The First Homeland I Ever Lost
As I spend these weeks in Hungary — trying to coax its language into my mouth one fragile suffix at a time — I keep circling back to a quiet, insistent thought. My connection to this country did not begin with its geography or its grammar. It began with Éva, a dark‑eyed Hungarian girl I met in kindergarten, who became my first best friend and, without ever announcing it, my first emotional homeland.
Countries rarely enter our lives through borders or flags or the ceremonious stamping of passports. They slip in through people — through the ones who shape our sense of safety and recognition. Éva was my first Hungary long before I learned my first Hungarian conjugation, long before I understood that languages can carry entire philosophies inside their syntax.
She understood me with an effortlessness that now feels almost mythic. My fears, my longing for freedom, my tendency to fold myself into shapes that caused the least trouble — she sensed all of it without explanations, without asking me to perform emotional clarity I did not yet possess. And more than understanding, she encouraged me to become the person I was trying to be, with a gentleness so precise that I now suspect she possessed an unusual emotional intelligence for a child.
She gave me books where girls were strong and victorious, as if she were quietly curating a feminist curriculum long before I knew what feminism was. And knowing how strict my mother was about sugar, she always asked her own mother to buy my favourite chocolate — Milka with strawberries. I never walked into her bedroom without finding that specific chocolate waiting on the table. She never said it was for me. Naturally, it was also her favourite.
But what touched me most was how she somehow knew which stories would speak directly to the softest parts of me — especially the ones about orphans. Long before I understood why those narratives mattered, she had already sensed it. A little princess, Harry Potter series, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre — she placed all these stories in my hands as if she were offering small lanterns, certain their light would feel familiar to me even before I knew how to name that familiarity.
Looking back, with the kind of clarity that arrives only years later — when childhood loosens its grip and memory becomes sharper than the moment itself — I have come to believe, though I cannot claim certainty, that she may have been in love with me. It is the only explanation that makes sense now: the intensity of her gestures, the closeness she sought, the games she invented that allowed her to touch me endlessly. In the swimming pool, she insisted we play the drowning game: I was drowning, she was saving me, again and again.
She held my hand every time we crossed the street, as if the asphalt itself were plotting against me, and she slept next to me during sleepovers, curled up with a protective tenderness that felt entirely natural. Children do not question intimacy; they inhabit it, unaware that growing up will one day complicate what once felt effortless.
In our early teen years, Éva understood something I had not yet grasped myself: I would never reciprocate her desire. And adolescence, with its small accidental cruelties, ensured that I didn’t understand her feelings at the time. So one afternoon, when she asked whether I had a crush, I answered with the cheerful obliviousness of someone convinced they were sharing harmless news. My answer turned out to be far worse than anything she had feared: I told her I was in love with a boy.
I wanted to tell her everything — how the boy and I had found our secret spot, a quiet corner where our parallel streets nearly touched; how we spent every Tuesday evening after our English lessons talking on that special corner until almost midnight; how we sometimes lost our breath trying not to let the conversation end, because the awkward silence would mean saying goodnight for another long week, until the next Tuesday; how this ritual had been unfolding for years under the disguise of friendship. I wanted to share my most important secret with her, to let her into the small, glowing world I was building with the only boy who mattered. But she didn’t let me. Before I could reveal anything more, she slipped into the bathroom, claiming a stomachache, and in that single gesture, she closed the door on our friendship, sending me out of her life forever.
Only much later did I understand that my innocent confession may have been the moment she realized that the emotional landscape she had imagined for us would never exist. And once that understanding settled in her, she removed herself from my life with a decisiveness that still startles me. For more than eight years, she had been the person who knew me best; the next day, she was gone without explanation.
And then, recently — decades after our last conversation, long after she quietly stepped out of my life — I learned that she had died suddenly, hit by a car. The news arrived without warning, without context, without any emotional cushioning, as if someone had opened a door and let a cold wind rush in. And the irony, of course, was impossible to ignore: It was my father who delivered the news, with the same kind of cruelty that had shaped my childhood. His voice carried nothing — no sorrow, no gentleness, not even the faint tremor of human concern.
In that moment, I felt again how precisely Éva had understood my parents long before I did, how clearly she had seen the emotional landscape I was still too young to name. Quite a few people recognized the narcissistic traits in my mother, but it was only Éva who sensed that my father wasn’t truly better — only her who perceived the deeper, quieter truth. She understood how even fundamentally good people, when they are not strong enough to trust themselves, can drift toward cruelty or allow it to unfold unchecked. She saw it all with a clarity I did not yet possess, and perhaps could not have possessed in that situation.
Even though we had not been in contact for decades, I was shaken. I am still shaken. There are losses that belong to the present, and losses that belong to the past but arrive late, like letters delayed for twenty years and finally delivered with the wrong postmark. Éva’s death felt like that — a message from a part of my life I thought was safely archived, suddenly demanding to be read.
I didn’t expect grief. I didn’t expect anything, really. But grief arrived anyway, carrying memories I hadn’t touched in years: her dark eyes, her protective tenderness, her strawberry Milka waiting on the table, her hand pulling mine across the street, her insistence on saving me in the swimming pool even when I wasn’t drowning.
Grief has a way of rearranging the furniture inside us. It shifts what we thought was settled, illuminates corners we haven’t visited in years, and asks us to reconsider the stories we tell about who we were and who we are becoming. In the days after learning about Éva’s death, I found myself walking with a strange double awareness: the present unfolding around me, and the past rising up like a soft echo, reminding me that the foundations of our lives are often laid by people we never get to thank properly.
Hungary, for me, will always be Éva’s country first: a place shaped by the echo of her tenderness, her courage, her perceptiveness, and yes, also her sudden withdrawal — a disappearance I know I will never be able to fully understand. As I walk through these streets now, sounding out words she once spoke effortlessly, I carry her with me. A reminder that certain bonds do not disappear; they simply settle into the background of our lives, becoming part of the geography we move through, part of the language we spend a lifetime learning.
