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Budapest: Or, Why I’m Really Happy I Didn’t Kill Myself in Grade Nine
The metro in Budapest, if you can call it a metro at all, is the second oldest metro system in the world, and appears to have not been refurbished since its construction in 1896. The yellow car rattles through the infinitesimal underground veins, scrambling its contents who white-knuckle the hand-holds to avoid being thrown around the car haphazardly. I sit on a bench, my butt grazing the edge of the plastic seat, eyeing up the stops listed overhead. Traveling to an eastern European country while dealing with anxiety is not the best idea, but when I decide to do things, I tend to skyrocket into them blindfolded and crossing my fingers.
Emerging from the underground to the darkened February Budapest streets, I am struck. I feel the people and the buildings and the rushing streets pulling at every organ of my body, the sound emanating from my chords a music I strain my ears to hear. My feet are fresh from the cobbles of Paris, my jacket a Christmas gift from last year in Canada, and my toque has rested on the stone walls of a castle in Edinburgh. I breathe in the lights and the smells, notice the people who rush with heads bowed, the beggars with hands upturned, the children with eyes resembling my own.
Following the directions to my hostel I got off the internet, I find myself wandering further and further down a darkened alley. Signs for 500 forint falafels cry out to me, and I pass a group of tall, dark-haired men. My palms begin to sweat, and I feel the walls of my heart tighten. Fear has a way of grabbing hold of me: wrapping skinny fingers around every inch of my body and squeezing tightly. I walk onwards, and the lit-up sign advertising my hostel pours ice-water relief through my veins.
I’ve never been one to lie in bed on my first night in a new city, so I pull my shoes back on and venture into the now pitch-black winter streets. It helps to think of myself as a Viking explorer. The street names employ what seems to be an entirely different alphabet, and the bones of each passerby are arranged into the most foreign of formations. My apartment in Paris and the familiar French-speaking western Europeans seem extremely far away. Traveling alone terrifies me when I think of how I could so easily disappear. I could slip off into the swaddling blackness of that side alley over there, curl up against a disintegrating red-brick wall and fade into nothingness. It would take them a while to realize I was even gone.
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When I was fourteen, I wanted to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge. I don’t know why, only that there was a kind of thick cotton inside my brain I could not escape. The world felt inescapably small inside my head. When my parents found out I was taking sharp objects to my forearms, they panicked and sent me to a therapist who talked a lot about healing crystals and trauma, and had fluffy brown hair that curled around her head like a halo. The problem was, as a working class family struggling to rent a rancher in North Vancouver, my therapy was the government-sanctioned kind that’s unpredictable and generally ineffective. My therapist moved to Squamish.
When I was fourteen, I wanted to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge, and I hadn’t even seen the world yet. I hadn’t seen the way the Seine bends around Ile St. Louis, or the way the Eiffel Tower sparkles like diamonds are falling from the clouds, or the way the Széchenyi Chain Bridge arcs over the Danube like waterfalls of tiny lights.
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When I awoke on my second morning in Budapest, I wrapped a thick scarf around my neck and emerged from my hostel into the frostbitten February morning. Fog had descended upon the city, wrapping Gellért Hill in swaths of cobwebs. The hill rose up beyond a bridge westerly of the one I had crossed the previous night. Before traversing the Danube once again over the Liberty Bridge, I ducked inside the Great Market Hall. The hall is a vast building, a product of the imagination of the first mayor of Budapest and built in 1897. Windows lined the tops of both walls, and merchants sold their goods in rows on the first and second floors of the gaping space. Scents of paprika and candied oranges filled my nostrils, and pastries glistening with glazed sugar watered my tongue.
I hiked Gellért Hill that morning, stopping at the cave church inside of it, within which an old Hungarian man handed me a tour guide headset with wrinkled hands. The cave was cool with the spirit of Saint Ivan. It is thought that Saint Ivan, a hermit who inhabited this cave, used the thermal springs adjacent to the dwelling to heal the sick. Perhaps he could have soothed my throbbing fourteen-year-old forehead, when the pains shot through my scalp and down my spine.
The top of Gellért Hill is crowned with the Citadella. I stand beside it and look out across the city I have climbed, scanning the Danube from east to west and imprinting the tiny white-washed churches and buildings and monuments that sprawl as far as I can strain my eyes to see. The ethereal morning cobwebs have begun to lift, revealing the details of the parliament building and Buda Castle, the Cinderella turrets of the Fisherman’s Bastion, and the string lights of the Chain Link Bridge. My cheeks burn with cold, and my fingers are numb as I descend the winding path to river level.
Most European cities I visit on my year of travel are divided into north and south, east and west, or right bank and left bank by a river. In Budapest, the Danube splits Buda and Pest in a wide snake; in Rome, the Tiber flows between Vatican City and the Coliseum; in Berlin, the Spree winds through the war-torn capital; in London, the Thames is connected by the Tower Bridge; and in my hometown of that year, Paris, the Seine separates the artsy right bank from the literary left bank. My brain is divided into sickness and health, sadness and sanity, impulse and clarity. All the times I stood on top of the world, on top of a hill by a citadel, on top of a volcano in Edinburgh, on top (almost, I couldn’t afford the extra euros to take the elevator to the very top) of the Eiffel Tower, I built another bridge across the hemispheres of my psyche.
And at night, when the cold hands of sadness wrap around my fingertips, speaking of my fourteen-year-old self and suicidal tendencies, I look for the lights strung across the span of my bridges, looping in lit-up parabolas over the black water of my divide. Sometimes I manage to cross to the safer side, and sometimes my bridges collapse.
All I know is I am thankful I never collapsed when I was fourteen, and had never seen the world.
