He sat on the stone stairs of the hostel, writing left-handed in a Moleskin. Our car rolled up in front of him, me in the backseat carsick after a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo. The GPS sometimes glitched and sometimes didn’t have information to give us. Soviet-era buses and trains still chugged along their prescribed routes while the country built new infrastructure. All of this resulted in a chaotic drive, bravely led by my co-intern Trevor and co-piloted by another intern, Kayla. Katie, the fourth intern, sat beside me in the back. The four of us had only just met six days prior, four Americans in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, where we’d be interning for three months.
“Your boot’s not closed,” he said as we exited the car. English accent, hazel eyes.
“What?” Trevor responded.
“That beeping means your boot’s open.”
We had decided, an hour into the drive, to ignore the beeping. Chalked it up to a Bulgarian quirk we weren’t yet familiar with. I went around to the back of the car and, sure enough, the trunk was slightly ajar.
“It’s called a trunk,” I said, looking at him. He smiled back at me, a wink within his smile.
***
I’d been accepted into an internship program at the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG), an opportunity I only knew about because of a professor whose work focused on former Soviet Union countries. I was in a master’s program for Higher Education Administration, a kind of degree program I had to explain to people. AUBG regularly enrolled students from over forty different countries; in the summer, though, the campus was empty, its staff of Bulgarian natives preparing for the next academic year. These administrators enthusiastically welcomed us. They encouraged us to travel across Bulgaria, offering us day trips up to the Rila Monastery and to Sofia. When the four of us mentioned a weekend trip to Veliko Tarnovo, the staff cheered, urging us to take Friday off for a longer stay. Красиво е, they said. It’s beautiful.
The hostel, a white house with brick-red trim, was a model of Bulgarian Revival architecture, with rounded doorways and an abundance of windows. In the main lobby a colorful rug welcomed us, floor cushions aplenty. Half-completed board games sat waiting for players to return; an easel set up near a window displayed an almost-finished pastel drawing of Bulgarian roses. A porch with tendrils of bougainvillea and a view of a stork nest atop a building across the street. An open lawn at the back of the property with a fireplace and papasan chairs.
We spotted him again as we left the hostel.
“Well, Americans, what are we doing today?”
“We’re walking to the Tsarevets Fortress in a bit,” Kayla responded.
“Make sure you pop into the Cathedral up there,” he said. “Quite lovely, and if you’re lucky, you might get blessed by an Orthodox priest.”
“Do you live here?” Trevor asked. “Or in Bulgaria?”
“Got a construction project going,” he replied, “but been coming here for football since I was a teen. Sorry, SOCCER.” He stared at me with punctuated pupils. My cheeks flamed. “It’s quite a charming place, Bulgaria. What you all doing here? I’m Paul, by the way.” He listened as we described our internships, our graduate programs; it took three attempts at explanation for him to understand exactly what we were doing.
“My crew and I will be watching the football match down by the river this evening if you lot would like to come. They project it in the park and there’s lots of beer, some food.” Our eyes met.
“See you later then,” I said, hopelessly wading into the deep waters of early love.
***
In the months leading up to that summer, I made a vow: No Love. For four years I’d been swept up in relationships: a too-long abusive relationship; a brief dazzling relationship with someone I was still desperate to be with; a few random make out-and-text relationships with men I wanted more from. Always, things ended. And when they did, I couldn’t eat a full meal for weeks. It seemed I was unable to dip just my feet into love, and I was exhausted of treading water in the deep end of heartache.
When I learned I’d be going to Bulgaria, one of the first thoughts that came to me was, maybe I’ll fall in love while there. But I told myself, No, absolutely not. I was going to Bulgaria to grow, personally and professionally; I would not let myself engage in this obsessive pursuit for permanent, unyielding love. I wanted to stop hurting myself with these fulsome attempts at love.
But there I was, weekend one in Bulgaria, crop top and skater skirt, Russian Red MAC lipstick, sharing a cigarette with Paul. Memorizing the depth of his dimples.
***
After the match we went to a bar.
“What are you having?” Paul asked, reaching down his pants pocket for stotinkas.
“Vodka cranberry,” I said, trying to sound confident. He teased me for the order and asked for two shots of Rakia. We downed the shots, and I told him about the first dinner we had at AUBG with our staff, how they gave us Rakia with our salads, and I mistakenly took it like a shot. There was something kinetic between me and Paul, like the atoms in the air separating my body from his were on the fritz, acting out of order.
“Oh noooo! You’re supposed to sip on it with your salad, love.”
“Well, I know that now,” I said.
“You Americans, what binge-drinkers.” He stared at me and for an embarrassing moment my tongue couldn’t find the straw of my drink. “Here,” he said, his pointer finger and thumb pinching the straw steady. My lips suckered around the straw, my eyes big and pleading. His other hand landed on my leg, just above my knee. Our first touch.
