Love Lorn in Budapest!
They say you should never return to the scene of a horrific heartbreak, and despite the healing power of time, sights and sounds can send you hurtling back in time.
The clinking and whistling of the old yellow trams reverberate and hang above the hum of the morning traffic. Budapest is under the blanket of a scorching August heatwave as all-about-me commuters walk this way and that way travelling to their daily place of work.
When I last left this picturesque city six years previous, I had that awful foreboding of impending loss. I visited Budapest then to try and persuade my runaway girlfriend to return to Ireland with me. Still, she decided not to follow me home to our life together but to stay and rebuild herself in the country of her birth.
She explained it as a calling from home. She didn’t want to be a foreign body under a strange sky amongst even stranger people. I was all she had in Ireland, but she needed more.
She longed to speak her native tongue and be close to the people she loved. The love I gave her couldn’t possibly be enough. It was a contest I couldn’t win.
For the next year and a half, I mourned and suffered her loss like the slow death of my soul, as if she had ripped out a small piece of my heart and taken off to the hills with it.
You are probably wondering why considering I loved her so much. I didn’t run after her. The answer is simple. She didn’t believe I could do it. She broke her own heart to come home to Hungary – something her family and friends should cherish every day.
She called me the love of her life and was almost obsessively possessive of me, which caused me short-term relief at her initial leaving. But this relief slowly became a loss and grew to where I broke down and needed help. Grief manifests in many shapes and forms.
So here I find myself back in Budapest, struggling with the thought that she is so close yet knowing that time has destroyed what was once our time here in this city. You can’t go back. What is gone is gone, never to return.
I want to enjoy Budapest for what it is today, but unfortunately, I can only remember this city for the person who showed it to me. And for this, I should have never returned. Budapest was her to me as much as Cork is me to her. Our love belongs to that time in space.
