The Broken Compass

Walking through Berlin at three in the morning, I feel like someone’s grandfather. Not old in years—I’m twenty-four—but old in the particular way of someone who has already used up most of what they came with.

There’s a woman I keep returning to. Not always in body, but in the way she occupies the space behind everything else. No matter how many others there were, it always circled back to her. Each year I thought I knew her and each year she was different. Even through the long stretches of silence I felt her weight, the way you feel a scar in certain weather. I find everything I need with her and still want to leave. I’ve never been able to explain that—to her or to myself.

My sense of direction is broken. I move through life the way a compass behaves near a magnet—always pointing somewhere, never somewhere real. When I arrive somewhere I immediately feel the pull back. It’s a cowardly way to live and I know it: periodically withdrawing from everyone I know, going somewhere alone and unfamiliar, sitting with the strangeness until I feel like a person again. Leaving always feels honest. Coming back always feels like arriving somewhere with something missing.

I’ve written about love, grief, joy, sex. About individual collapse and collective hope and what it means to witness things that mark you. Now I’m sitting on a platform waiting for a train, wondering if I’ve run out of the raw charge behind it all. Not topics—there’s always a next thing—but the urgency underneath the writing. Twenty-four years old and the thoughts in my head are those of someone putting everything in boxes and labeling them for someone else to carry. I need something I haven’t found yet.