I'll Keep My Stories to Myself

Silence
I had finished my shrimp cocktail on Lufthansa Flight 1480 and still the woman next to me was rattling on about her sister’s best friend’s boyfriend who she had seen in the airport and just had to talk to. I nodded and smiled, tried to laugh in the right places, but eventually excused myself for the bathroom, a mere 2 rows away to find a bit of solitude, and then slipped on my headphones before she had realized I returned.
One week later, I’m in Prague, and the silence of this place suits me. The often overwhelming pressure to talk constantly and tell-all delightfully disappears outside of the confines of my dorm room in Machova. Just yesterday, I bought my groceries, said thank you and left, an almost impossible feat compared to the fast pace and titter of New York and a conversation with my mother.
This is not to say that I am an introvert; in fact, this last week has been an unbelievable experience in the power of self-expression, as I fight my way through the barrage of questions and feel the adrenaline of finding things in common with people whose faces are becoming familiar. And it is this great contrast, between the lively chatter with students, to the calming pallor of Prague, that has left me disoriented but content.
Already, I am experiencing life in a way that I’m not used to—unplanned and precarious. I’m far away from the list making and structure that has followed me through my life, and I find it strangely liberating. The Vodaphone store has remained unvisited, and I spend my nights drinking wine from the box and pouring over travel books, my appetite increasingly voracious to see the world. It’s a journalist’s dream, to be a stone’s throw away from twenty different countries, and I don’t want to think about the reality of a credit card bill four months down the line.
I’ve always been what you may call an over-achiever; that attitude is what led me to transfer from American university to NYU for the opportunity to experience the media culture and give myself a chance in the industry. As a journalism major, I push myself to constantly succeed and this semester, thousands of miles from home, is not much different. I’m challenging myself academically, studying Kafka and learning about foreign attitudes on gender. I will be writing more than I ever have before; my international reporting and travel writing classes forcing me to document everything, and it’s opening a doorway to a culture that I so desperately want to be accepted by.
And if I am not, then I will have at least seen it through a lens colored a different shade than they once were, and I will taste it with an appetite increasingly sustained by gravy and starch, and I will smell it with a nose that is becoming immune to cigarette smoke.
I wonder if four months down the line, I will step away from the silence of Prague craving more noise, if I will be the one blabbering away on my flight back. I think by then, I might have found a different voice, one laced with the breath of this intoxicating city, a voice that has a story that I can’t wait to tell.