The Budapest Garden

"If I hadn't put my heart out there despite every reasonable objection, I would never have found that garden."

The Budapest Garden

He stood me up again in Budapest.

I won't get into the details because they don't really matter and also because he reads these occasionally and I'd like to keep him humble. What matters is I was alone in Budapest with a free afternoon I hadn't planned for.

The normal thing to do would have been to go back to the apartment and sulk or go on a rant in a fit of rage. I instead went for a walk.

I didn't have a destination nor a good sense of direction as my friends can tell you. I just moved through the streets in the way you do when you're trying to metabolize something or maybe run away from it. The act of putting one foot in front of the other until the feeling changes. 

Budapest does something to you when you're in that state of mind. The buildings hold stories. The colours are muted and faded and then suddenly, if you're paying attention, something catches the light and takes your breath away.

I turned down a lane I had never been down before and found a garden.

Not a public park. A real garden, tucked between the buildings, the kind of place that has no reason to be where it is. A beauty that should never be hidden away. I sat down on a low wall and took out my pocket sketchbook and painted it in watercolour with the tiniest paint brush I have ever owned. It took maybe twenty minutes. My hands knew what to do even when the rest of me was still catching up.

When I finished I sat with it for a while. I then went for a coffee and after a beautiful meal, alone, at a table in the sun. Some people I knew would eventually come across me and we made a night of it.

That garden became a painting. The painting is called The Garden and it's about the eternal argument between the part of you that knows better and the part that goes anyway. The figure in it holds his heart and his brain outside his body because that conflict doesn't stay internal, you carry it out visibly whether you want to or not.

If I had gone back to the apartment to pout or rage, I would never have found it.

That's the whole painting. That's the whole story.

The Garden is available in the shop.

Jackie