The Fear Arrives at a Birthday Party

The urge that had kept me home all of last weekend had completely inverted by Friday: I had to get out, or something was going to give. So I ended up at a stranger’s birthday party in some village, which wasn’t quite the escape I needed. Everything checked out on paper—decent music, cute girls, free alcohol until the room stopped making sense—but underneath all the drunk laughing something crept in. Fear of Berlin. It came quietly, the way bad feelings do when you’ve had just enough to drink that your defenses are down but not enough to stop thinking. The fear wasn’t really of the city itself. It was the same fear I have about dying—not death, but the forced removal from the game. The idea that once I leave, everything I’ve built here in terms of interaction just stops. That kind of imposed helplessness does something to me.

I hate having too much time inside my own head. The ghosts drift in uninvited, soft and unannounced, and suddenly I’m missing things I was certain I’d gotten past. My iTunes wasn’t producing enough genuinely mournful songs to let me sink all the way in, which was probably fine. Two things actually helped: The Simpsons Movie, which kept the dark stuff at bay for about two hours, and a postcard from Nicki, written from vacation on Rügen. Sweet that you thought to send it. I hope whatever plan you have to free yourself and reclaim your life catches a little this way. Especially on Sundays—which, by long experience, is my most vulnerable day for this particular bittersweet condition of mine.