“There’s this film you have to see! It’s called For Some Inexplicable Reason,” she blurts, recalling. We were sitting in a courtyard, part-café part-living room, a prime example of Budapest bar syncretism. It was a sleepy Sunday. The city’s always quiet on Sundays, as I was that day, less than 24 hours back and already nursing a Hungarian hangover. I had arrived the previous evening, breaking a long two-year absence, and in short order Julcsi and I went for beers. I was grateful to see her so soon—not only because I missed her greatly, I did, but also because she is still my only friend with whom I solely speak in this peculiar tongue. After an absence, the practice was welcome.
Before I moved away from Hungary in 2013 I felt on top of the world. I was nearly 22, working an exciting job in a city with which I had essentially eloped. Far away was the Arizona desert that had wrung me dry from university strictures and the chronic anxiety of a malcontent living in bad air. The air seemed better in Budapest, my stress lower, and inexplicably, for the first time, I felt wholly myself. Then I left it again.
Admittedly I was living a very specific and peculiar existence. I had the privledge of cherry-picking the parts of Hungary that I liked and could remain cozily deaf to the parts that I did not, leaving them as conversational table scraps. I had spun a beautiful tale from the golden pieces and wrapped myself in it, tight, and returned to Arizona that way, praying it could sustain me until I could again see the Danube.
Two years was long. I ultimately couldn’t hold off the erosion. What eroded was not so much memories—those stayed and morphed as they do—but the feeling gestalt that lies at the heart of these bizarre experiences I found in Hungary over the last four years and change. This time I returned on a prayer that even though I couldn’t quiter remember how it felt to be in Hungary, that whatever that feeling was would be there, and that it would be enough to tell me just what we might do together now.
Julcsi took my sister and I to see the movie. Van…, as it’s called, cuts so much to the heart of contemporary (Hungarian) Budapest life that every soul I talked to spoke to attunedness: it is alternatingly sad, hilarious, frustrating, sexy, hopeless, harsh, and then, when you least expect it, mercifully gentle. The characters, conversations, challenges, even the cinematography are classic Budapesti. It was for me both a homecoming and the opening of a window I should have known was there. As the protagonist and his male friends shot back and forth rapidfire Hungarian slang while trying to pay a tab, and I desparately tried to keep up with rough English subtitles, it dawned on me just how little I know of this place I’ve come to claim. This place that I consistently describe as my favorite place: where I inexplicably most feel at home.