Truck Stop Rainbows
Iva Pekarkova
Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1987. (Read: the Soviet Union)Individualism... We all felt exceptional to some extent.
Perhaps not unusually intelligent or gifted, perhaps not infused with any special ability or strength that made us somehow better than anyone else. We were simply different - and from many experiences we knew very well how few people understood us.
There was an enormous number of exceptional people. Hundreds of independent individualists, people understood by no one, standing in lines in front stores and stepping on each other's feet in trams. Among the crowds of lonely seekers for understanding we wandered through Prague without a word to anyone. If we did, after all, enter into conversation with someone, the conversation was brief and passing, or it lingered so long at the level of superficiality that each party concluded that the other was one of those people who understood nothing. There were no magical moments of agreement or glittering instants of friendship. The Praguers wandered through their city day after day, shielded by little bubbles of opinions they share with no one. Hitchhikers wandered the republic - and only by terrible accident might you discover that this other person sitting beside you shared your destination. Lonely microscopic personalities wandering across an overpopulated globe.
We lived separated by our silence, tedium, and anxieties.
And if - even just once in your life - you actually met someone, someone with whom you never ran out of things to talk about, that was an absolute personal miracle, pure and simple.
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