I made it because my mom had known me long enough to know it wasn’t worth telling me no, you can’t go to an Eastern European country instead of college just because you read in Seventeen magazine about a girl that got a dish-washing job in Prague when you weren’t reading and re-reading Milan Kundera and thinking about how the Soviets just marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968, just marched in and took over, and how they called it the Velvet Revolution in 1989 when the whole world was changing, and instead of Russia nuking the States, like the culture of the Reagan administration told you your whole life, walls were coming down and somewhere, far away, in a country, with real people, that was just a concept and fun to spell in Spelling Bees back home, a poet who loved the Velvet Underground became the president and you needed to be there because there were just a few years to do something before you inevitably made choices you maybe didn’t regret but maybe did and either way you couldn’t take them back for the rest of your life. I made it because, although I’d seen little of the world, I’d seen regrets.
Aubri K. Adkins is a writer based in Detroit, MI. She is the founder and co-curator of the East Side Reading Series, a literary series featuring writers of all genres. She has had memoir published in Gravel Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, and Stirring: A Literary Collection, as well as fiction published in the Tusculum Review.