets of Paris or Vienna. But I have always been drawn to their polar opposites, the tired old buildings with cracks and weather stains marring their facades. They feel more real to me than their immaculate siblings. Every broken tile and crooked doorframe tells me a story about the humans who once lived there, while every tiny weed impossibly growing through a crack in the wall betrays the relentless resiliency of nature.
The story began to change as I neared the heart of Kutna Hora. Crumbling grey industrial buildings gave way to twisting alleys, crammed with diminutive coffee shops that could only hold four people at a time – if all of them were standing. The town sprawls like an enormous Roman amphitheater, except the things demanding your attention stand along rim of the bowl rather than within its depths. The crowning attraction at this broken bowl’s edge is a UNESCO-listed Gothic cathedral, which looks terribly similar to all the other Gothic cathedrals scattered throughout Europe except for its one staggeringly aberrant feature: a triple-peaked slate grey roof that resembles – of all things – a Ringling Brothers’ circus tent.
This impossible silhouette – so many points and curves in all the wrong places – beckoned to me from across the skyline, sparking my imagination and making me wonder what could possibly be inside such a unique building. But when I finally made it inside the church, I was disappointed to find nothing so exciting as growling lions or rainbow-headed clowns. The cathedral’s magic, it seemed, only worked upon me when I was outside its doors. Fortunately a small lively market in the nearby lawn provided the perfect vantage point from which to examine all its angles in the newborn sunlight poking through the clouds. A friendly teenager whose English was approximately as good as my Czech (read: nonexistent) sold me some local bread and sausage, and I wandered around in the shallow sea of local residents, happily immersed in yet another language I didn’t even remotely understand.
It was in Prague that I kicked off my solo travels, due to an untimely injury that made it impossible for one of my best friends to travel overseas with me. I woke up on that first morning in Prague intoxicated with a wonderful sense of absolute freedom, a feeling that was slightly poisoned by dread when I remembered that I’d done absolutely no planning for this part of my journey. And so I did that thing I do best: I filled up my purse with all those things I always bring with me (even though I rarely actually use them) and headed out for some good old-fashioned wandering.
I didn’t make it more than 400 meters from the hostel before getting roped into one of those ubiquitous “free” walking tours. The tour guide was everything a tour guide should be: a gregarious born-and-bred local who was full of important information about everything. Even so, he only held my attention for about twenty minutes before I got distracted by the smell of fried sugary dough wafting towards me from a lively Easter market, and I slipped away from the group without so much as a word. I felt a momentary twinge of guilt over my exit, but who was I to resist an entire square that that was covered in violently pastel ribbons and painted eggs so enormous they would have been right at home in a Brontosaurus nest?
I dove headfirst into a crowd that flowed like a tributary towards the Vltava River and found myself standing on what would become the centerpoint of my Prague adventure: the famous Charles Bridge. For the next three days I became a tiny confused planet orbiting this bridge like it was a life-giving star, occasionally straying further away but always eventually succumbing to its gravity. I came to recognize the faces of street musicians and artists selling their wares on the bridge. I perched upon its blackened stones to watch the real sun die out at the end of each day. Part of my devotion was practical – it was the most convenient way to cross between the two halves of the city – but it also provided a unique opportunity to be immersed in the beating human heart of the city while still being able to see the horizon.
I stayed in a so-called party hostel in Prague, the first and only one I patronized during the whole month-long trip. I typically avoid alcohol altogether while traveling alone, not wanting to deal with the diminished mental capacity, sticky situations, or subsequent hangovers that often go hand-in-hand with beer. But I’d been told that Prague is a party-goer’s dream destination, so I found a well-loved hostel that catered to young solo travelers. Every night I’d come back from a long day of wandering and launch straight into a long night of adventure. At 7 sharp the cavernous kitchen filled up with foreigners from every corner of the world, where we’d share a homemade dinner cooked by the live-in employees while exchanging tales from home and the road. The beer came out before the pans of quiche and lasagna had even been scraped clean, sparking lively games of Kings Cup and Never Have I Ever before heading out to local watering holes. It’s an interesting dynamic when you know multiple incriminating stories about someone’s past but can’t quite remember his or her name!
I almost missed the John Lennon wall, even though I’d unknowingly been walking circles around it for two days. I didn’t have particularly high expectations for it; all I really knew was that it was a graffiti-covered wall in the heart of Prague. So on a bored whim just before sunset on my last day (believe it or not, not every moment of travel is action-packed), I followed my phone’s GPS signal somewhat dubiously down a nondescript alley.
Small clusters of people stood against the long wall, some posing for photos with their backs pressed to the chaos while others stared up at it, hypnotized. The art was largely pedestrian: mostly initials and dates with the occasional swear word thrown in, hastily scribbled in overlapping layers of eye-burning technicolor. The few political messages and premeditated art pieces were already half-digested by nascent layers of paint. Too many colors and lines and themes had been blurred together for me to find it traditionally beautiful, but I was surprised to feel a visceral pull towards it. I subconsciously rested my hands upon its cool face, trying to feel down through the infinite layers of paint to the original surface that lie fifty years beneath my fingertips.
The whole trip up to this point – maybe even my whole life up to this point – I’d been trying to find out where I fit in the fabric of humanity, trying to spot connections and patterns that I felt I was missing. And here at last was a tangible approximation of it. Here was a half-century record of names and dates and lives all overlapping, all trying to make themselves individually heard over the increasing din of a hundred thousand voices. I asked the nearest American to take my picture in front of the wall, by happenstance choosing a background of a garish pink heart presumably painted by two lovers whose names both started with A. As I wandered down the wall towards the end, the familiar opening chords of John Lennon’s “Imagine” echoed down the wall, emanating from a portable speaker brought in by a group of young men, all of whom raised their voices and sang along with the gentle words. Right as I reached the end of the wall I looked over my shoulder, just in time to see the magenta heart drawn by A + A slowly disappearing under the ministrations of a teenager with black paint, yet another in an endless stream of visitors adding her voice to this inert wall that was anything but silent.
And I found myself singing along:
Imagine all the people living for today.
Window Seat Odyssey 
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