budapest

this was never something i intended to share, but after feedback from my wonderful writing class at ubc and understanding that humans must share in order to heal, here is my non-fiction writing piece i developed during my first term of university. i feel like it requires some sort of an introduction, but i would not know where to start. it scares me to release this into the world, but it would be a shame for this to gather dust in the depths of my word documents.

~

                                                                                                                      

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.

~

           

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.

~

           

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.

Late July

I walk out onto the porch and see you there, and the air smells vaguely of thick honey - the kind my mom buys at the farmer's market that's infused with lavender. I have always associated summer with dusks like this one - that warm, thick scent to the air - as if the very tendrils of atmosphere are licking the bare skin of my legs beneath my cutoffs. The comfortable warmth wrapping around me as I walk home after dark, my shoulders bare. It's late July.

You inhale as I sit next to you, three inches of space between our thighs. I ask you what you're up to tonight.

"Dunno. Gonna head down to the railroad tracks. Jessie's having a thing."

I wish my stomach wouldn't convulse every time you said someone was having a thing. I wish my palms didn't go cold and fill with moisture. I wish my head didn't feel light, disconnecting from my neck. I wish I could move my hand from where it clutched the top step to wrap around your bare shoulders. I ask you what kind of thing.

"You know. Just a thing."

And I did know, but I didn't want to. I hated myself for knowing, and more so, I hated myself for permitting you to leave every other night to the railroad tracks that July.

~

It's May, and your cheeks are mascara-streaked. Graduation hangs huge and foreboding above your head - more like an expiry date than a doorway. I see the fear in your eyes as I open our thick maple front door to you. A garbage bag is slung over your shoulder, swelling. Edges poke at the black plastic, and I make out the spine of a book . Your spine is hunched, curled in on itself beneath the weight of your load. You hair is swept up into a bun on the top of your head, pieces coming away around your ears like a blonde halo, back lit by the five o'clock sun. You come in without a word and I carry the bag up to my room.

My mom asks what you're doing here.

"She's gonna stay for a couple of days."

She asks why. I feed her lies. My words hang thinly in the air between us and I see in her face that she doesn't believe me.

That night, your bag lies half-unpacked on my hardwood bedroom floors. My curtains are open and the oak tree across the lawn sways in the eleven o'clock breeze. I see your knees, scraped, and your palms, blistered from climbing its bark. Your hand plays through the darkened air, greyish light catching your skin from time to time as your fingers dip and twist. I ask what you're doing.

"Go to sleep, Katie."

~

It's the second week of June. You've been staying here for six weeks now, your garbage bag curled up in a corner of my closet, long forgotten. You graduate next Friday. I see the fear wrapped around your lips and inside your eyes and buried deep within your stomach. I ask you what you want your future to be like, one night, when we're sitting out on my lawn. I'm drinking iced tea and you're drinking a beer because my dad treats you like an adult.

"Well, Katie, I'd like to live in London. Brick Lane, you know, loft apartment. A nice guy, he has thick-rimmed circle-frame glasses and a beard. I want to sing. I think my voice is okay, and singing makes me happy. Aren't you supposed to try to be happy? I don't know. It all sounds like a pile of bullshit to me, but I can't exactly write that in the yearbook. I mean, what's the point of illustrating this idyllic future, this perfect man, these two and a half kids, this apartment with its imaginary claw-foot bathtub and authentic hardwood flooring? What's the point of it all? As if imagining it will somehow make it real. Well, Katie, I'll tell you what imagining's got me. A big pile of disappointments and a bucket load of expectations. And empty promises. To myself. Which are the worst kind, really. I know I won't end up spending my Saturdays walking through Hyde Park pushing a designer stroller while I put together perfectly engineered melodies for my new album that will undoubtedly go platinum in two point five seconds. That's not my life. We're all given a life at the beginning of this whole shit show, we're all given a script. And I've read mine from top to bottom. And I didn't like it. I tried different accents, different inflections. I've even added some small print in there, some actions. Done my best with what was written for me. But I'm no magician, none of us are. Don't believe those bullshit 'coming from nothing' motivational stories. That's what their script was, part of the larger plan to make us believe that there isn't a script, that we are in command of our own destinies. Well, I'll tell you something, Katie. Keep believing. Keep believing in the plan. Because I'll tell you what - when you stop believing, when you stop mapping this imaginary future out and stringing the lies you tell yourself on the cord you wear around your neck - well, when you stop all that, you'll be happy you were weaving a rope. Because you'll need something to get you out of here."

