If you’re starting to read this, it either means you have way too much time on your hands, or you don’t yet know what this is. Don’t worry, in either case you won’t regret anything — at worst you’ll waste a few minutes of your life. You would have squandered them somewhere else anyway.
So here I am, past fifty, and I’ve decided I’m going to write. Because why not? Everyone’s doing it these days anyway. Teen influencers are penning life advice, politicians their memoirs, and (old) women their recipes. Some strange internal pressure compels me to write something… because I need to record that there once was a person who actually lived from time to time. He had stories that may have never even happened, but he told them often enough that no one dared argue with him anymore.
I honestly have no idea what exactly happened to me. But maybe that’s not such a big deal. Precise memories are overrated anyway. My life was never organised — more like a cheap, overstuffed suitcase that spills something out every time you open it. Something that always makes you pause and wonder.
Many years ago, I came across an article about why time seems to speed up as we get older. It wasn’t particularly well written, but it stuck with me. A summer used to feel like a lifetime — now an entire year passes, and all that’s left are the Christmas decorations. The article referenced a French philosopher named Paul Janet, who argued that our perception of time isn’t linear but logarithmic. In other words: the older we get, the smaller each new year feels in the context of our whole life. For a one-year-old, a year is 100%. For a ten-year-old, just 10%. At fifty? A measly two percent. And that’s exactly how our brains perceive it. Reality doesn’t change — only our internal map becomes warped. And by the time we notice it… it’s already too late.
For days, I couldn’t get that article out of my head. One thought kept growing louder — and darker: life is like a car rolling downhill. At first, it moves slowly — and you can still see everything. The trees, the people, the landscape beyond the window. You hear the birds, your own voice, even someone nearby sighing. Everything is sharp, everything has weight. But then we start accelerating. Unstoppably. We still see movement, but we can no longer tell what it is. A person? A tree? Colors smear into each other, shapes dissolve. And the sounds? We don’t really hear them anymore — the wind is too loud. The outside world fades, and without noticing, we start looking inward for meaning. Because out there, everything is already moving too fast.
I kept waiting for that moment to come — the moment the switch would flip. And when it finally did, I knew exactly what was happening. I wasn’t scared. Just quietly melancholic. Because from that point on, the end of the road — the plunge into nothingness — had come within reach. And the only thing that might make it bearable were my memories.
It happened in Kuala Lumpur. On one of those hot afternoons when even your thoughts start to sweat.
I don’t like the heat, yet I spent nearly a decade living in the tropics. Interestingly, tropical heat is more predictable than the European kind — around thirty-something degrees during the day, and just a degree or two cooler at night. In all those years, there was only one morning when it dropped to 24 degrees, and one of my Indonesian colleagues remarked, “So cold today!”
So, Kuala Lumpur. Afternoon. 33 degrees. 100% humidity. I was standing at a small shop’s register, the clerk didn’t even look at me, just tossed the change over. In Malaysia, shop clerks often aren’t the friendliest people. I still remember one of my first culture shocks when I moved there: I greeted someone with a cheerful “Good morning!”, and got a grunt and an “OK” in return.
Hmm… This just reminded me of another story. This always happens to me — one memory always brings six others with it. So there was a big Aeon-BIG nearby. One of the cashiers — a Muslim girl around twenty — always lit up when she saw me. She’d smile, chatter, as if we were in the middle of some light Southeast Asian rom-com. Then one day I went shopping with my wife and son. The girl looked at me, then at my wife. “Your wife?” she asked. I nodded and never saw her smile again.
But let’s get back to the original story, otherwise we’ll never reach the end. We were at the point where I stepped out the door (Actually, it didn’t even have a door. Many small shops over there don’t have doors. Why would they? They never close, and it’s always warm…), and at that moment, a scent hit me. The scent of an old perfume. I was still a teenager in the eighties, and back then, there wasn’t much selection, so naturally, I still remembered a special and expensive perfume even decades later. I stood there on the sidewalk, motorcycles and people around me, and I must have looked like someone having a stroke, because memories flooded over me all at once.
A red coat. A house party. A party that we actually organised because of another girl. A classic pickup party. I invited the girl, who, of course, didn’t show up. I can see everything before me. How I was sitting in the kitchen while the others shouted from the living room, eyes glued to the TV. A Mike Tyson fight. No idea who the poor guy was on the other side — probably someone who had a bad day, but I also feel some uncertainty. Professional boxing on Hungarian TV? In 1988? Or maybe ’89? I don’t remember.
But I do remember when the red coat appeared in the doorway. She wasn’t a beauty, but she was attractive and interesting. The kind of girl compared to whom I could have been at most background colour in her beach vacation photo. And yet we talked for hours. I have no idea about what. We walked in the night. In the en,d I deployed one of my most reliable tricks: I pretended I was still a virgin. This is actually a scientifically founded pickup trick: innocence, vulnerability, and zero threat. Something like a stray kitten in a guy’s hands on a Tinder profile pic.
But my thoughts didn’t stop. I was sitting in a noisy, cigarette-smoke-filled nightclub with a girl. A different one. Suddenly, one of my friends walked up to me and loudly asked her: “Did he already tell you that he’s still a virgin too?” I no longer see the reaction, because a new image emerges, again the girl in the red coat. We’re in her room. I see that immeasurable wealth she lived in. Which, interestingly, really bothered me. And this bad feeling snapped me back to reality.
I started heading home, and the whole way, I tried to remember the girl’s name. But it just wouldn’t come. I still don’t know it. What I do remember is completely useless: for instance, that she adored Károly Nemcsák. Her name, though? Gone.
I’ve been watching myself ever since. Often when I’m telling a story, somewhere halfway through, I get confused and feel inside that it didn’t happen this way, it couldn’t have happened this way. Did it happen at a different time? Different place? Was it even the same person I’m talking about? But then… what’s the truth? Memories aren’t transcripts. We remember things the way we wish they’d happened. But these aren’t lies. This is an adjusted reality.
And this blog is going to be about exactly this. Not about what happened to me, but about how I remember it. How it should have happened. This way at least it will be worth thinking back on before the plunge.