We reconvened with the others. Kayla challenged a big Bulgarian man to an arm-wrestle; Trevor futilely swiped for gay men on Tinder; Katie sat with a blanket over her lap looking bored. Paul began asking questions, having everyone in the circle reply. At the ask of our favorite movies, Katie replied with Sex and The City, and I said my favorite at the time, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. I barely knew Katie yet, but I felt some kind of condemnation from her.
He looked at me and winked, this time a real wink. “I knew it,” he said. He didn’t say the rest of the sentence, but I felt sure I knew what he knew. We knew one another.
I got up to order us another round. When I returned, I saw Katie next to Paul, my seat taken. With Kayla I gushed about how flirty Paul was being, how natural things felt between us, our profound chemistry.
“I can see it,” Kayla said. “It’s so obvious.”
Trevor came over in a rush and told us we needed to leave.
“What about Katie?” Kayla asked.
“What about Paul?” I echoed.
And then I saw them: Katie’s wide smile, Paul’s arm draped across her shoulders. I realized what had happened, that despite all that kinetic energy and atoms nearly bursting it was her and not me. I watched her grab his arm tighter around her. Time dissolved and what was left was humiliating agony.
“Don’t look,” Trevor told me every few steps as we walked back to the hostel. Behind us I could hear Katie laughing. Paul stumbling. Back at the hostel I sat on the floor in the lobby and cried. I held a cushion so hard I thought it might burst. I called my grandmother knowing she’d be asleep, stayed on the line so I could hear her voice on her machine. From my pathetic position on the floor, I could see a half-moon through the window. I thought of my first love and my second, of all the minute loves in between and after. I thought of blunts rolled quickly and smoked in a shrub behind the college gymnasium. I thought of cupcakes being iced and chocolate icing ending up on my nipples. Of stargazing in the middle of a baseball field. I thought of the X my body could make over a door if I spread my legs under me, my arms above me, the denial of the end.
I wiped my face, and my hands came away stained with Russian Red. Bloodied hands for breaking my vow, abandoning it as soon as I was seen.
***
In the weeks after, as we established our daily rhythms in Blagoevgrad, I tried my best to seem unperturbed. Logically I knew I had no ownership of Paul, that flirtation wasn’t a one-way road to quenched desire. And I was embarrassed; I felt that the pain of not being chosen was what I deserved for breaking my vow of No Love, what I deserved for being so stupidly confident in that crop top. I started visiting the campus gym, the library. Started taking solo walks through the city. Most of the city center was divided into pedestrian-only areas, patches of park space and town squares where children ran through bubbles their mothers blew for them. The Rila Mountains were visible outside of any window in the city. There was a small stream which ran through the west quadrant of town, its bank my favorite reading spot. There was one pedestrian street that was covered by a parade of rainbow umbrellas, something new to me then, something fantastical. On weekdays, the four of us worked and took long lunches, quickly developing our favorite restaurants, parks, palachinka vendors. We walked to the grocery store, became familiar with its aisles, its cashiers. The back of the grocery store served fully preserved cow skulls available in the window. The dairy section of the store overflowed with pride. Bulgarian yogurt, Bulgarian feta, Ayran.
We lived in one of the residence halls. The building was empty except for our floor where we each lived in our own room. There was a common room where we’d binge-watch Game of Thrones and burn popcorn. On lunch breaks we’d make pasta, wash our newly bought cherries and place them in a large bowl, their maroon bulbs full of goodness. Despite the low-thrumming tension that sometimes existed between me and Katie, the four of us moved forward, completing projects and sharing dessert at dinner. We were familiar in an unfamiliar place.
In our common room, we hung a large whiteboard where we wrote out plans for each weekend. Red marker indicated the trip was one inside of Bulgaria, blue indicated elsewhere. We dreamed up ways to get to Istanbul, Bucharest, Thessaloniki. We designed new orientations for the school, assisted with on-campus summer programs, created promotional materials for Erasmus programs.
Paul stayed in my mind. After Veliko Tarnovo he’d friended all of us on Facebook. He sent me long and detailed messages, some apologetic for what happened that night with Katie, some curious about me, my interests. I went to Istanbul with Katie and Kayla and read a message from Paul regarding a poem of mine he’d read: I really hope your lovely poem gets more likes than a photo of you in a pashmina. As a group we traveled to Melnik and Paul messaged: I am fascinated by the contrast in your work — from hope to hopelessness. It’s very honest. Another weekend we spent a day on the beach in Thessaloniki, and I returned with a painful ear infection; Paul helped me, via Messenger, translate what the Bulgarian doctor said. In my dorm at night I reread our correspondence, reread his apologies.
