I Gave My Guides Permission to Ruin My Day

It started with a confession, which is usually how the embarrassing things start.

A few days before the trip I told a close friend that I couldn't remember the last time I had felt joy. Not sadness. Nothing so dramatic or so useful as sadness. Just the slow evaporation of delight, the sense that somewhere in the last five or six years I had traded lightness for discipline and forgotten to check whether it was a fair swap. I had become more serious, more precise, more impressively competent. I had also become the kind of person who says "impressively competent" about herself and means it as a complaint.

On the way to the airport I spoke to my guides. I don't lead with that at parties.

I didn't ask them for answers, which is what people usually want from anything they can't see. I asked for their company. Interfere with the day however you like, I told them. Every delay, every stranger, every wrong turn is yours. And then, because I meant it and because saying a thing once has never felt like enough to me, I asked for joy. Surprise me. Remind me what it feels like. I had no idea what I was expecting, which, as far as I can tell, is the entire point of asking.

The first one arrived on the bus to the plane.

A man in his seventies had clearly decided, some decades ago, that shyness was beneath him. He was dressed with a confidence I would never have risked myself, and within four minutes he had made himself host of the entire vehicle. Names, hometowns, unsolicited stories from a life that had evidently been eventful. Nobody had asked. Nobody seemed to mind. I sat there thinking, with something close to envy, that here was a person who moved through the world without first submitting a request for permission.

I smiled at him. Then I filed it away and forgot about it, because Budapest was waiting and I, God help me, had a plan.

I always have a plan, and I always have complete faith in it, which tells you everything about how often the plan and the day are on speaking terms. A bookshop first. A walk along the water. Dinner somewhere loud and warm and generous, the opposite of those restaurants where the food arrives in tweezers and the concept is more filling than the meal.

The afternoon read my itinerary, I think, and quietly decided against it.

The bookshop delivered before it betrayed me. I found the Healing Waters oracle deck and picked it up without interrogating why, the way you occasionally pick up a person. While I was paying, the rain began. Nothing alarming. The sort you assume will pass before you reach the door.

It did not pass. It committed.

By the time the shop was closing it had arrived in full, the kind of rain that removes, gently but firmly, any possibility of leaving a building with dignity. I stood under the entrance next door, ordering taxis I already knew would never come, watching the little cars on the screen turn around and drive into other people's evenings.

And then I thought: fine. If I'm going to stand here, the standing may as well be mine.

So I opened the deck. Inside was a small card explaining how to wake it up, and one suggestion was to connect the cards with living water. I looked up. There was, at that moment, an unreasonable quantity of living water falling on Budapest. It seemed almost rude to refuse the invitation. Feeling roughly as absurd as I sound now, I set the intention to activate the thing through the rain.

A taxi pulled in across the street to drop someone off. I grabbed my bags, hurried toward it, and missed it entirely.

I waited for the irritation. It didn't come. What came instead was a thought so calm it startled me.

That's fine. I'll walk. Worst case I get soaked, my hair surrenders, my clothes are ruined, and I survive all three like the resilient adult I keep telling everyone I am.

So I set off under the trees, actually intending to enjoy it, which unsettled me far more than the weather had.

Then the bag gave way.

The paper had drunk its fill, and without warning or apology the bottom simply opened and offered everything I owned to the pavement. The books. The purchases. The brand new, freshly consecrated oracle deck. All of it, face down in wet leaves and dirt and the greasy shine of the road.

I knelt to collect the cards one by one, and the only word in my head, on a loop, was activate. Activate. Activate. No anger. If anything I wanted to laugh, in the specific way you laugh when the situation has removed every other option. The deck had asked to be married to living water. The deck was getting the full ceremony, including the part where the bride ends up in the gutter.

I gathered it all, held the sodden books against my chest, and kept walking. A taxi eventually passed that was empty, and stopped, and was, at last, mine.

Back at the hotel the room slowly disappeared under cards.

I laid every one out to dry until the place looked less like a hotel room and more like the scene of a private game played during a flood. Then, because apparently I hadn't put the deck through enough, I felt drawn to pull a card. It was still damp. I did it anyway.

The Pink Dolphin.

Its message was joy. Not resilience. Not discipline. Not one of the serious, load-bearing virtues I had spent years quietly perfecting. Joy. The precise thing I had asked for that morning, before the rain, before the bag, before any of it.

I don't know what to do with a day like that, and I've decided I'm allowed not to. The taxi was probably just a taxi. The rain was certainly just rain. The man on the bus was, in all likelihood, simply someone who liked people more than the rest of us dare to. Each part behaves perfectly well on its own. It's only when you line them up that they start to resemble a reply to something you said out loud and then half forgot you had said.

What stays with me isn't proof. There wasn't any.

It's that at some point between the broken bag and the dolphin, I realised I was laughing. Out loud. Alone, on a Budapest street, soaked to the bone, clutching a stack of ruined books to my chest as though they were treasure. That was the whole answer, arriving without an appointment. I had spent years assuming joy was something I'd have to rebuild slowly and seriously, the way I rebuild everything I'm good at. It turned out to be far less disciplined than that. It had simply been waiting for a day chaotic enough to catch me off guard. It found one, and so, at last, did I.