Bohemian Days

Saturday, August 11, 2007

I’d like to say I “did” Budapest, but I really didn’t. Or, actually, in a way, maybe I did….

I sit at a wooden table on a cloth covered antique couch, eerie hookah-smoking-Indian music playing in the background. I expect any minute to look up in the tree outside the window and see the Cheshire cat grinning down at me as a puff of smoke rises from the caterpillar smoking his pipe perched upon a toadstool growing in the pot on the balcony. Where am I? Budapest of course. Where else would Alice in Wonderland seem so obviously reality?

Five days have passed, I have left this flat just once. I wish I could describe the easy air here. It is like living inside a symphony – the day rises and falls like a melody, punctuated by dark and light but no perception really of time. Hunger is a light wood wind, whispering its presence until it is satiated by a wedge of peach or slice of chocolate. Pot comes in like the solo piano, conquering everything around it, carrying us into some little hollow of the world where everything is mellow, easy, covered in lightly blowing gauze. The intimations of love making that we both know are intimations and not intentions are the violins teasing in the distance.

What have I done in the days since I arrived? Slept, smoked cigarettes, danced with Mary Jane, eaten bread and nuts and chocolate, slept more, smoked more, worked on the internet, wrote emails, slept again, chatted, burrowed, and licked my still open wounds from a love lost. My host is laid back, patient, easy, brilliant, a deadhead without a band to follow, and an anomaly of the highest degree; his salt and pepper hair, thick and burly in contrast to his smooth white alabaster skin; his careless nature opposing his sharp, keen intellect. I love anomalies. His home is a reprieve. Like Alice, I could easily get lost here amidst the sitar, chasing sunrays that drift through the tall windows, and losing myself in the green lights that follow my cigarette embers in the night. What am I doing here again?

Oh yes, something about writing a book. Or was it living a life? Or trying to find love or peace or something? Yes trying to find something I am looking for that I know I already have but don’t know that I have. My own backyard. Circling the world to get to my own back yard. What will I write? What will I do? Who will I love? Will they love me? Why are we here? Why do I care? Am I done yet? I ask this question when the darkness comes and light is forgotten. Am I done yet? Have I tried hard enough? Learned enough? Done enough? Laughed and cried and hurt and recovered enough? Enough yet? Because frankly sometimes I am tired, but of course, it is night, and the abyss still whispers in the night. And then the sun returns and I remember that there are more roads and more countries, more people to meet, smiles to share, tears to cry, languages and stories and histories to learn, more questions to ask, more answers to find, more pages to write, more love to give, and to receive.

I am in Budapest now, land of the Bohemians. I think I’ll stay awhile and ponder the unponderable pointlessness of all that has a point and the pointedness of all that is pointless. Drinking from the Danube, inhaling, breathing, crying, laughing, loving, life…

I stayed a week in Wonderland. As the clock ticked down to the appointed departure time, he played my favorite classical piece – Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor. The room filled with the vibration of the violin solo, as the song filled my soul with all that is life. I stand on the hill above and look down onto the patio, the door that opens into Wonderland, the observer now, on the outside looking in, where moments before I was inside looking out. The song still echoes within me, as if I were hearing it carried across the tips of the trees - its crescendos and descendos, its pain and joy and melody. I can still hear, still feel, the notes that carry you away and the silence between that leave you breathless and full and empty all at the same time.

The wind blows across the hill, winds of time, of love, of loss, gently lift my hair, caress my skin, carrying the past toward the future. The future, always moving toward the future. We can look back, but we cannot stop the movement forward, even in the looking back. The wind blows. Time flows. Where am I going to? Can I follow these melodious string vibrations into the sun, the light I saw yesterday streaming through the trees, casting me in a golden beauty that no one saw, that I fear no one will ever see. I feel the music deep inside, within my body, my heart, my mind, all that is woman in me and alive and hurting and joyous; raping me with fullness of feeling, pillaging my heart, ripping my soul to build it again, tearing me asunder to recreate me whole, phoenix from the fire, ashes from the man, scattered on wind carried to lovers who make love and bring me forth again. I want the words. Where are the words for this feeling inside me? “You cry easily,” he said. “It is beautiful.” Yes, beautiful and wrenching, I don’t know how to live so openly and not die with every moment. Is that what it is to live openly? To die every moment? To feel everything, everything in its fullness, its presence, and its inevitable departure. I die, with every moment past, every goodbye and am born with every new moment arriving. Each fills me and depletes me simultaneously. Breath in, breath out. Do others know this place? This raw, openness? This realness? Is this what others feel? Where am I going to? Evita cries as descend the stairs backpack on my shoulders, walkman playing in my ears. Don’t ask anymore….

Comments

[JT]

Mein Gott! Was that only 3 months ago? Seems like a more distant haze.