By Hannah Brown

ABOUT THE PIECE

I imagine this as love note to a daughter. I spent my twenties leaning into traveling the world, pouring all of my heart, time and devotion into finding love, enriching friendship and exploring parts unknown. I'll always be so incredibly thankful for this season spent prioritizing personal growth, artistic freedom and personal relationships. I think my twenties gave me the roots to thrive in my thirties, a decade I hope to share continuing in love and in creativity, but focused on welcoming new life and becoming a mother. If I have a daughter one day, and I hope I do, I would love to share the joy and weight of experiencing seasons in bloom, encouraging her to lean in to discovery and growth to get ready for what's next in any phase of life. It's a love letter to the season of life that got me ready to love and welcome her, and a guide to encourage her own exploration with tenderness and curiousity.

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Last year I returned to the first address of my twenties.

I spent four months living in Prague in a fourth-floor walkup with six roommates and three bedrooms. I lived off 20-cent pasta from an underground grocery store. I went to class in a centuries-old building, watching Loves of a Blonde and wondering if my professor looked like Mozart.

I read Anna Karenina in a gelato shop, falling in love with the idea of love. Then falling in love, traveling with a partner for the first time, sharing trdelník, finding penguins at the zoo. Smashing our lips, then laughing one night when we’d come home to find my roommate stuck in an elevator after dark.

Living here in my twenties felt like flight. Intoxicated by creative freedom, I was meeting her for the first time. Someone who spoke in French after too many pours, decidedly devoted to the words of Anne Carson and Louise Glück. I carried her with me for all of my twenties. I loved the way she intertwined fingers on a first date, returned to playing the piano, lived more softly and kept chasing the rush of first light in new cities, finding her way in places unknown.

But we are in these bodies for a short while. So I returned here in Spring to bookend my twenties. In this return, time feels like too much and not enough. Days here feel infinite. I ride the number two tram to and from Hrandska, I shop above ground. I think of B, back home, eager to return to the life we’re building together.

I linger to thank her, for a decade of freedom. For getting me ready for what comes next. Making peace and making room. I’m suddenly twenty again, eating pizza outside Chapeau Rouge. Precocious and hopeful, then I wrote “it will take another arrival, and not a departure, to bookend my experience in Prague.” I knew then what I know now: this city holds a special kind of magic. Revisiting Prague opened a way for me to return to earlier versions of myself, reawakening nostalgia for shared memories, for newfound freedom.

I’m slow goodbying - writing postcards and eating cake on the balcony, brimming with gratitude for all this decade carried, feeling bright for all that’s still to come.

I feel the relief of a rib being pushed back into place.

The lucky chance to reset and to invite what’s next.

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ARTIST:

HANNAH BROWN

Hannah Brown is a writer, artist and romantic based in Portland, Oregon. Often lost in a daydream, her childhood was spent baking scones from the Secret Garden Cookbook, stitching quilt blocks in vintage trailers, and burying her thoughts in a series of dramatic but earnest journals.

A big dreamer, she feels most alive in the desert. Watching the sun dance over the valley floor. Smelling creosote after a heavy rain. Seeing the earth crack, only to watch blooms thrive and push their way upward. You’ll often find her traveling south with her soul sister, laughing with gratitude for a life rich in friendship.