We organized a trip to Varna, a city on the Black Sea Coast, for one of our last weekends. Paul, who was in Dobrich, an hour away from Varna, met us there. He’d messaged all four of us asking if we’d like him to come; when Katie brought him up it was with a tone of possession. He stayed in a hostel with us that had a pool, a ping-pong table, and a seemingly endless supply of Rakia. For two days we alternated between the pool and the ocean, taking in the chaotic Myrtle Beach-adjacent sights: pythons and alligators on men’s shoulders, whippets being huffed outside of bars. Paul sought me out in the ocean, he sat next to me at restaurants, asked me to be his partner in ping-pong. That kineticism was still there, but when he tried to kiss me, the day we were scheduled to leave, I gave a closed-mouth kiss. I wanted to fall into his open arms, but I would not let myself.
“But you feel this too, don’t you?” he asked. I did. But The Vow. But him choosing someone else. I wasn’t sure which, between the two, made me hesitate. I nodded but feared speaking, sure I’d cry. “It’s okay,” he said. He slipped something into my bag. On the bus back to Blagoevgrad I found it: a journal. On the first page he’d written:
I found this journal in Plovdiv and immediately imagined you writing in it.
Keep in touch,
Paul (the idiot from Veliko Tarnovo who would happily kiss you through any football match)
***
That night I read through our Facebook messages, flipped through the photos I’d taken of my summer. Whatever it was that Paul and I had, I knew it was impermanent. And up until then I’d believed impermanent love was faulty, deficient. But this was not. This was imperative.
***
I spent my last week in Bulgaria terrified that the summer was ending. I found myself desperate to commemorate the ending. I walked the streets of Blagoevgrad, trying to memorize the color patterns of the lights against the university building. I counted the steps it took to get from the karaoke bar to our apartment building. I’d been alone in Bulgaria in ways I’d never been before, alone in ways I’d never be again. I wanted to record everything, to write everything down. Every time we did something that would be our last, I announced its finality to the group. I wanted all four of us to feel heavy with this ending, like a rooftop buried in snow.
But I don’t remember anything specific about the last day. I don’t remember the details of our going away party or the last meal we ate together. There are notes in journals that tell me to remember things: the gelato at that one place (what place?); the car game we played on our way to Veliko Tarnovo (I don’t remember the car game). I was always a visitor in Bulgaria. Three months isn’t long enough to know a place, not long enough to become a part of the community. But the town was small enough, my stay long enough, that I am still there when I sleep. I walk the streets in my dreams, palachinkis in both of my hands, Paul’s kiss still fresh on my ear.
***
Re-entry into my old life came. By the time I started my second year of graduate school, my time in Bulgaria already felt fuzzy, as if it had happened in a book I read. Katie, Kayla, Trevor and I talked daily for the first few months, but soon I felt our bond slipping — time’s cruel inevitability.
I kept in touch with Paul. We wrote to each other about films and music, telling one another we missed each other in roundabout ways. I was in some kind of love with him. We were nothing, had nothing. But every few weeks I’d get a Facebook message from him and my life felt aglow and doable. I passed my final year of graduate school in this way, with Paul and the memories of a summer I’d just lived hovering in my chest, my own personal atmosphere. In the winter of 2015 Paul sent me a video of him playing acoustic guitar and singing. He wrote: it’s about that night in Veliko Tarnovo. It’s about regret.
I played the song on breaks from class; I played it at night in bed. I memorized the lyrics like it was a carcass I was gnawing at for sustenance. ‘It’s just the usual hostel small talk, but everyone can see, the sparks that bounce off the walls when you’re talking with me;’ ‘exchanging shots and stories, I just wanna grab you and embrace all that we’re ignoring;’ ‘I could listen to you say anything.’ In the song Paul sang about the inevitability between us. In my waking life I cut my hair off and slept around with men I didn’t care about, able to uphold my vow of No Love only because of Paul and his song.
***
Things happened to me that summer in Bulgaria. I discovered the best cherries of my life. I read all of Anais Nin’s diaries. I learned how to properly drink Rakia. And I taught myself how to go back, how to walk the streets of Blagoevgrad in my dreams; go back to Veliko Tarnovo, back to that sticky bar, back, even, to that hostel lobby I shed so many tears inside of.
I felt, that summer in Blagoevgrad, as if I was biding my time until the Big Love came. But the biding was love in itself: the biding was a riverbank where I read every afternoon, a message thread that lit up my body. There were relationships to come, and heartbreaks, too, that made me wish for the rose gardens, for the Bulgarian cheese, for the riverbank. Even for Paul.
Eventually the messages between us went cold. But I keep the song in my Google Drive. Sometimes I even let myself hit play.
Image by Jacqueline O’Gara on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- That Summer in Bulgaria - September 23, 2025