A Date In Budapest

It’s late summer of 2003 and I’m living near Columbia University in Morningside Heights, in student housing, because I’m involved with a girl who’s going to Columbia Law. Her name is Julia. But at this point, she’s been gone for three months—off in Budapest, doing a summer internship with a human rights organization. I have been living alone in this apartment, next to a college I don’t attend and which has utterly emptied out for the summer, going to the local bodega where the only song that ever seems to play on the overhead speaker is “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” and I swear it has rained constantly the entire summer. But, there’s a reprieve coming.

The plan is simple: in three days, I’m flying out to join her for the last few weeks of her time in Budapest. We’re going to travel through Central Europe together. It’s going to be great.

And then, one morning, I wake up with that feeling. You know the one—when something isn’t right. You just know it. Like a sixth sense from across the seas or, in my case, like I hacked her email found out about the Serbian guy she’d been fooling around with for the past month.

Now, in my defense, she had hacked my email before. It was practically a love language for us. She even hacked my email after we broke up. Our trust issues outlasted our relationship and our relationship lasted eight years. Non-consecutively.

So, naturally, I pick up the phone—calling Budapest from New York in 2003 wasn’t cheap—and we proceed to rack up a monumental phone bill having a series of very intense, very emotional conversations. But in the end, the decision is made: I’m still coming. We’ll work it out.

And, honestly, a big part of why we make that decision is money. One of the things that unites Julia and I is that neither of us comes from families with money or who travel casually. We don’t “summer.” We spend a lot of time with those kinds of people – Julia out of merit and me because I have turned gate crashing into a lifestyle – but that only makes us more conscious of the fact that we are not those people. The $800 I spent on my plane ticket is a lot of money. It’s a ridiculous amount of money for us. So I’m going. That’s happening. And, as we agreed on the last fraught phone call, we can work this out. We are going to work it out.

I get to the airport, get through security, telling myself the whole time, “We’ll work it out. It’s going to be fine.” I get on the plane. “We’ll work it out.” I fly over the Atlantic. “We’ll work it out.”

I land in Budapest. I get through customs. I step out to meet Julia.

We break up on the shuttle from the airport.

Didn’t even make it 15 minutes.

But now we have three weeks of travel ahead of us, and in a week, her lease is up. So, we have no choice but to move forward. That first week is spent circling each other in Budapest, pretending we’re not furious, trying to appreciate the city’s sights while studiously ignoring the ruins of our relationship, like, for instance a Soviet statue graveyard. This is a giant parking lot full of discarded relics from the failed state of communist Hungary. I don’t want to be so self-absorbed as to compare our inability to make healthy life choices with the collapse of one of history’s most significant and powerful political movements, but there was at least one Lenin statue whose expression seemed to say to me, “Same, buddy. Same.”

Then comes the next phase of the trip. We board a train to Prague. So far, we’ve been civil, we’re keeping it together, but now, cracks start to show. For example: there was the issue of my passport.

My driver’s license had expired, so I’d been using my passport as ID in New York bars, stuffing it in my back pocket, where it got a little… mangled. It was worn and fading some of the laminate was coming up around the picture.

So as we make our way across central Europe, when the border guards board the train, they take one look at my frayed, dog-eared passport and give me a long skeptical look. Then they remember the Cold War is over, shrug, and toss it back to me. No big deal.

Except, every time this happens, Julia has something to say. The first time, it’s a light chide: “You probably should’ve renewed that before coming.” At the next border it’s, “You should have gotten your passport renewed.” By the third border, it’s: “I cannot believe you didn’t renew your passport. That is just like you”

And I find myself thinking, “How can I get drugs and how much heroin would I need to plant in her bag for the guards to take an interest?”

But we make it to Prague. And here’s the thing: we were terrible as a couple, but we were excellent travel companions. So, despite everything, we fall back into that rhythm. We joke about the city’s endless supply of bad street performers. We comment on little details of the architecture. We duck down alleys and take detours to see where we’ll wind up. We laugh, we have a good time—until we remember who we are to each other now. Then we get sad. Then we cry. Then we go back to the hotel and have the kind of sex you have when the only person who can comfort you is the person who’s making you miserable.

Some people travel Europe by rail. We chose to travel by emotional roller coaster.

Next stop: Vienna. A brief pause before heading to the Dalmatian Coast. But then we get to the train station, and the train is overbooked—packed with sweaty Central European vacationers, all melting into one another. It’s over 100 degrees inside. No air conditioning. No lights. Just an 11-hour standing-room-only nightmare.

Julia looks up at me, tears welling in her eyes, and whispers, “I can’t do this.” And suddenly, I know: this is the last thing I have to do for this relationship. I have to get her off this train.

I turn around and see nothing but a wall of exhausted, dehydrated people packed together like sardines. The only way out is the way we came. So I summon my inner ugly American. I straighten to my full height, take a deep breath, and bellow, “GETTING OFF THE TRAIN!” Then I start using my backpack as a counter lever giving added force and momentum to my swinging arms, parting the seas of sunburned German tourists, pushing through the mass of bodies. Their eyes widen in panic as I start to bulldoze through. They start scrambling over one another as they see me coming. From the outside they must have looked like so many human sized trapped sparrows flinging themselves at the windows.

And then, we’re through.

I make it back to the platform, grab Julia, and pull her off the train. And just as I do, the air brakes hiss and the train pulls away. We watch it disappear, and the relief washes over us. We’re free. We laugh—hysterical, euphoric laughter.

Then Julia’s laughter turns to tears. She looks up at me, red-faced and wet-eyed, and says, “I’m so sorry. I feel like I’ve wasted your time.”

I can’t hug her. That’s not where we are and both of us sense it. But I place my hand on her arm and I smile and tell her its ok and  that I don’t feel my time with her was wasted. But what think is: If this had been about marriage, or kids, or building a life together—then, yeah, maybe a little time was wasted. But if this was about havi