~

So it's late July and you're sitting on my porch while my mom makes dinner inside.  I ask if you're eating with us.

"Thanks, Katie bear, but no thanks."

You ruffle my hair. I cut it two days ago. Chopped off my long brown curls into a boyish. short back and sides thing. You said it made me look older than sixteen. I hoped you were right, because I've been waiting for some sign of womanhood to land upon me. You always seemed like some exotic, uncageable creature. But looking at you now, your face bare and your body small and feeble beneath your old tank top and cuffed shorts, you seem so human. I guess you always were. But the bravery you had, and I use past tense here on purpose, it made me think of you as something greater than that. The idea of you I harvested helped me forgive you, I think. Forgive you for the convulsions in my stomach every night you didn't come home. Forgive you for the sweaty palms and disconnect I felt whenever you said you were going to a thing.

~

Yesterday we went to the beach. We shared a basket of fries drenched in ketchup. The sun blistered our skin and you dared me into the swelling waves. You floated on your back for a while, your long hair splayed out around you. I tried hard not to picture you floating like this, your lips bluish, your face whitened, under more dire circumstances. But what you said to me that night before graduation gives me nightmares almost every time I close my eyes. I wonder if you know that.

~

"Want a cigarette?"

You hold one out to me, the slim stick between your thumb and forefinger. I say sure, all nonchalant, and hold it between my lips like I've seen you do. Your thumb flicks the flame to life and brushes it against the end. I inhale as it burns reddish orange. I pull it from my mouth with two fingers and exhale in a gasping sputter. You laugh as you light your own, and my face reddens. Somehow this makes me angry.

The cigarette isn't at all what I'd expected. It tastes like ash and chalky bitterness, and it scratches my throat on the way down. But for some reason I'm compelled to inhale again and again until the sky darkens and I stub it out on the deck like you do.

"Katie, I gotta tell you something."

You tuck your hair behind your ear and turn towards me. I notice the hoop pierced in your cartilage and the streak of rose by the nape of your neck. I say yeah.

"I won't be seeing you again."

I ask why, knowing you won't answer.

"I can't say. You'll hear about me, don't worry."

~

I don't know why I held out a sliver of an inch of hope that when you said I'd hear about you, it would be under better circumstances. Maybe you'd have moved to London after all and released a hit single and were going on tour. Maybe you'd written a book. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know.

But I sure didn't expect to hear of you like this, as I dropped my bowl of cheerios to the carpeted floor, as I saw you light up on the television, your graduation photo above your name. And behind that, a train stopped on the tracks. And behind that, a conductor being interviewed by a man in a nice suit. His brows are knitted together. I think he looks gravely sad. Maybe you'll haunt his nightmares now, too.

you at sixteen

I find myself thumbing through the ghosts of you

And all your had beens and almosts

Until my mind is numb at one a.m. 

