“Where are all the dogs?” I ask my mother. Beside her on the phone is my dog, Charlie, with his yellow eyes, quiet and American. They are in New York. I am in Budapest, today. But I converse with my mother as if she is here because no one else is, because I am–in the senses that mean anything–alone, and I have been for some weeks now. I have not made friends, here. The only people that talk to me are men in their early forties and I shut these conversations down quickly, because maybe I am just the only other American on this Slovenian gondola, but my father’s caution rings in my ears, and so I put in my earbuds and shut out the possibility of camaraderie in these foreign cities. I am not an experienced traveler. I have traveled, in the past, but with my family, and so my understanding of what happens to the soul when it is alone in a place where it does not speak the language was, before this trip, very limited. It was based on the movies, really, which is to say on the idea that the soul opens itself up to scorn and embarrassment in order to find its way away from loneliness, but I know now that this is not the case. At least, it isn’t for me. I have been very quiet this past month, save for when I call mother and we talk about things like where all the dogs are. I wonder this as Charlie responds to the sound of my voice across the transatlantic FaceTime, ears perking up at the sound of his name when I say it. The internet tells me that Budapest is the seventh-most dog-friendly city in the world, but I’m not inclined to believe it. I’ve only seen one dog all day, and it was a small dog–the “cop out” kind of dog that you can hide from a landlord, if you really need to. When I was in Barcelona, it was a lot like Los Angeles, a lot like where I come from. In Barcelona, there were dogs on every block. Big dogs. Real dogs. Purebreds–I could name every one of them–but real. At seven in the morning, as I perused that city, suffering through my jet lag, the streets were a sea of canine. Sometimes, the bipeds were outnumbered. There were panting huskies and trotting vizslas and (both) groomed and unruly poodles. In Paris, there were also big and real purebred dogs, but they walked themselves. Some held their leashes in between their teeth, some didn’t have leashes at all. Their owners yapped commands from ten or fifteen feet back when they saw the dog sniffing around a garbage can, but all-in-all it was an uncomplicated affair. In Luxembourg, the dogs were bigger than I had seen in any other place, and they were mutts. They were all shaped differently than their coloring suggested. A dog with golden retriever fur had rottweiler eyebrows. A dog with the brown spots of a beagle was shaped like a husky. Dogs have been everywhere, in every city I’ve been to. But I can’t find them, here, in Budapest. I sit outside a dog park, now, and it is empty, like all the dogs have vanished. I used to sit at the dog park in Silver Lake, in Los Angeles, and watch Charlie chase tennis balls I didn’t throw, dirt becoming caked into his fur, but the turf is unmaimed, here. It looks like there hasn’t been a dog here in years. The other thing my mother and I talk about on FaceTime is reflection. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not adventurous. This trip has been so unbelievably far out of my comfort zone that, during catch-up calls with friends and family, I get asked, “How are you feeling? How have you changed?” They wonder if physical and thereby emotional isolation has done something other than improve my Italian and facilitate an addiction to Gossip Girl. And I wonder about these things, sometimes, usually at the high-up viewpoints in the cities I visit. I wonder if this view, or the last one, or the next one has changed me. Being alone is the kind of thing that gets harder over time. It hasn’t really gotten harder, for me–does that mean it’s gotten easier? Am I quiet now because I am quiet, or because I don’t speak Spanish, Slovenian, French, Hungarian? Life has passed, here. I take my birth control but skip my period. I am, naturally, irregular. My car sits with a full tank of gas in the garage at home–it hasn’t run. Have I? There has been no witness to my experience, these last four weeks. I am a tree playing twister in the forest. There is no one around to see it. Am I still improving? Are my limbs–my branches–still stretching farther in every direction if I am the only one that can gauge the difference? The ground cannot be seen beneath my feet. Maybe I have changed, but can I really know that, now? Can I really know that until you have put me back in my hamster wheel? My stomach doesn’t mind the dairy, here. There are no dogs, no lactose intolerance. I tell my mother everything, I tell my friends everything else, like their commentary will make this real. When I get home, over a month from now, will it all be changed? Will I remember to be different? By what measure can I possibly gauge it? I could joke about the metric system, but I’ll joke about the temperature, instead. It’s hot today, hot on my skin, but I don’t know how hot because these numbers don’t make sense to me, and that is what it’s like inside my head. They ask me if I’ve changed, and I guess I could say, in some way, I have, in some way, it’s hot, but there are other words for everything I want to say, there are other names for all I’m feeling. These are the things I should be contemplating, really, but I’m trying not to, because I’m still in it, still here, still changing. So, instead, I wonder, where are all the dogs? What is this permutation of canine culture? “Can I see myself living here” becomes “Are there dogs, here?” Do people let them on the bed, here? Could a dog lay at my feet on the patio at the espresso bar, here? These are useless questions, but I ask them, because what I want to ask must lay dormant, for now. That part of me is proofing, setting, steeping. My eyes wait for a dog to come into the park, to remind me that there is something usual about this place. I look down at my cell phone, away from the empty park. My mother is washed out by the light refracting off my screen. Charlie rolls over. I tell my mom it’s hot outside. She asks me how it is, otherwise. I tell her, lonely. On the screen, her brow furrows. It’s okay, I tell her. I’m happy. I just don’t know how else to explain it. It’s hot and it’s lonely. Sweat collects on the back of my neck, beneath the pieces of hair that have fallen out from the clip. When I hang up the phone, there is silence. There are no more dogs.