bittersweet

(Photo from Au pays des homes integres)

For some reason, this afternoon and evening my mind is lingering on a humid, crowded, underground dance floor in Budapest, Hungary, underneath the old space of a popular outdoor bar, in May of 2005. But of course you know the reason, because you were there, dancing, sparkling at me, drawing your exuberance all around me like an embrace that foretold the other kind. That is one snapshot of us.


And here is another. Morning. Coffee from your French press, two cups, little spoons, sugar. Two of us sitting at a right angle on the L of your black leather sectional couch, our images reflected in the mirrored panels of the closet door. The decor not to your tastes, but the now-familiar (then unfamiliar) mismatch of it endearing somehow, anyway, in its very reminder of our shared liminality as visitors, as foreigners, and the ironic lens through which we both saw this world. The midsummer yellow light and breeze filtering in from the heavy double windows soaring above the market in the square.

And a lapse in words, filled in instead with music, of a kind I had never heard. (Mustafa Kandirali, was it? I always forget the name, but never the sensation, never the sound.) Clarinet, at once mournful and ecstatic, reaching higher, and yet deeper, finding secret untouched places, lifting me up outside of myself, to sweep me out on wings, quick, through the windows, over the roof of the csarnok, to the Duna, and rushing back, to realize with a dizzy glance at you that I am falling in love, against all sense and reason. Too soon even to say the words, they expanded, percolated upwards, and settled in my chest. Silent on my lips, though, they were transparent in my eyes, which I tried to settle anywhere but in yours.

To this day, a taksim unfettered by accompaniment is almost too, too naked, too burning, too frighteningly alive, to hear in mixed company, for it still seems like our secret, locked in that moment on that day in your flat, that space to which we will never return.(I wish now I'd captured our view from the windows, to remind me, to remind me. . .)

(Photo from Budapest Daily Photo)

Such a sweet tender sadness and joy, to miss you.