A Voice from Friedrichshain

There’s a writer in Berlin—writing for a magazine called Blond—who opens one of her pieces by noting she got up at six that morning and is still half-dead, so everything she’s about to say will be pure nonsense. Accepted? she asks.

Yes. Accepted.

She writes about turning the city into a village, about how she lived 22 years in Pankow, recently moved to Friedrichshain, and is only now, for the first time, actually roaming through Mitte. About people who form their musical taste exclusively through music channels: I still have no sympathy for them. About trying to look melancholic and withdrawn in public—but it only works until someone speaks to me. About loving to stay home despite talking constantly, about being happily antisocial, about not answering calls and pushing every appointment further back.

And then this: Whenever I say that I rarely go out, it’s definitely followed by a terrible party phase. Everything I state as a given tends to turn into its opposite.

That last one. I’ve been living inside that sentence for years without having the words for it.

That’s the real reason I want to go to Berlin. Not the clubs or the mythology of cheap rent—because somewhere in that city is someone who thinks in these shapes. The self that wants isolation and the self that needs chaos, the plan you announce and the opposite thing that happens, the city you’re only starting to discover after you’ve been there half your life. I want to see the place that produces this kind of thinking.