Postcard From... Budapest
I am nineteen, and it is the ninth day of the ninth month of the year 2016. It is one o’clock in the morning and this is the fourth bar I am visiting on the first bar hop of my life. I am in Budapest, Hungary, which is the fifty-fourth city and the sixteenth country I have been to in the past six months. I am with three friends that I met for the first time twelve hours ago. The only thing I cannot place numerically is how many drinks I have consumed tonight, but it is enough to make me feel like all 15 trillion cells in my body are singing in unison.
A few hours prior, when my new friends convinced me to join them on this Ruin Bar Tour, I was faced with the same feeling I always encounter when I am invited on a night out – dread. Some people are born to have uninhibited fun in the night. I am not one of those people.
But I like my new friends and I don’t want them to smell the dread on me. Plus, I know I’ll regret leaving this city without seeing any of its famous, crumbling bars. I pay twelve thousand Hungarian Forint to a gangly man who looks as ruined as the bars he’s going to take us to.
See what the night does to a man? I want to say. But I keep quiet; my new friends think I’m a regular nineteen-year-old, and I don’t want to scare them off.
I am dressed head to toe in black, right down to my underwear, and I feel more put together than I have in months. My hair has dried in perfect ringlets. My eyebrows are freshly waxed. Look out, Budapest.
In the first bar we play snooker with Italians.
In the second bar we drink ciders with Spaniards.
In the third bar, a Russian, an American, a Macedonian and I wax lyrical about our respective homelands.
In the fourth bar, I meet the love of my life.
I spot him from across the dancefloor. He has whitish-blonde hair and crystal-like eyes that catch the sparkle from the strobe lights. He is wearing tortoiseshell rimmed glasses and his posture is impeccable. I know without even asking that he is, without doubt, German.
I lean into my troupe of new friends and declare, “THAT MAN OVER THERE IS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!”
If we were a colony of bees, I am the queen, and my new friends are my loyal workers. Within mere minutes of my announcement, my worker bees have dodged intoxicated crowds and sloshing drinks and have procured me a prize far sweeter than honey; they have managed to shimmy the German into our dance circle.
We say hello. He asks my name, I ask his. He tells me where he’s from: Germany. Bingo.
It is too loud to talk. An accidental brush of a shoulder becomes an innocent hand on a hip which leads to, naturally, the kind of kiss that’s reserved only for foreigners in clubs: hot and urgent pashing. It goes on for hours, and the longer his tongue is in my mouth, the more I am sure that this man is The One. He tastes like beer and tobacco, which I immediately decide, are my new favourite tastes.
We go outside for a brief interlude in our passion. He lights up a cigarette, and I am certain that he is one puff away from asking me to run away with him and live happily ever after for all of our forevers.
He is twenty-six, and a dentist from Bremen. One day from now, I’ll be searching every dentist in Bremen on LinkedIn to find him. Tonight is his last night in Hungary; tomorrow he will drive back to Germany with his friends, who have come here together on a road trip. He stumps out his cigarette, and we go back inside because our tongues miss one another.
Our passion is unquantifiable. I cannot count the number songs that have played, nor the number of people that have come past and cheered our communion with enthusiasm, nor the number of times I have considered getting down on one knee and proposing to this man myself, right here on the sticky floor of the bar.
One of my friends, who has somehow located me in this multi-storey cacophony, delicately notifies me that her and the others are heading off, and that it would be a good idea for me to leave with them, so we all get home safe. She is a very good friend, and she is right: safety doesn’t make compromises for meeting the love of your life.
I shout across to my lover that I must go. He agrees.
He says, “Kelsey, goodbye”
I say, “Goodbye-” and then, horrifyingly, realise that between the passion and the night, I have forgotten his name. I’m still drunk, mostly on love and a bit of Vodka, but I am acutely aware that asking for his name would be insulting. He has only spent the past few hours attached to me by the mouth.
Nothing happens and then a lot happens. I stare at the man whose surname I should be taking, whilst being lead down the stairs and out onto the street by my friend.
The cab costs me two thousand Forint. It is four o’clock in the morning and I make one phone call, to my mother in Australia, to tell her that I have had the best night of my life. I am young and very dramatic. I climb six sets of stairs to reach the apartment-style hostel, and collapse into my loft bed. I sift through all twenty-six letters of the alphabet and hope that they spell out a name that I forgot.
In the morning, I meet my friends for coffee. We reminisce the night and share tales of our night between the chalky walls of the bars. I wear the hickeys on my neck like an engagement ring. They confirm that yes, it did indeed happen and yes, it can only be described as true love.
The sentiment makes me feel warm. I forget for a moment that I am missing something.
“Does anyone remember his name?”