You will always be a half-finished masterpiece to me

For I cannot understand the lines sketched across your skin

Without having witnessed your preliminary drawings

When your canvas was washed

Clean

Vices piled up around you like cigarette butts and you

At sixteen

Your eyes burned red 

I try to imagine you

Halved

Prior to your emergence from your chrysalis

I fail

For suffering feels unnatural on you

Foreign

Alien

I know you must think the same of me

Me

At fourteen

A girl you will never meet

Perhaps we are all half-people

Snippets, cut off at each end

Our pasts a vague and distant mimicry 

Of our present selves

An echoing of gulls against jagged cliffs

Our futures memories of tomorrow

Pretty in how we imagine ourselves to be

Picturing you at sixteen is futile

As attempting to return to fourteen year old me

I must see you for all your half-finished beauty

My eyes awash in your effervescent shades of topaz

Without searching for the scratched out graphite beneath

You at sixteen died with all those birthdays

And it is enough to be in these parentheses

To know you now

You at eighteen

honey air

the air is thick like honey syrup and we are slaves
to the pull of the sun magnetic upon our icy winter skin
limbs stripped from jeans, extricated from blankety wombs
we run and spill out of our underground caverns to the rolling hills of emerald
the trees still barren, signs of winter's cruelty
the sun azure in a way that makes my bones ache for oceans
my lungs are filled with sweetness and a vague nostalgia
for nights like this eight months ago
walking home in the warm darkness I remember
pavements just like these
and nights I breathed freedom like it came naturally
and days we laid on blankets like this, wrapped up in a comfort
of warmth and togetherness
there is a part of summer that breeds unity
he laughs as he bounces the baby on his hips and she glances
up from the novel she is reading to smile at him as he flicks
ash from the end of his cigarette and
the bare skin of his back is to me while his fingers strum a guitar to
the tambourine player's beat
and breathing comes easy
when the air is thick like honey syrup and grass is cool beneath our feet

lighthouse

And it was almost like a thin lined reminder

Raised a near invisible inch above the flesh of her

A tribute to her humanity, she felt warmth of life stuff in currents through her veins below

Beneath the origami paper thin webbed as if by a spider so easily broken by the slightest bend of a fingertip, the slightest increase in pressure

Almost immeasurable
Nearly undetectable

She thought of this often, the power entrusted in her entirely undeserving hands

Her fingers shook too violently, as tremorous as aspen sometimes
And it was during the earthquakes she was reminded of it, the searing release

She knew now the chemical equation that was missing from her, the adrenaline and endorphins that calmed her shaking hands like the warm breath of a mother stroking the hair above her ear

And she remembered it, as distant a memory as it was now, fogged and creased around the edges as a wallet sized photo kept in a jacket pocket too long, crushed beneath receipts and spilled chewing gum

But it was there, still, she realized
A partially obscured lighthouse beacon and sometimes she felt herself running towards the crags of the rocks it stood upon instead of obeying the warning it screamed

And she sometimes felt she craved sharp edges more than she needed the gentle ebb of the sea

afraid of the dark

I'm afraid of the dark
But not in the ways you would expect, no I am not afraid of unnamable monsters that lurk between floorboards and bedboards, of hidden spaces closet-black, of tree-skeletons projected like black and white movies on death-pale carpet, no
I have no fear of the unavoidable, of my vulnerability to circumstance and night predators
I do not tremble by cause of fear for the unknown, the concealed, the shapes that shift unnoticed across walls paling in moonlight
For my fear lies instead within me
Under the layers of skin in the half-light through the window blinds
In my eyes filmed over with night stuff
In my hands that reach for something they recognize in the blackness
My terror is in me, in my choices influenced by the shadows of midnight, puppeteered by a loneliness that develops like a sheet photo in a darkroom sometime around two a.m.
And this is the fear of it, when all is stripped of ghosts and shadows and tricks of light
How does one prepare oneself against their own slight of hand?
How do I run from a thing which will inevitably be neither in front nor behind?

airport

Eyes searching scanning pointing finding 'we still have two hours'
ten languages bleed into one

Backpack heavy it weighs him down hair long and unbrushed skin penny tarnished

Limbs aching shoulders heaving face drawn and tired she sits because her anxiety put her here hours early

Man in business suit duty free liquor in a sealed plastic bag I wonder if he'll be drinking alone

Italian family swelling and overflowing speaking loudly they love one another

Middle aged man one sleek black briefcase long handled I wonder if he's flying home or away if he has two kids in pajamas waiting for him at the top of the stairs

He is old, his back bends like a willow
Too old to be flying alone

Were all caught between staying and leaving, here and where we're meant to be I wonder who is going home and who is running away