Last September, I took a 36-hour trip to Paris.
I walked out of my apartment around 3:20 a.m. on Saturday, still groggy from my early wakeup call, but with enough coffee and eggs in my system to convince myself that it was properly morning. It felt like it should have been 7 a.m., except for the pitch black skies outside my bedroom window. When I walked out of the front door, I expected to see Budapest entirely asleep.
It wasn’t. The street lights were on, as were the lights from bars on my street. It was loud. Shouts of “bazd meg!” barked from the rock-n-roll bar across the street. Crowds still filled out the street. It was late though, so the people were at their drunkest, some sitting on the curb with a half-drunk beer in one hand and a half-eaten kebab in the other.
I made it to the airport well before my 6 a.m flight. I had enough time to eat a croissant and drink a cappuccino, and call my parents and tell them, “Guess where I’m going?” Enough time to walk to my gate at a leisurely pace, a rare occurrence in airports.
I watched the sunrise from the airport that morning, the sky slowly getting brighter and brighter. I felt awake. Wired. Optimistic, as if only good things were on the horizon.
***
This isn’t a story about Paris. I’ll save that for another day. This is a story about sunrises.
I’ve always loved movies with depictions of young and beautiful people staying awake all night, enjoying their lives until the sun rose. There’s the classic film, of course: 1995’s Before Sunrise. A young man and woman played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet each other on a train going to Vienna. They spend the entire night falling in love, or in lust, into infatuation. And after the sun rises, they part ways.
Another one of my favorites, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, isn’t a love story, but it’s beautiful. It feels like a moving painting. Marie Antoinette is also an oddly modern movie, with a brief shot of Converse high-tops hidden within a crowd of colorful satin high heels and a contemporary soundtrack that solidified my love of The Strokes.
In the film, Marie Antoinette hosts an extravagant eighteenth birthday party. Performers from the Far East march into Versailles while spinning discs, guests play roulette, the Duchess of Polignac snorts an unidentified powder and then asks her companion in the most 21st-century way, “I love your hair! What’s going on there?”
At the end of the night, the queen and her friends run, twirl, and trip through the grounds of Versailles. They sit by a pond, pop open a bottle of champagne, and watch the sunrise. New Order’s song Ceremony fades into the sound of chirping birds.
When I was 15, this scene entranced me. Surely that’s what my twenties would be like, I thought. Having absurd parties with my friends that last until the morning hours. Happiness, I felt convinced, would be watching the sunrise. Listening to New Order still fills me with longing, that very specific feeling of hope that my life would be full, not lonely.
Now that I’m in my late twenties, I can say with confidence that I have mastered the art of absurd parties. My friends and I have hosted them many times. I could tell you about the Third of July party (yes, Third) in Washington, D.C., when I invited three different men I had been very casually seeing just to see if they’d fight over me (they didn’t). Or I could tell you about the Halloween party in Missouri, when strangers off the street turned a friendly house party into a rager. But I won’t tell those stories. More tales for other days.
Watching sunrises, though, didn’t turn out to be as fruitful in my early and mid-twenties as I expected. I’ve done it a few times, once sneaking into a 24/7 prayer room in Kansas City at the crack of dawn. But really, my quota for watching sunrises has turned out to be far fewer than my teen daydreams.
***
This year, I’ve rediscovered the joy in the sunrise.
Let’s go back a few weeks. We’re at A38 Hajó, a club boat on the Danube in Budapest. It’s Friday night.
It’s past midnight when we (P, L, and me) arrive at the boat. It feels like I’m 20 years old and back in England, headed out to a club called Life and ready for an overpriced Long Island Iced Tea (which I now cannot look at without my stomach churching). I speak to the cab driver in Hungarian. He points out my accent. I’m frustrated with myself that I have an accent. He drops us off, annoyed at me for using a card instead of cash. There’s a line in front of the boat. We groan.
When we walk through the doors, it doesn’t take long for the frustration with the cab driver and long line to disappear, and we get low. More specifically, “get low,” like Lil’ Jon told us too. The theme of this party: ’90s and 2000s music. And P, L, and me — we love this music. Even better than that, the three of us love dancing.
Britney Spears, Eminem, Spice Girls, Ricky Martin, Shania Twain. The DJ even plays Cotton-Eye Joe. I show off the square dancing skills I learned at Mountain Grove Elementary School, and then I hook my arm into my friends and swing my pard’ners round and round as if I’m right back in the Ozarks.
Bathroom break, we look at our phones. It’s 2:30! Well, we can stay a little longer. We’re having far too much fun to stop now. L goes to the deck of the ship to smoke. I reapply my lipstick. P dares me to hit on a guy standing next to the bar, so I do. My attempt is unsuccessful, almost definitely because he can’t hear a word I’m saying. Regardless, I flatter myself by thinking, “I must be too intimidating.”
3:30 a.m. How did this happen? Somehow, we keep going. We take selfies at the bar. The music is getting a little bit unfamiliar (I guess only so many ’90s and ’00s hits exist), but that doesn’t matter. We keep dancing.
4:30. We’re beat. Perhaps this is when we say goodbye to A38 Hajó. We step outside. The sky is already becoming brighter. P insists that she doesn’t live too far away, that she can walk home. L and I live on the Pest side, so we cross Petőfi Bridge in search for cabs. We are still giggling and giddy. The sky gets lighter and lighter. We say goodbye.
These are the best sunrises — the unplanned ones, the ones that you never expect to see, but you’re far too caught up in having fun to pay attention to the moments ticking by. You feel happy simply to be alive.
***
Early morning hours play tricks on us. After my 2:30 a.m. wakeup call before I took off for Paris, I felt like the world should be asleep, but instead the world was very much still awake. It was disorienting, as if I had swallowed a strong pill that had been prescribed to someone else.
Other times you walk out of a boat after dancing for hours, and you see the light hours from the bridge. Also disorienting, but in a different way. You’re grateful for the good people in this world, the privilege of spontaneity, the pure joy of dancing as idiotically as you’d like.
And some sunrises — the sunrises with a particular sort of magic — I like to keep to myself.
kasia redux 