I like sitting in the park. I used to play a game where I’d try to figure out people’s stories from the few words I caught from their conversations as they walked by. Where did they come from? What do they do? Are they married? Secret lovers? These days, people just don’t interest me anymore. They’re not exciting enough to make up stories about – even their reality is too dull.
But recently, one overheard fragment stirred something – a memory buried for over a decade, along with the girl tied to it. A man walked past me, talking into his phone in a voice as if the whole world was eagerly listening to his wisdom:
“Nobody is happy. Nobody! Nowhere!”
It sounded familiar. Not just the thought, but the feeling that came with it. It was like a song lyric. Because that’s what it was.
The man had long disappeared, but the song kept playing in my head for a long time, as if someone had turned on the old cassette player that had been gathering dust in the depths of my consciousness for decades. One verse after another resurfaced, pulling me back twenty years to the smoke-filled, dimly lit upstairs of an old café. I was no longer sitting in the park, but watching Zselenszky with just a guitar in his hands, singing this same song.
Even the oil washes some filth from me.
You died in me, but I died too.
I sway between God and you, like a broken swing,
I'm tired of it all, but this is how it should be!
Total emotional emptiness hit me – the end of a relationship, mutual ruin. Two people slowly “dying out of each other.” The struggle between two poles and surrender, resignation. I think this always happened to me. I never knew how to free myself from pain, only how to get used to it. And when I sometimes remember my old mistakes, I feel it again…
In Heaven there's no place for me yet,
Because such small qualifications aren't enough!
Though the boss has been a good friend of mine for long,
I'm too short and the sky is far away!
Heaven – as a transcendent goal – becomes a bureaucratic, diploma-bound, exclusionary institution. It’s both blasphemously playful and absurdly personal. God is an unreachable “boss.” The “I’m too short” physically transforms spiritual distance: humans don’t grow tall enough for salvation. I’m not a believer; I don’t think God controls our lives. But I believe there’s something that moves this system. So much has happened in the past few thousand years that through understanding our world, we’ve gradually reduced the number of our gods. But many people still need that one, because we don’t know where we came from, why we’re here, and where we’re going. One thing is certain: we’re not going to the boss.
I love music. I love instruments, how they sound at exactly the right moment with exactly the right force, coming together to form a whole. How a guitar or drum beat gives meaning to a sentence. Song lyrics are puzzles to me. But you don’t always have to solve them – sometimes it’s enough just to get lost in them.
By the time my thoughts had reached this point, the scene shifted – and there she was: the bartender. It was a strange encounter – strange in every way. Another bartender – my old acquaintance’s girlfriend – talked about her a lot – nothing good – and I became curious, because people are always curious about what others say to “stay far away from.” So one spring afternoon, I went to have a coffee there and see for myself. I sat down, ordered, and she served me without even glancing at me. She was just an average bartender doing her job without particularly caring what I thought of her.
The next day, we went back with a few friends because I liked the atmosphere of the place. I called out to my acquaintance at the bar: “I checked out the girl yesterday, but she’s nothing special.” A few minutes later, the other girl stepped out from beside the sink and quietly, without any emotion, with complete naturalness, just said: “Well, yes! I’m nothing special…”
What can you say at a moment like that? I introduced myself. She stood there in front of me, and in that moment, everything changed, which naturally meant that everything became much more complicated than it should have been. Late,r we had good conversations, and then I only went there because of her. What was there between us? I could never say. It was a relationship, not love, not friendship, something else. As if we both knew it was just a temporary encounter, but that’s exactly what made it valuable. She was like Zselenszky’s songs: complex, unsolvable, and attractive precisely because you couldn’t understand her.
Then we moved in together.
And that’s exactly what made us drift apart. As if intimacy had dissolved the very tension that had sustained the strange, unspoken pull between us. Moving in together was what it took for us to understand: there are people who can only be loved from a distance.
And yes, had I foreseen how it would all unfold, maybe I’d have followed the song’s advice:
Good faith
Ends with me, especially I'm careful with those
I might grow very fond of
Excuse me, I'm getting off, have a good time!
I'll suffer anyway, so I don't care
Better for you than from you
These few lines contain everything. The fragility of relationships, the fear of intimacy, the tension between love and self-protection. When a person simultaneously craves closeness and rejects it, because they know exactly how destructive real attachment can be.