Learning How to Belong to a Square You've Never Owned

Learning How to Belong to a Square You've Never Owned

I arrived in Prague during the hour when light hasn't decided yet if it's morning or just the ghost of yesterday refusing to leave. Old Town Square was still assembling itself—wooden stalls half-dressed, vendor voices soft and private, the cobblestones cold under my boots like they were testing whether I was serious about staying. I stood near the edge where the square opens its mouth to let strangers in, hands shoved deep in my coat pockets, learning the specific loneliness of watching a city wake up without you.

I came for Easter. Not the commercial kind, not the chocolate-wrapped forgetting. I came for the season that feels like an exhale after holding your breath all winter—bells in the distance, painted eggs lined up like small planets, the air smelling faintly of dough and smoke and something I couldn't name but recognized anyway. The markets had returned, and I wanted to understand why the sight of careful hands making careful things could undo me so completely. I wanted to know what it meant to carry beauty home in your pocket and whether that made you less alone or just more aware of how alone you'd been all along.

The stalls unfold like a secret being told slowly, one cloth roof at a time. A baker wipes down a wooden bench with the back of his hand, and the gesture is so ordinary it feels like proof that the world hasn't ended yet. Three pigeons patrol the perimeter with the focus of veterans who've seen every season come and go and still show up for duty. I watch them the way I used to watch my own hands when I couldn't trust my thoughts—looking for something that moved without needing permission.

The city hums without hurrying, which is its own kind of cruelty when you're someone who's forgotten how to move slowly. I touch the iron railing around a statue—once, twice, three times—and let my gaze travel the cobblestones toward the row of booths waiting to be filled with things people made because they still believed making mattered. Ribbons appear first, then garlands of spring-green branches, then a banner hung with bells that sound like they're clearing their throat before the song begins. Old Town Square teaches me this: begin with gesture. Unroll the cloth. Tie the knot. Lift the latch. Pretend you know what you're doing until the pretending becomes real.

I pick up a wooden horse at a stall run by a man whose hands look like they've argued with wood and won. The toy is small, paint-chipped in places, sanded smooth in others where he decided on purpose to leave the memory of the tree underneath. It fits in my palm like it was carved for this exact moment of holding, and I think about all the things we're told don't matter anymore—handwork, slowness, objects that carry the fingerprints of their maker. Nearby, a puppet with a ridiculous grin waits for someone to pull its strings and give it a story worth moving for. The vendor says something in Czech that I don't understand, but his smile translates perfectly: you're welcome here, even if you don't speak the language of belonging yet.

Crystal catches the light and throws it back like a challenge. I used to think fragile meant weak, that glass was just a countdown to breaking. But standing here, watching prisms refract the pale spring sun into colors that didn't exist a second ago, I'm learning something different: maybe bravery is being transparent enough to show exactly what light does to you. A tray of jewelry—warm metal, nothing flashy, the kind that looks better after it's lived a little—sits under a handwritten sign I can't read. The maker tightens a clasp and gestures toward a small mirror. I don't try anything on. I'm practicing letting beauty exist without asking it to fix me.

At a long table covered in linen that's been washed and ironed like it matters, a woman holds an egg in the curve of her palm. She warms a thin tool over a candle and begins to draw with beeswax, tracing a pattern she knows by heart, the way some people know prayers or the lyrics to songs that used to mean everything. The egg turns slowly. The design grows—geometric, ancient, patient. A child points at bowls of dye arranged like a quiet rainbow, and the mother answers with a single word that needs no translation: wait. The dye takes its time, the way seasons do, the way trust does, the way healing happens when you finally stop forcing it.

Another stall offers personalization—names, small wishes, symbols that travel well across languages and borders. I ask for a word in English that's followed me from country to country like a dog I keep trying to lose: home. The painter considers the letters, then writes them on the shell as if she's setting a feather on water, careful not to disturb what's underneath. When she hands it back, the egg feels both impossibly light and impossibly heavy. I think of all the people who will carry these fragile planets back to distant kitchens, tiny vessels holding the gravity of a season that insists, against all evidence, that beauty still matters.

