Budapest, Lover by Bekah Waalkes

All my dreams end in that apartment, even four years later. I can still feel that thick tile on my feet, the clink of the bathroom door handle closing, the dusty dry of the stucco walls. I could find my way back, even now. Drop me in the middle of Budapest blindfolded and I’d end up there, at Bogdáni út, up on the sixth floor, right around the corner from the elevator.

I feel this about moments, too. I drop easily into memories of my old life: the feeling of being wrapped in a hug by seven tiny first graders, catching the night bus at sunrise over Margit bridge, drinking mulled wine that rapidly chills in the cold air of the Christmas markets, icy before you can get halfway through. The teacher who stops me in the hallway to say in broken English, “Every time I see you, you are shrinking,” her hands motioning smaller and smaller as she grins. Keep going, she means. Keep shrinking. “You’re getting so beautiful,” my colleague sings as she walks away, her voice lingering on the you of beautiful.

The view out of my window: the Buda hills to the left, the Danube to the right. Straight ahead, more concrete block apartments, identical to my own. When my friends from the States come to visit, they all say how depressing the concrete blocks are, how soulless my view is. “Good thing it’s only a year,” they tell me. “You look so good, have you lost weight?” 

If I sit outside on the concrete benches in the schoolyard, another teacher will rush out with a pillow for me to sit on. “Careful, please be careful!” It could be dangerous to sit on cold concrete, my colleagues say. You might freeze your uterus, rendering you infertile. How funny it was, I remember, to spend a year surrounded by children, teaching children, with women who worried about my future children, and to feel so alone. “Don’t you ever want some of your own?” they scold when they find me outside. “Someday you’ll want to settle down,” they tell me. They call me ‘Amerikai kislány.’ Little American girl.

I am not the only little American girl who teaches at the school: I live on Bogdáni út with my friend Kate. We have no other friends in Budapest, not really. So I spend my days standing in my classroom, playing games with first graders; my afternoons and evenings walking around the city, walking so much in my cheap plastic flats from H&M that I develop plantar fasciitis. I do lose weight, a lot of weight. I eat very little and take up running. Kate runs around Margit-sziget, the beautifully manicured island in the Danube, with a paved track and bright lights and a view of the city. She invites me to come with her sometimes, but I am slow and want to run alone—I want no witnesses. Instead, I run around Óbudai-sziget, a wild island with a gravel path that disappears into grass and reappears half a mile later. I run often. This is the loneliest year of my life, I think as I circle the island in the dark, far from the lights of my neighborhood. Endure this and you can endure anything.

The apartment has a tiny kitchen with no windows and this is where I sit in the mornings before school, eating whole milk yogurt with half a nectarine, a bit of muesli. Black coffee. I am shrinking and still alone. In college I imagined if I could just lose twenty pounds then I would be loved, my body would become magically desirable; the boys who were only ever my friends, only ever dead weight on group projects I would finish for them, would want me for once. Yet I move to Europe and sometimes smoke cigarettes and grow smaller and smaller and still no one wants me. I live in the lonely world of my mind, I write in my journal that year, where no one wants to move in. Now I read it and know: the lonely world of my mind is a dusty apartment on Bogdáni út.

The teachers at school think I live a wild life, that I go to all the clubs, that I barely sleep. They don’t realize my teaching clothes are my going out clothes. “Are there any boys?” a teacher asks me at school. This is a good question, actually, I write in my journal later. Are there any boys? Did they all disappear? Can you confirm this phenomenon? The truth is, I could have said, is that no boys seem to want me. Or: I haven’t been touched or hugged all year, except by the children I teach or by my friends when they visit, but even then only when they’re saying hello and, inevitably, goodbye. I go to the club one time, a horrible tourist trap by the basilica, with other American teachers. I am trying to be friendly. A man who speaks broken English buys me tequila all night and I get so drunk that I let him kiss me in the middle of the dance floor. Kate finds me, pulls me away, says, “You’re better than this.” Am I? I wonder. We take a taxi home and never talk about it again.

After the school year is over, I move back to the States and once I am back, I will realize that my loneliness has grown another set of ribs inside of me, my imbalances calcified. My body hangs ajar, just slightly off, imperceptible to others. Barely noticeable to myself. But I dislike being touched, I want to be left alone. In groups of people, my cheerfulness expires in an hour or less—I can’t hold my face together to smile or to laugh on command, not like I used to. At night I can’t sleep. I am homesick for Bogdáni út, for Budapest, and I am also relieved not to be there. How can you love a year that wrecked you? How can you be nostalgic for your own loneliness? 

Eventually I move to Boston, to a new apartment, to a new life, and even here, when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes and trace every step from the bus stop back up to Bogdáni út, remembering the buzz of the door, the unsatisfying press of the elevator button, the walk to my front door. I fade into sleep only to start the journey again in my dreams. This is an intimacy that I’ve never felt with a person: I know everything about this place. It knows everything about me. No one else saw me like that, I think when I look back at pictures, when I reread my journal. 

The only one who wanted me, Budapest, my lover, my friend.

Bekah Waalkes is a PhD candidate and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Bon Appetit, Cleveland Review of Books, among others.

28 July 2022