AKA I'm Cold

Sometimes the wind blows outside like it's trying to break in. Once I stared outside and imagined a woman scratching at the glass, shrieking and howling like a ghoul. It reminds me of Ireland, especially when it's also raining.

Already this place with its moody skies and sullen clouds feels suspiciously like home. I have come to know the cold winds that blow like spurned women, and the emerald grass that grows stubbornly despite the snow. The sun comes out from time to time, and suddenly sweaters are pushed up past the elbows. People wear shorts in 50 degrees, which is so strange to me.

Those are the good days. Sometimes weeks on gray weeks go by and I feel that a part of me withers as it shivers. The cold and snow really aren't that bad, although they tell me that this Winter has been uncharacteristically mild (woe is me), but snows have a way of making me forget how to speak. It blankets the persistent grass, and it blankets my mind. Curiously, softly, languidly.

I do like bursting through doors and unwinding my scarf, unbuttoning my coat, shrugging it off. I like to bring the clean scent of cold in with me, letting it roll off me in waves, smelling it cling to my hair and my hands. Days like these, I can feel my face growing longer, my skin shrinking from exposure.

I do not welcome this. And yet it touches me. This incessant gray moves me strangely, and not like the glass-shard gray of Irish seas. I go numb here, I think.

It is good I am here. But someday I will be always beneath sun and salt.

Budapest

I think little girls aspire to be princesses because they have an idea of power manifested as beauty, grace as elegance. To be a princess is to be revered. Exalted. Worshipped in the heaviest, earthiest sense of the word. Worshipped in a manner that defies the most sanctimonious braying of clerical authority. Worshipped for belonging to not only the cult of woman, but the race of deity. Somehow, all this is made vastly clear to a girl, a knowledge lost as the world's reality is impressed upon her more and more each day.

I had almost forgotten myself. I have not been a little girl for a long time. Like two weeks, at least.

I heard, after we descended the bus and began searching vainly for a taxi, that Budapest is most beautiful in the Summer. Imagine the city beneath azure skies, a sensual sun glinting off jewel waves, a warm breeze sighing in verdant leaves. 

It was December. We had come from Prague. Prague, that lovely city who wears a wintry morning like a lady wears a silk scarf. But Budapest is the morning, declining cover. Strange, how demure and yet brazen with nakedness. That is Budapest.

I was remembering thrones made of air and diadems of moonstones on the ruined walls of an old Hungarian castle. The view was a UNESCO world heritage site, which is silly somehow. But it keeps skyscrapers from popping up and ruining the skyline. 

There, the Danube flows beneath the Chain Bridge. There, the old quarter of Buda, with its winding boulevards and ancient winds. There, the Parliament building, with its flying buttresses. There, where we stayed in a beautiful Airbnb near the city center.

And I felt royal. The day was cold, and the scarf wound around my throat suddenly became chased with silver threads, pinned in place by mother-of-pearl clusters the size of my pinky fingernail. The cheap coffee in my hands became the richest, smoothest blend. It was all very romantic, I assure you.

Ah, Buda Castle. I dreamt about it last night, actually. And the silvery grayness of the sky, the cover of clouds, offsetting the sea of red rushing up that big hill with the statue of a lady holding a leaf/branch/thing like Rafiki holds up baby Simba that is supposed to remind people of their freedom. It is a funny story that Norbert told us (our tour guide, who introduced himself as Norbert the Hungarian, like the Hungarian Horntail named Norbert in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). It didn't feature in my dreams, because Soviets rather ruin the illusion of royalty. 

btw, that's a smudge, not a UFO

But for your information, that statue was erected by Soviets in 1945, to celebrate the Hungarian people's liberation from the Nazis and their gratitude to their Communist liberators. Then, after the fall of Communism in 1989, the city wanted to tear down the very kitsch reminder of Soviet influence, only the statue was so darn big that it would have cost an enormous sum to tear down. So, Norbert said, tapping his nose knowingly, the city came up with an ingenious plan to circumvent such obstacles: they covered the whole thing up with a big tarp, waited three days, and unveiled it as a new statue.

I think that is accurate. I scribbled some notes down in the margins of my map of the city. 

I would like to return to Budapest, and see it when the weather is warm, but there is something regal about it when the sky looks like snow and the Christmas markets sell hot, spiced wine. And because I first began listening to him while writing a paper on the imposition of religiosity on ethnic conflict, James Bay to me is Budapest. When I hear "Hold Back the River" I think of the red wine our hosts left us, and the bluey glow of this laptop, and the sound of its keyboard. I remember wet hair spilling on my shoulders, the fatigue of my eyes, the pages of National Geographic that papered the walls. 

Budapest is a city that by day reminds you of days past, and by night, makes you feel old, and grand, and wise. It is a city of dreams without substance, sparkling like diamonds. Perhaps I will go back when I am older and wiser and it will not be so. That is likely, for like a mirror, it will show you yourself.

Go to Budapest. Take the waters in the Turkish baths leftover from days of Ottomania. The food is cheap and very good.

Thinking about, without actually, reading

Today the weather was fine. Never in my life would I have thought I'd ever think 59 degrees Fahrenheit "warm", but there you have. Compared to -15 it's beautiful.

 I have been thinking about reading recently. I don't have a lot of time, and I waste what time I have. Today, though, we spoke a little about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a throwback to freshman year of high school for most of us. It made me nostalgic, and now I am sitting in the quad because the weather is fine and because I want to be quiet and think about reading.

I am thinking about Winter nights when the sun went down sooner. Naturally, it didn't actually, but that's how I like thinking about it. I am thinking of the frost on my mother's car when she came in to pick me up from school. She used to smell like mint, if it was near Christmas time, because her old company used to hang garlands that smelled inexplicably of it. Some bizarre, likely carcinogenic air freshening agent, no doubt.

I am remembering how I used to be sprawled on my stomach, hanging upside down from chairs, or curled on my side, reading. I always pretended not to see her.

I am remembering the warm light in our old house, the way it was absorbed by the pages of a book. It was so wonderful to read about other people eating when I was skinny and hungry, and then go down and eat. I used to like reading at the table, something my parents never tolerated.

I am remembering also the shed in the garden, where I liked to repair to, with a glass of milk and a bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. I read Pollyanna there, and Helen Keller's autobiography. I also read some book about a boy named Jeb, and his friend, Onion John. I can't remember what it's called.

It smelled so musty in there. It was always too warm, and I don't know why I liked hiding in there so much. Maybe it was that no one ever thought to look for me there.

When we spoke of To Kill a Mockingbird, I also thought of Pan, and Asta Solilja, and Per Petterson. I should like someday to go to Norway.

It is already 5, and the light has not gone. It was fine today.