Come away with me to Prague.

Come walk with me through a city of ghosts and bells, where memory clings to the air and mornings arrive soft and gray. Stroll along the banks of the Vltava River, where swans drift between the arches of Charles Bridge and the water glints like hammered steel. Stand with me on the hilltop at Prague Castle, watching the red roofs spill down into the city below, the spires of St. Vitus rising like black flames against the sky. Sit beside me on the swings in Vítkov park, where the chains groan, and the scent of cherry blossoms and coal smoke linger. Ride the trams with me through crooked streets, past onion-domed towers and façades that have stood through centuries of sieges and whispers. Every corner here has a story, if you are quiet enough to hear it.

The pages that follow chronicle my time in the Czech Republic and beyond: from Vienna to Innsbruck, Budapest to Bratislava, Kraków to Cyprus to Cairo. These pages hold my life, unrestrained, as I stumbled through grief and guilt and tried to find my way back to myself. It is a record of loss and longing, of fleeting connections and small salvations, of how far one can go in search of healing and how much can be carried across oceans. It is also a story of the people I met — wonderful students who opened the city for me with their kindness and curiosity, friendships with colleagues who, like me, were trying to navigate the new world they found themselves in, strangers on the streets, refugees, escorts and vendors, many of whom I came to know by name, and even a few encounters that left me unsettled. And it is a story of the romances I experienced there, some brief, some deeper, but all impressionable in their own way. Each of these connections became part of the tapestry of my time in the county’s capital, their presence shaping me in ways I could not have anticipated.

It has taken a great deal of courage to share this story. What you will find here is intimate and unvarnished, my life examined under a microscope, for better or worse. There is no hiding in these pages, no graceful disguises.

I am not the hero of this story. You will not find triumph in every chapter, nor redemption at every turn. But you will find something honest, if nothing else, and it is that honesty that gives this story whatever worth it has.

This is a work of nonfiction, but that raises its own questions. Memory is not a ledger; it is a weathered map, with edges torn and colors faded, some landmarks missing altogether. Where do we draw the line between fact and feeling, between what happened and what we believe happened, between truth and perspective, two forces that often collide and reshape each other?

I have tried to tell this story as faithfully as memory allows. I have done my best to help memory along by noting the details of my life there, always writing and always observing so that those details would not be lost. Still, I have learned that honesty and certainty are not the same thing. Many of the names in this book have been changed, and some moments are rendered through the soft distortions of time, as memory does what it always does: tries to make meaning of what it cannot fully hold.

If you are carrying grief, if you have ever felt the pull to see the world through new eyes, or if you are curious about the often-unseen life of teaching abroad, then you may find something of yourself in these pages. This book is for you.

So, let’s pack our bags, leave the comforts of home behind, and grab our passports for the next adventure. A new world awaits.