Feeling Continental

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Claire sat at the tiny table outside her favorite cafe, her laptop forgotten, her cup of tea now cold, and simply soaked in the bustle and charm of the narrow city street before her. Had she arrived earlier, everything on this side of the block would have been shadowed and cool. If she’d come in the afternoon, the front of this aging cafe and its neighbors would have been aglow with warm sunshine. However, she’d arrived an hour before noon, still wearing her thin sweater, the sweater now hanging off the back of her chair. As the sun drifted straight overhead, it had thrown every crack and crevice, every architectural detail and flourish into stark relief for anyone who cared to notice such things -- and she did.

This city had endured for centuries, as both home and haven for all who'd trod these worn and weathered cobblestones before her.

This sabbatical had taken three years to plan. The flat she’d sublet just down the street was both unusually narrow and surprisingly tall at the same time. The ceilings were so high, in fact, she’d noticed an echo when she first arrived and decided then and there to stick with soft-soled slippers indoors for the duration of her stay.

The kitchen, if you could call it that, was little more than an inconvenient cubby with a two-burner stove top, a single sink that wasn’t quite deep enough, and a mini-fridge barely larger than what she’d had in her college dorm decades ago. At least she was eating fresh foods every day.

Claire could live with the uncomfortable futon sofa-sleeper. She could manage with a counter so small even making a simple sandwich took ingenuity, but she missed a private bathroom. Buildings this old weren’t easy to retrofit for modern conveniences. The shared bath down the hall was another reminder of college where you brought what you needed back and forth with you. It helped to pay attention to her neighbors’ schedules to avoid awkward overlaps. As she wasn’t a slave to a work schedule here, it was only right she be the flexible tenant.

This is where she was going to write her masterpiece. No, she’d never done anything more than publish papers and a couple of articles, but she felt a novel inside of her, the driving urgency of it, the incessant need to put words to paper, or screen — her actual medium of choice. Then she got here and those voices shouting to be heard inside of her fell silent. It was an uncomfortable hush, a foreign hush more difficult to fathom than the speeding flow of overheard conversations spoken in an unfamiliar tongue.

It was disquieting, unnerving, and she made excuses for the voices’ absence. It was only temporary. Perfectly understandable given where she was and what she was doing. But even soaking in a strange, aged tub at two in the morning didn’t bring them back. She tried to tease them out like a comb through tangles. She poked them. She prodded them. She gave them a conversational opening then paused, hoping one of these characters would pick up the thread and run with it. But her creative adventure appeared over before it even began and it was terrifying. This was not what she’d planned.

So she walked miles, took more photos than she’d ever taken in her life. She developed a taste for crusty bread and dark coffee. She haunted old bookshops hoping to find the perfect book in English even while trying to improve her own pronunciations of somewhat familiar but definitely foreign words. She studied faces, heard their voices, and knew in some deep and disappointing way that this trip had been a mistake. No one was talking to her here, not even her characters.