“The only thing I’ve wanted to do is to sleep. I have just enough energy to make it to school, and then back home in my bed. I mean, I hate feeling this way; it feels like some kind of depression. But thing is, I don’t know what the hell I’ve got to be depressed about. I mean things aren’t perfect right now. Sure, I’m broke as shit, but seriously other people have got more serious problems than I do, you know. I just came back to New York from an and all I want to do is cry about it. Really, if I could allow myself to cry, I probably would,” I told Christopher over the phone. Since I’ve been back from Budapest, he was one of a handful of people that I had any desire to talk to. Christopher and I have been friends since junior year of high school back in Flint. We haven’t seen each other much in the eight-year gap since we graduated, after high school I left to come here and soon after he moved down south to Alabama. Despite the distance, a phone call is a phone call.
“Well then, cry if you need to,” Chris was trying his best comfort me.
“No, I don’t really want to do that, I feel pathetic enough as it is.”
“Ty, what’s the matter? Do you miss David?”
“Listen, I’m going to go get something to eat or something.” I was done sharing my feeling for the day.
“Well, call me you want to talk.”
“Thanks, you too! Bye.” I hung up my phone and placed it on my desk before I collapsed onto my bed, which was just a few feet away. I lied in on the queen-sized mattress; I stared at the one-dollar bill that was taped to the ceiling. I put it there sometime last year because I read a book about the power of thoughts. It was about how if a person visualizes a specific object, then the thing that they want will appear in their life. At the time, money was what I wanted and needed the most, I needed to save for the trip to Europe; I figured if the bill was the last thing I saw every night and the first thing each morning then it would be fixed into my brain and eventually my ceiling would be raining of money. Needless to say, things didn’t exactly happen that way. Although, I’ll admit I was making decent money between the two jobs that I was working. Thing is, in the end, it wasn’t really enough. That’s funny! I mean, it’s such a negative way to look at life, that’s there’s never enough. Actually, come to think of it, the book says about something that too. If a person thinks, for example, that they don’t have “enough” in their lives, then they never will.
Could all those beliefs be possible? Whatever. I didn’t want to think about that anymore. I forced my thoughts onto the facts of evening: I was curled up in my bed on a Friday night in New York City. Sure, it was very cold outside, January is not a joke, but even still, it was a Friday night. I felt compelled to go out and find something to get into.
I got up from bed and looked around my room. I never realized how much I loved having my own room and my own bed. For the last four months I had slept on couches and on other people’s beds, I had no real privacy of my own. In that way, it was nice to be back. The guy who sublet my room took great care of it. Everything was exactly where I left it: the desk against the window overlooking the street, the clothes drawer in the doorway of the adjoining bedroom and the bed on the opposite wall across from the desk. Nearly everything in the room was some shade of brown, even the walls. The tones were very warm, they darkened the room just enough for it to feel like a cave when I needed that and other times, for it to earthy and sensual.
I grabbed a towel and made my way out the door into the building hallway and headed to the other side. All of the units in the building were railroad style, so the benefit was that my bedroom had two doors, which was nice so I didn’t have to walk through the other room. The front door of the apartment was unlocked; I usually leave it that way so I don’t have to bother about taking my keys with me every time. Once inside, I went straight into the bathroom. I took out my clippers, ready to give myself a haircut and shave. Then I stopped and stared at myself in the mirror. Suddenly, it seemed that I looked older than what I remembered about myself. The black hairs protruding out of my face aged me by at least a few years; I always kept my hair cut short because it was beginning to thin in the middle, I don’t know if that is normal for a twenty-six year old. I’ve always been conscience of my appearance, that’s because of the way my brother and sister would tease me when I was young. Everyone in the family was a high yellow to golden complexion, but me, I was the darkest with the biggest lips. Also, my maternal grandmother never failed to remind me how much I looked like my father, a man that she despised. I could never hide the lips that were too big for my face or the sleepy eyes that made me look like I was always stoned. All of these thoughts passed through my mind as I examined myself. I also thought about how much I’ve how come to like the way I look, my tall and slim body works in my favor.
Right then, I decided that I didn’t need to change anything about myself; the haircut could wait until tomorrow maybe. I showered and made my way back to my room. This whole time, my mind had still been going back and forth on whether I really wanted to actually leave the apartment. Finally, I decided to go.
Instead of dressing and leaving right away, I logged on to my email. Waiting for me was an email from Jodie; she wanted to know what I was planning to do with the hours of video footage that I shot while I was Budapest. That was something that I definitely did not want to think about right then. But it was in the typical Jodie fashion to fire a person up without even trying. I was avoiding the videos from the trip, just as I was avoiding memories, it was an intense experience and not enough time had passed for me to know how to deal with it or how make to sense of it. I felt, still, too much involved, because in a way, emotionally I was.
