Lost in darkness, lost in Budapest

Lost in Darkness, Lost in Budapest

At first, I thought I knew the city.

The yellow trams rattled across the bridges. The Danube divided Buda and Pest like a scar that had long since healed. Tourists wandered drunkenly through the ruin bars. Every street had a name. Every building had an address.

That was before the darkness.

It arrived without drama. No blackout. No storm.

One evening, walking home through the Fifth District, I noticed that the street behind me was missing.

Not dark.

Missing.

Where there should have been a row of apartment houses, there was only a wall of blackness. Not the absence of light, but the absence of reality itself. My phone showed the street on the map. Cars drove into the darkness and never emerged.

Nobody else seemed concerned.

The next day, another street was gone.

Then a square.

Then an entire block near Kálvin tér.

The city continued functioning as if nothing had happened. The trams adjusted their routes. GPS recalculated. Cafés remained open beside impossible voids.

Whenever I asked people about the missing places, they stared at me with mild confusion.

"What street?"

"It was always like this."

I stopped sleeping.

Budapest was shrinking.

Each morning I woke to find fewer roads leading home.

One night, unable to bear it anymore, I followed the darkness.

It waited at the end of a narrow alley in the Eighth District.

No sound came from beyond it.

No smell.

No temperature.

Just an absolute black curtain stretched across the world.

I reached out.

The darkness felt warm.

Like skin.

Then it moved.

Thousands of faces emerged from within it. Pale human faces suspended in the void, eyes wide open, mouths frozen in silent screams.

Some wore modern clothes.

Others looked decades old.

One of them was me.

Not a twin.

Not a lookalike.

Me.

His eyes followed mine.

His lips began to move.

Slowly.

Painfully.

As if speaking through deep water.

"Don't let it remember you."

The darkness lunged forward.

I ran.

Through empty streets.

Past buildings whose windows now contained only black interiors.

Past trams carrying motionless passengers who never blinked.

Past the Parliament, whose illuminated facade flickered like a dying television.

When I finally reached my apartment, the door opened onto a room I had never seen before.

Dust covered unfamiliar furniture.

Family photographs lined the walls.

Every picture contained me.

Yet I remembered none of them.

The names on the back of the photos belonged to people I had never met.

A wife.

A daughter.

A life.

Outside, Budapest continued dissolving.

The next morning, Margaret Island was gone.

Then the Chain Bridge.

Then the Danube itself.

The city was becoming a maze of disconnected fragments floating in an endless sea of darkness.

And the people?

They were disappearing too.

Not dying.

Being forgotten.

First their names vanished from records.

Then their faces from photographs.

Then the memories of everyone who had ever known them.

I watched it happen to a colleague.

One day he didn't come to work.

The next day nobody remembered he had existed.

Except me.

Because the darkness had not forgotten me yet.

Now I understand what Budapest really is.

The city is not being consumed by the darkness.

The city is the darkness.

The streets, the bridges, the cafés, the tourists, the trams—those are temporary shapes it creates to lure new memories inside.

A feeding mechanism.

A camouflage.

A dream.

And every night, more of the dream disappears.

I am writing this from a tram that has been travelling for six hours.

The route number changes every few minutes.

The passengers have no faces anymore.

Outside the windows, there are no buildings.

No river.

No sky.

Only blackness.

The tram keeps moving anyway.

A moment ago, my phone informed me that I am still in Budapest.

The terrifying thing is that I believe it.

Because I can no longer remember any place outside the city.

And if you are reading this, and you still remember Budapest—

Look behind you.

Count the streets.

Make sure they are all still there.

Because once the city remembers your name, it never lets you leave.