Belonging

A Trip to Prague

The woman woke knowing she had travelled from a far-off land. Everything felt altered, as if she had slipped through a mirror into another self. The air was thinner, the light greyer. The first thing she noticed was the trains — their moaning, endless racket through the night. They came and went like the sea, a strong wind rising to a crescendo before fading into nothing. Then silence again.

On the fifth afternoon, she walked the maze-like streets until she came to the river. The water moved with a slow, silvery weight. She could follow that. The thought of turning back into the labyrinth of alleys filled her with unease. The night was coming, and darkness lay ahead.

Then came a sound — a deep, pulsing thrum, the city’s heartbeat amplified. Techno shivers of sound bounced off stone walls and rippled through the mist. Ahead, a crowd gathered on the upper river path, pressed against the iron railing. An explosion of light fractured the air. Beams strobed and shifted, carving the fog into shapes of pure energy. From a raft in the river’s centre, a vortex of light began to spin — a black hole, stretching, shrinking, as though breathing. The crowd gasped.

A portal had opened.

She learned later this was Signal, the city’s annual festival of light. But in that moment, she thought it might be something else entirely — a door to another realm, a test, or an omen.

She wandered for hours afterwards, losing herself in the alleys that wound in on themselves. Each turn brought her back to the same square, the same fountain, the same sleeping statue. She wondered if Prague was a maze designed to keep travellers circling until they forgot who they were.

She liked the edge of it — the sense of drama, the chaos that mirrored her own pulse. She had lived so long with uncertainty that calm now felt unnatural. Yet beneath her wandering thoughts was a quiet resolve: to grow beyond the anxiety that had shaped her, to soften the scars left by a turbulent childhood.

Here, in this foreign city of ghosts and alchemists, she felt strangely at home. More at home than she ever had in Australia, with its blazing sun and restless distances. She thought about belonging — whether peace came from the land you lived upon, or from the people who claimed you as their own.

She had come to visit her son, but she sensed there was another reason for being here. The city was speaking — in whispers of stone and water — and she had only just begun to listen…