Jodie’s email put me off, any plans I had of going out and having a good night was now squashed. I sat at my computer for a while, I trying to find anything to keep myself busy but my mind kept running back to Budapest.
As soon as I got completely bored, I decided to open iPhoto and take a look at what was there. I randomly selected a short clip; it was of David, Jodie and myself at the apartment on Vorosmarty. Although nothing special happened, I clearly remembered that night. It was just the three of us together; we had had dinner, something that Jodie cooked. The clip was of three of us sitting around talking. Jodie, a tall and lanky girl with wild hair was wearing a purple sweater that looked like it used to belong to someones grandmother. She, herself acted like a granny, her favorite activities were knitting and baking. I swear if those were the only two things that she could do for the rest of her life, she would and with a stupid smile on her face, she’d try to look happy doing it. She was the same age as me but it seemed like we were worlds apart.
In the clip, David was managing the camera, something that he loved to do. It’s funny because the night that we met years ago in New York, he told me that he worked in film. That wasn’t exactly true, but I suppose he has always had a passion for taking pictures. The camera turns on me, and I flinched a bit because I hated the thought of being recorded. “Give me the camera,” I tell David. Reluctantly he hands it over. I got a nice shot of him, he was wearing his trademark “flat cap.” He told me that he started losing his hair when he was around twenty-one so I suppose for vanity sake, he always has a cap on. His light brown eyes are lit up. He is really very beautiful. Between his looks and his charm, most people can’t people but to be attracted to him. Even the people who hate his guts, somewhere, deep inside they want to be around him. He was someone that you either love or you hate, but in the end, both emotions are essentially the same. David had found his famous red clown nose, and was making silly faces before I turned the camera off.
Something I didn’t expect happened, I found myself laughing at the video. We had many nights like that. There wasn’t a TV in the apartment and for a while, there was no Internet, so we were forced to deal with each other’s chaotic energies. Most of that energy was tension. All three of us were struggling in our different ways. David was the middleman and orchestrator of this bizarre threesome; at time the situation was very stressful for him, but even still, I know that he always enjoyed a good social experiment so there had to have been some amount of satisfaction for him.
I had been in Budapest visiting David for about three weeks by this point; for many reasons, this had been one of the most turbulent periods time of my life. One of those reasons is that before I arrived in Budapest I had been living in Paris for a few months. That adventure was a personal goal of mine. I had visited Paris before, but the longest I had stayed was a week, not long enough to know the city. Each time I had been there, I never felt like I belonged. This feeling built a determination inside of me to go back and try again. Unfortunately, that quest didn’t go as well as I had hoped: I hadn’t made any close friends, I had been in a relationship that ended up as a total failure and I completely ran out of money. I ran to Budapest, looking for David to save me in some way. Our energies were rarely ever in sync, when I was a nervous wreck, he was calm and easy going. When he was fed up with his own issues and wanted to explode, I was his rock. In theory this may seem like an ideal balance of a relationship, but it was never actually like that. There were too many complications standing in the way of our relationship for it to ever be simple. The fact that I loved him but didn’t feel free to admit it, was not simple. The fact I lived in New York and he lived in Budapest, was not simple. But still, somehow, being there with him felt so natural. This was the third time in the last four years since he’s moved back that I had gone there to visit him.
I remember David telling me about Jodie when they met last year. At that time, I had been working on a film about people of mixed; David and I talked a lot about this topic. I guess the subject was so much on his mind that he managed to meet a mixed race girl, Jodie. Her mother was from New Zealand and her father, from the West Indies. David loved the mysterious, so I can see how her pale white skin and wild, curly black hair would have the power to capture his attention. To look at her, it would be hard to pin point exactly “what she was”, or where she was from. Actually, she looked like she was from no-where and to know her, this would be very easy to believe. It was like this girl just dropped down from space. As if she materialized out of the thin air with no past, no future, nowhere to be or anyplace to go, she was just there, always there. Her and David had a brief story together over a few months but afterwards they remained friends.
I once read somewhere that the best way to keep a secret is to tell the truth; I haven’t exactly figured out what that means but when ever I hear it, I always think of David. He had mentioned Jodie quite a few times, especially recently, since she had been staying at his apartment more and more often. I was interested to meet this person. Once we did finally meet, I remember is a demure and meek, sheep-like creature standing in front of me. “She seems nice,” I told David.
I didn’t care to spend much time outside: it was a very cold winter and because I had seen most of the tourists sites there in Budapest. My time was mostly spent visiting one of David’s friends, at bar or at home. The apartment we lived in on Vorosmarty Street was owned by his ex-girlfriend, who now lived London. By New York City standards, the apartment was perfect but by measures of what I’d seen in Budapest, the apartment was tiny. There was only one bedroom, which felt like a closet, a bathroom that was about half the size of the bedroom; but to its advantage, there was a nice kitchen and large living room, that’s where David and I slept, on the fold out couch. Jodie slept on a mattress alone in the bedroom.
