Scrolling and Circles

If you do some scrolling, a serious amount of scrolling, if you scroll so much that lives and times and people and places and the world have changed as you scroll back in time - you'll come across this:

"made it to Budapest safe and sound! yesterday we watched a boat sink (seriouslz! apparentlz it's important, when on a fast-moving river, to anchor off the bow of your boat, as opposed to the low-profile stern...) on the Danube River, then both an air show and fireworks above the Danube. hungarians know how to celebrate the signing of a constitution! today Eva is driving me to Eotvos Collegium so we don't have to do it before she works tomorrow morning. hungarian is marginallz improving. z and y are switched on hungarian computers, please be forewarned for the upcoming ten months!"

August 20, 2005.

Two years ago to the day.

August 20, 2007.

So, so long ago. To get there, you'd have to scroll back in time, through me and my stories. And yet I can remember it. In some ways I miss it desperately. The planes flying above the Danube seemed so fresh and new and scary and invigorating. The twisted keyboard so full of mystery and potential and wonder and intrigue. Hungary was still magyarorszag, sometime delightfully unfamiliar. A challenge. An adventure.

I leave, tomorrow morning, a bona fida tour guide.

Emily and her friendly Hungarian boyfriend are sleeping on the makeshift guest-room on my porch. an amazing hungarian girl is sitting on a train right now, making a bee-line from the second-to-last day of Salsa camp to the sweaty capital, just to be with me. eva's waiting for me in her apartment, half an hour from now. this time, two years later, she doesn't have to pick me up, i can navigate there myself.

the tall black shelf in my room is the last thing I have left to pack, sandwiching three bottles of wedding-gift wine. i'm standing in front of it, typing on my laptop set on the fourth of five shelves. the tears have a long way to fall.

it's harder, much, for me to say goodbye to hungary this time. so, so much harder. maybe it's heves vs. budapest. maybe it's three months vs. ten months. probably its because of noemi. maybe it's because of friends. maybe it's because of school. probably because i know it's for good. probably because it's the same pang of autumn - just after the first back-to-school ad, just before the excitement of the first day of school - that pang that has made me cry since i was a little boy.

yesterday emily and i stumbled upon a wine festival. if we had arrived 6 minutes earlier, admission would have been free. another random turn took us to concerts up and down imperial Andrassy. We smiled, in silence, in delight of simply watching Hungarians for block after block. that same amazement i've always felt.

At the last block, a fitting tribute to two years in the books. Hevesi Tamas. Not simply is he "Thomas from Heves," but he's the singer who has haunted me since i arrived. his wailful ballad has followed me with every turn. The song, simply, is titled "Jeremy." students in heves who had never even sat through one of my classes and couldn't even speak a single language i could, would serenade me with the cry. Don't leave me, Jeremy, Hevesi Tamas and all the subsequent crooners would beg. The world will have no meaning without you. Don't go.

As much as I shouted as he stood on stage, entertaining a few hundred holidaying Hungarians, the song didn't come. Jeremy vagyok, I pleaded, certainly one of only a handful of folks in this whole country who can say that with a straight face. I am Jeremy, I am leaving, I begged silently. Please play my song.

It never came. The tribtue, though, was a good reminder in silence. Hungary isn't about me. Hungary will keep going on being Hungary long after i've snapped my seatbuckle on the plane at Ferihegy tomorrow. I leave having touched hundreds of friends, making their lives sparkle in many different ways. they'll just have to know that they have all done nothing less for me.

Just as there are flavors that go unnoticed in gulyas, there are stories that will go untold in this goulash. wonderful stories of twenty-year old american girls learning to enjoy celebrating an evening, and birthday, in Little Heves. and 4:50 am bus rides home. stories of friendships and goodbyes. tears and waves. stories of coworkers discovering themselves in the fineprint of a largely anonymous blog. stories of hungary.

my story, one of just a million billion stories in hungary, is ending. mixed into the gulyas, one delcious spice of a savory whole. i pass my story off to others, those with hungarian stories yet to come. michal the traveller. jenny the visitor. alison the student. dave the dentist. trever the scholar.

little pieces of the Hungarian gulyas. My goulash. Egeszsegedre!