The Book He Left: A Stranger, Budapest, and Blue Trees

The second time I went to Budapest I was shattered.

I had gone only to see Dave. I saw him once, for a few hours, and then he was gone the way he always is, somewhere he needed to be that wasn't where I was. I won't pretend that didn't hurt because it did and I was terrible at hiding it that trip.

I found a coffee shop with a back garden. One of those quiet Budapest places that don't announce themselves, you just find them when you need them. I sat in the back with my sketchbook and my coffee and I cried. Not the dignified kind. The full ugly kind that happens when you've been holding something too long and your body decides it's done waiting for a better moment.

A man was sitting across the garden. He watched me for a moment, then left, then came back and put a book on the table in front of me and a slice of lemon cake.

Read it, he said. It won't cure you but tomorrow you'll feel better.

It was Captain Margaret by John Masefield. A seafaring novel from the early twentieth century, the ship named The Broken Heart, about a man who carries a love he cannot have across the sea in silence. One of the few English books in the place. He paid for my coffee and the book and the cake and then he left. No introduction. No waiting for thank you. Just gone.

I didn't notice until much later, thinking back on it, that he was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that belongs in a museum -- chiseled features, skin like fine marble, the kind of face that stops you in a doorway. At the time I couldn't have told you what he looked like. That's what a broken heart does -- it makes beauty invisible until you have enough space to look back in hindsight, or until something slaps you in the face. The man was hindsight. Blue Trees slapped me in the face.

Florentine statue

I went back to the hotel room and read the whole thing and fell asleep from the exhaustion of crying all day, the kind of sleep that comes when the body has finally had enough of feeling things and just shuts down.

I woke up early the next morning and wandered the way you do when Budapest has quietly put you back together overnight without asking permission. The light was doing something particular that morning, the kind of light that makes you stop walking and just look. I found the trees by the Danube and something in me went still and I painted Blue Trees.

He was right. I wasn't cured. But I felt better. I'm not one who hangs onto paintings but this one still sits in my private collection. It's not ready to go yet.

I still don't know his name. I never saw him again. I don't think you're supposed to.

Jackie