I can’t say whether or not this arrangement ever bothered Jodie because at the time I didn’t really care. In the beginning, I was annoyed by her presence. She worked at a youth hostel and for the most part, lived there. But any chance she got, she would sleep at the apartment, this happened up until the point where it was just assumed that Jodie would be over.
Although, they were just friends, I could tell that her feelings for David were still unresolved. She always had this look in her eye that said, “Fuck me. Now!” Come to think of it, she had that look whenever any man was around. She gave off this very passive energy, as if she wanted to be used and taken advantage of. That quality pissed me off the most about her, sometimes I wanted to shake her and tell her to wake up. David, often, played on her nativity. He was by nature, a very critical person, he always had an opinion; and when it came to Jodie, it was just too easy for him to find something to pick at. Maybe it was her cooking, maybe it was the fact that sometimes she would stay in the house and read all day, maybe it the unflattering way she dressed or maybe he was just trying to get any kind of reaction from her stoic personality. Despite my feelings toward her, often I found myself coming to her defense. I didn’t understand this girl and even now, I still can’t say that I do, but I feel that I made an effort to try to be open with her.
One evening when David was ill and wanted to stay home to rest, Jodie and I stepped out together for a drink. This was the first time since I arrived in Budapest that we had spent any time alone together. The experience was very awkward up until about the second round of drinks. She asked me if I loved David, I said yes. She smiled. I had questions for her. Drink by drink, the picture was beginning to come together. She left her family in New Zealand because she felt that didn’t really have a family. The only person she was close to was her maternal grandmother, whom she hadn’t spoken with in two months. She had lived in England with her father and his new family for a while; then back down with her mother and that new family until she eventually moved to Budapest for school. It just happened that she remained there. I suppose it’s easy for a person to float if they don’t have any roots tying them down. All the while we talked, Jodie wore that stupid smile that I guess was supposed to mask her pain. After that night, although she continued to annoy me from time to time, Jodie and I were ok.
Throughout the years that David and I known each other, we’ve often talked about our ideals about the future in regards to marriage and family life. Questions like, whether or not I could see myself living life with another man. For me, those were thoughts that I had been fearful of. The older I gotten the more comfortable with myself I’ve become; now those thought are less threatening. For David, I think since he realized that he was also gay, he’s held the fantasy of living life with a wife and children and also his male lover. He way he explained it, everyone would live together like some kind of happy family. David played with this fantasy between Jodie and I, often he would joke saying, “What if the two of us had a kid with Jodie? It would be half white and half black.”
Such suggestions never got much a response from me, which he knew meant that I didn’t like the idea. If he and I were ever to end up together, there’s no way I would want to share him. He and I together would be the most melodramatic story of love withstanding the tests of time and in the end, conquering all. I’m skeptical.
On my computer, I scrolled through iPhoto and pulled up the video of our New Years Eve celebration. It wasn’t actually December 31st, maybe a week and half sooner. It was the night before I was supposed to have left Budapest. I wasn’t ready to leave but we weren’t going to be together on the actual New Years Eve, we made our own. Earlier in the night, we ate a farewell dinner with Jodie. I was happy that David asked her to sleep at the hostel, I was glad to be alone him for the last time.
It was a full moon at night. It was almost eerie how close it seemed to us as we stand out on the terrace in the cold staring at it. The snow was coming down pretty heavy. Which reminded me of something David had said a few days before. I had made a comment regarding the fact that despite me having grown up in Michigan, I hated being cold and I hated the snow. David responded with the benefits of snow. He said, ”We should be grateful because of it. The white snow keeps the dark, bleak winter bright. It’s the reason why people don’t go completely crazy and kill themselves.”
I had never thought in that way before and I supposed it was true. I smiled thinking about it. There on the terrace, David was wearing his red clown nose and I had on a pair of glasses with little red plastic bulbs, which blinked on and off when the switch was on. Through the camera, his face was only visible because the light coming from the candle that he brought out with him.
“New Year celebration!” I said
“Our new year!”
“Yes, our new year celebration! You must have a wish for New Years Eve.” I proclaimed
“Well, I’m turning thirty years-old.”
“Yes, now what does that mean to you?” I asked
He didn’t respond, he simply began to sway back and forth.
“This video is just for us,” I assured him
“Well, I know, but I want to find myself.” He responded. I continued to roll the camera and remained quiet, giving him time to “find himself.”
He stopped swaying, stood still and with the candle close to his face, “I don’t really know what I’m wishing. Honestly. I don’t really know. All I know is that I’m not wishing to continue what I’ve been doing in the past year and a half.”
