The Only Advice

I was 21, alone in Budapest, dying.

Or so it seemed. I had arrived in the early afternoon, hopped right off the train from Vienna into a seatbelt-less van with a couple of other backpacker kids and drove to a hostel where I’d be staying for next week. I got in the van because I had no other plans. I didn’t even have a map of Budapest, let alone a place to stay. I knew no one in the city. No one knew where I was. It was my fourth week on the road, and I was already getting a little crazed, stressed, lonely, unhinged.

I locked up my backpack in the bunk-bedded dorm and threw my messenger bag over my shoulder to go explore the town. I had to guide me the little tourist pamphlet-map the men from the van had given me. I had a vague notion that I would walk from the hostel to the Danube, which seemed to me not too far away, and along the way get something to eat and drink, because since a quick pastry and coffee that morning at the Vienna train station I hadn’t had anything to eat and my stomach and head weren’t feeling quite right.

It was a hot day at the end of August. The sun was in full blaze through the smoggy air. The past weeks had seen unprecedented rains in Eastern Europe, massive flooding, and everything still felt musty, sticky, heavy. I walked down a wide boulevard, away from my hostel, in the direction that I thought the river was in. I took detours down interesting-looking side streets, because that’s what I was in Europe for in the first place: to see things, to experience. I was on the lookout for a place where I could grab something to eat, something cheap, because I still had to stretch my little money several more weeks, and something vegetarian, which I was about to learn was near impossible in Eastern Europe at the time. Nothing looked quite right, so I kept walking.

It was getting hotter, and the heat was making my head hurt, making me a little dizzy. I couldn’t quite tell where I was. I had wandered off the edge of the map. My sense of direction, naturally pretty spot-on, was a little turned around. I headed toward where I knew the river must be, weaving in and out of residential streets, no signs matching my map. The river was there, all right, but I had walked so far from the main drag that I was now in an industrial port area. Cranes and barges and cargo containers. More smog. More heat. I was feeling very wrong.

My confusion and loneliness only added to this feeling. What was I even doing here, halfway around the world, by myself, wasting time, spending money? I was stupid to think that I could do this on my own, do this at all, go see the world when I should be responsibly working a job and starting my real life.

I stumbled across a small bakery. I ordered a coffee–I always learn how to order coffee in the language of any place I travel–and a piece of cake that looked chocolate but turned out to be spice, by pointing and smiling. I was the only person in the place. The lady brought me the coffee and cake. One sip, and one bite, and I knew I had to abandon the food and get back to the hostel as quickly as possible before I threw up and passed out.

I don’t remember exactly how I got back to the hostel. I seem to remember picking a direction and just walking until I got to a major street. I soon found a street with a tram on it that would take me back to my hostel. Of course, not wanting to spend the money on the tram, I just followed the tracks until I was back home again. I promptly got into bed, got out of bed to throw up, got back into bed again, and didn’t leave for about 48 hours.

I thrashed around in a fever, throwing up every hour or so for the first day even after there was nothing left. I tried to drink a little water and nibble on my cookies when I could, to not completely dehydrate or starve. I wondered if anyone around me was going to offer to help or at least complain, but they didn’t. Everyone just left me alone.

In my fever and pain and fear and loneliness, panicked. I decided I had to go home immediately. I would change my tickets and fly home from Budapest instead of traveling around for three more weeks and going back to Paris.

But before I did, I did something out of character: I reached out and asked for support. I emailed my mom and my little sister, Rose, and told them: I want to come home. It’s so awful here, and I’m so sad. What should I do?

My mom wrote back right away, and she was very Mom about it. Her daughter was halfway around the world, alone, sick, and scared. What else would she say? She told me to change my tickets and come home. She handed me the old hippie slogan, “If it’s not fun, why do it?”

Not long after that, Rose wrote me back. And she gave me the only advice in the world that’s worth anything. She told me: Don’t be an idiot. (Most of her advice started like that. We were constantly being idiots.) Suck it up. Stay. When are you ever going to get this chance again?

Rose was better at this than anyone I know–seizing the moment. That’s what you get when you were never supposed to live in the first place, when every year the doctors give you another year, are surprised that you haven’t stopped working yet. She knew better than anyone that this life is all too finite, and it’s the one and only shot we get. She took advantage of every opportunity. Sometimes it made me crazy, how demanding she could be, how selfish she seemed. But now that she’s gone, I’m glad for every single thing she got to have for herself.

She was right, of course. I stayed. And I got better, and the rest of my stay in Budapest was glorious and has already been told. The trip changed my life in all of the cliche ways that don’t bear recounting. What mattered was that I was there and experienced it, that moments are there to be seized or to be lost, and no moment is promised to anyone except the one that you’re in right now.

I have a terrible memory, and there are probably a lot of wonderful things that I’ve forgotten about my sister. But I seem to remember specific things right when I need them. Today she’s been gone six months, and this was the thing I remembered on my walk this morning. It is the best and only advice from her to me, and to her husband, and to my parents, and to everybody who loved her. Even as we’re wading through all of this awful muck of grief, we need to remember not to be idiots and to live our lives, because we won’t ever get this chance again.