By the corner where the street narrows and the tourist current thins, willow wands lean in a woven basket, green and supple and alive. A vendor shows me how to braid them into a plait that keeps its shape: overlap, pull, breathe, don't rush the rhythm or it falls apart in your hands. I'm terrible at it. My fingers forget the pattern halfway through. But she's patient in the way that people who've survived winters are patient, and eventually I hold something I made that didn't disintegrate the moment I stopped concentrating. A group of teenagers nearby, cheeks pink from cold and laughter, show off their own handiwork with the unearned pride of people who haven't learned yet how rare it is to make something and have it hold.

The bells agree with everything—the laughter, the failed braids, the morning unfolding without asking anyone's permission. Someone tunes a string instrument a few stalls over, and the notes test the air like a door learning how to close without slamming. An old man in a wool cap counts the beats with his thumb, eyes closed, conducting a song no one else can hear yet. A woman ties ribbons to a wooden hoop and lifts it toward the light to see how the colors bleed through. In this narrow corner of the world, everything feels made by hands instead of machines, by breath instead of engines, by people who still look up from their phones long enough to meet each other's eyes and stay there.

I walk the thread of streets that stitch Old Town Square to Wenceslas Square—past windows with lace curtains and cakes that could moonlight as architecture, past doorways that smell like centuries and coffee. The distance is small, but I take it in sips, stopping to watch a woman arrange candles by color: milk-white, eggshell, straw-yellow. People move at the pace of curiosity instead of urgency, which feels like a language I used to speak before I forgot how. A couple loops back for a second look at a marionette that seemed to wink at them earlier—or maybe they just needed an excuse to stay longer in a place that doesn't demand anything except attention.

This is the river of the city in spring: not water, but people; not rushing, but moving with a purpose that refuses to apologize for going slow. I follow the current, learning its shortcuts and quiet eddies. A stall of pastel candles gives off a scent like a memory I can't place: wax warm enough to keep time soft. The vendor tells me, with gestures and two shared words, that wicks burn cleanest when trimmed with a patient hand. I file it away as advice for more than candles.

Smoke doesn't ask permission to be remembered. It curls from grills and braziers and insists you name what you smell: cured meat meeting fire, sweet dough courting cinnamon, onions committing fully to their sizzle. I eat standing—the proper way for this kind of food—elbows tucked, eyes half-closed, tasting heat and salt and something that feels dangerously close to contentment. At a barrel table, two men lift paper cups of beer and include me in their toast with the unspoken grammar of strangers who've decided, just for this moment, that loneliness is optional. I answer with a nod and the smallest clink. We're not friends, and also we are. Travel rearranges the distance between people in ways that don't make sense until you stop trying to make sense of them.

Someone presses a napkin into my hand—three taps, like a benediction—and moves on without waiting for thanks. The market is generous that way. You arrive with an appetite and leave with a pocketful of unearned kindness you didn't know you were allowed to keep.

Every city has two clocks. One for visitors who move like they're being chased, checking off landmarks like items on a grocery list. Another for people trying to belong, who return to the same vendor until you both stop pretending this is the first conversation, who learn how weather speaks through stone, who ask a shopkeeper where they buy their bread. I arrived with the first clock ticking loud in my chest. The square convinced me, slowly and without force, to borrow the second.

I learn the rhythms the market keeps without announcing: when the crowd thins, when the music leans folkloric, when the puppeteer finds a child who doesn't need words to laugh. In the lull between afternoon and evening, the woman from the candle stall shows me how to press a leaf into soft wax to leave a fossil of spring. She presses the leaf into my palm afterward as if to say: carry this softness carefully; it will guide you better than any map.