He blew the candle out; I guess that was enough sharing for him. Normally, I would have asked the most logical follow-up question. But since, after all, that video was just for us, I didn’t need to. It wasn’t because I knew the answer, but just because I knew him. Sometimes, some things don’t always need to be said. I stopped the camera.
We went back inside the apartment and continued the celebration. David had had ear-wax candles in his bathroom. In the past, he had told me of the times he had performed the treatment on some friends, he said that strange things happened afterwards. Of course, I was curious about it. Like a kid, I had begged him to give me a treatment. That night he finally did. It was a sort of ritual. He prepared a small bowl of water, and a fresh towel; he turned off all of the lights in the apartment and relit the candle that he placed on the table, then he told me to lie down on the pillow he placed on the floor and turn on my side.
“Before we start, make sure you are very comfortable.” He paused, then continued, “now breathe in and out deeply, try to clear your mind.”
I did as he instructed.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes.” I responded as he wrapped the towel over my face and stuck the candle in my right ear. Then he lit it. As the candle burned, all I could hear was the crackling of the candle melting and I could smell it’s fumes. Its purpose is to create a pressure in the ear, removing wax and dirt. Spiritually, it’s supposed to remove negative energy. This was the pull for me. I also had wanted some kind of change. I was hoping that all the bad energy both surrounding me and inside of me would be melted away. He took the candle before it burned down too low and it placed in the bowl. He instructed me turn on my other and he repeated the process. The procedure lasted about fifteen minutes on each ear. Once it was over, I opened the candle and the inside was filled with a brown, dirty looking substance; I took that be what had come from my ear.
Next, it was his turn. He lied down and I instructed him to relax and mediate in the same way he had with him. Once the towel was in place, I lit the candle. While I was holding it for caution so he wasn’t burned, I was mesmerized at the light. I thought over everything that occurred in those last few weeks; it was hard to believe that come the next morning, all of it would just be memories and stories to tell.
It was late once his treatment was over. We drank ginger tea and made our way to bed.
An hour before my alarm was set to go off the next morning, David’s cell phone rang. I saw that it was Jodie calling, so I took the liberty of answering. As calm and tranquil as she could ever have been, she told me that the Ferihegy airport was closed and that all flights leaving out of Budapest were cancelled because of the snowstorm that swept through Europe. The soft and passive tone in her voice only helped to evoke a terror and horrible panic inside of me.
“What happened?” David asked
“The airport is closed,” I blankly replied
I handed him the phone and he carried on the conversation with Jodie. I rose from the bed and went to the door of terrace; it was true, the snow had come down. The outlined shapes of the white buildings was the proof that the snow had a will and a life of it’s own. It was almost as if the snow was intentionally forcing everyone to be still and recognize its power. With my mind out there somewhere, I searched for a good way to handle this.
“Ty,” David interrupted my thoughts.
I turned back to him and we just sort of stared at each other; he looked as confused as I was.
“What are you thinking?” He said.
“I’m thinking about how the hell I’ll get back to Paris and what if I don’t get back in time for my flight to New York on Wednesday?” I exploded at him; I definitely wasn’t reacting in a good way. I could feel the anxiety working its way up my body with one muscle after the other becoming tighter, my breath shortening and the baggy sweatpants I wore seeming to cling to my skin. There really was nothing I could do; if there were ever a good time to go crazy, it probably would have been right then.
“What? This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” He retorted.
I didn’t answer his question, which really didn’t seem like a question at all but more of an affirmation. I stared blankly out the window thinking about what he was saying, then as if all of a sudden I could feel my tension began to calm because deep inside of me, I knew he was right. As my stress was leveling, I could tell that his was on the rise. I don’t know if it was what I said, the negative attitude I had or both, but he became nervous and panicky in a way that I had never seen before.
“So last night meant nothing to you then?” he said.
“David, what about my ticket? Nothing is happening the way it was supposed to,” I stuttered my words.
“There is no ‘supposed to’, that is the point! Don’t you get it, everything happens the way you make it to. This storm, you being stuck here it all means something. You wanted this, you wanted a way to be in Budapest longer, and now it has happened. What is your problem?” David screamed as he stood in the middle of the room staring directly into my eyes. My emotions were completely mixed at that point. As pissed off as I wanted to be at him for talking to me in that commanding tone, I found myself trying to hide the smile that was creeping its way up, I didn’t want it to find its way onto my face. My hope was that David’s temper was because he too was also grateful for this accident.
David turned his glanced away from me then stared out the window onto the white covered streets and buildings, it was as if he were also searching for something out there. Me, trying to both calm him and amend the situation, I said, “Ok, ok! So what do we do now?” David didn’t respond, he only continued to gaze out into snow.
Finally, he said, “We go back to sleep now and then later we call the airline.”
Sterling Hudson
