Old Towns anywhere are all the same shit. Cartagena, Beijing, Prague…all stripped skeletons done up in gaudy makeup and neon signs, imitating something alive. They can heave with a facsimile of breath from the maggot tourist swarm shoving its way around the chest cavity, crowding loudly through the arteries of the place, cameras and phones held overhead with both hands to pay homage to foreign gods of statues, castles, really anything with a plaque. Deliberately quaint storefronts with overpriced Typical Local Food Menu of the Day, a mediocre street performer with guitar and portable sound system, and arrows towards Photogenic Landmark #3 from the Tour Guide, all painted carefully by the mortician to resemble the living.

But then you swerve down a side street and silence squeezes in, narrowing the walls of the alley until you’re right up against dusty windows with nothing but darkness behind. Flaking plaster over cobblestone, and cracked buildings too mundane to reconstruct into the tourist imaginary. You can try to resuscitate the smell of roasting onions floating down the alley, laundry flapping out the windows, some woman scolding her child all the way down the street, a city that lives and breathes. No temporary blood transfusion, blowing through for a day to buy gelato and snap some pictures. You can almost feel the pulse, for a second, under a thousand years of ghosts.

Then the silence is too heavy, too tangible, too old. So you blink, shake your head, and duck back out of the alley in search of a Czech beer on tap.

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By Joy
Photograph by Joy