Evenings I practice living here. A small apartment off a tram line teaches me the discipline of the quiet door: enter without announcing yourself to the whole hallway, carry groceries with one arm so you can wave with the other, learn the radiator's timing so socks dry while you sleep. In the borrowed kitchen, I unpack the day onto a cutting board—bread with the elastic chew of patience, cheese wrapped in paper that crinkles like a secret, apples that smell like rooms where windows have just been opened. Cooking becomes a ceremony of temporary belonging. I warm soup until it forgets the refrigerator's cold. I slice bread at an angle that feels right for no reason I can name. I stand at the window while the city turns down its volume and lets the streetlights carry the rest of the story.

Somewhere, people are still buying painted eggs by lamplight, because some things are best chosen when the world is a little blue and the day has only enough strength left to nod.

Markets are classrooms that fit everyone. For children, there's the education of the immediate: touch the smooth shell, count the wooden beads, listen to the puppet say hello in a voice like a leaf turning. For the old, there's a different curriculum: stories finding their rightful place again, hands remembering knots and recipes, the steady comfort of making things that have outlived a dozen trends and will outlive a dozen more. We move through the same space at different depths and call it a day well spent, even when we can't explain why.

I notice the generosity of benches, the intelligence of a square designed to offer rest without making you beg for it. A father ties his daughter's scarf more carefully than he ties his own tie. A grandmother lifts a candle to her cheek as if testing its kindness before she commits. When weather turns—and it does, suddenly, the way spring always betrays you—stallholders angle their roofs and the crowd adjusts as one organism that's learned how to surviveogether. This is what travel gives when you stop demanding it give you anything: you're no longer just the person you brought with you; you become a small part of a choreography that cares for itself without asking.

It's easy to treat markets like museums where everything's priced and nothing's for touching. But spending is a vote for what you hope survives. I think about that when I choose something small to carry home, when I say yes to a pastry because someone woke early to make it, when I tip a musician who caught the square at exactly the right tempo. Value here is a handshake—firm, honest, warm. It says: your work matters; my appreciation has form.

There's also the economy of attention. The world trains us toward speed and scrolling; the square rewards staying and looking. I put my phone away and let my eyes do the work they were built for. The return on that investment comes in small dividends you can't photograph: the way a vendor wraps fragile things in paper that crinkles like new snow, the way a child learns to wait without losing their light, the way strangers remember how to stand in a chorus without needing to be the soloist.

After sunset, the market lifts a different lantern. Voices gather near a small stage, thin at first, then round and full. A choir opens a window you can't see but you feel the moment the harmony reaches over its shoulder to make sure you're following. I don't know the words and don't need to. My mouth shapes vowels that carry gratitude better than fluency ever could. Three songs in, the square has become a living room where no one's left standing on the threshold.

Someone hands me a candle in a paper cup. The flame looks small and defeated until I tilt it toward another, then another, and suddenly the darkness has a new job. Light does what it does best: arrive, choose, remain. I think of all the painted shells going home tonight in coat pockets and careful hands, all the wooden toys wrapped in newspaper, all the small purchases that are actually sentences saying I was here, I saw care made visible, I will carry it forward even when I forget why.

The last morning, I walk the square before the stalls open. The city is a chessboard resetting itself for another slow game played at human speed. I rest my palm against a stone pillar and thank it for holding—the way you thank a friend for listening longer than they had to. I'm not leaving, not really. I'm learning a different form of staying, the kind that follows you even after you board the train.

At the platform that will carry me across the river and eventually away, I check my pockets: a painted egg cushioned in tissue paper, a candle whose scent will ambush me months from now in a kitchen far away, a receipt I don't need but will keep because the ink knows the date even if I refuse to say it out loud. The market continues behind me as if I were never there, which is both the saddest and most honest thing about travel. You visit. You learn. You join the chorus for one verse. And if you're lucky, when you hum that verse later in a place that doesn't know Prague's name, the city hums back.