Running Out of Stories

Walking through Berlin at night and it hits me: nothing else is coming. I’ve known her for years in different shapes, different women, but always her underneath. Every year we’d find each other and I’d learn who she was again that year, think maybe this is it, then leave. It was the only pattern I could repeat.

I’m a coward. I have to disappear from people I trust—just vanish into somewhere I’ve never been and sit alone until I feel alive. Then I come back. When I leave I feel genuinely real. When I return I feel like I’ve paid something essential for the right to come back.

I’ve written about love and heartbreak and sex and desire. About how individuals dissolve and crowds carry hope and how you can live through moments that make you feel singular in a world that’s indifferent and arrogant. I’ve said what I needed to say.

I’m twenty-four years old. I think like an old man. I’ve broken the taboos I needed to break. Lived the lives I needed to live. Written it all out. And now I’m sitting somewhere, waiting, and it’s clear to me: that’s everything I had. That’s the full inventory. So what’s left?