Still Here

I step off the U-Bahn, turn right without thinking, walk along the tracks. That the direction comes automatically now feels like a milestone worth noting. Six months in Berlin.

Following Ella here was the largest thing I’d done up to that point—larger than it probably looked from the outside. I packed up and moved to a city where everything was different in ways I hadn’t predicted and familiar in ways that made even less sense. That dissonance hasn’t resolved. I still feel it, most days: the sense of being exactly where I should be without fully understanding why.

Six months of new everything. New job, new school, new people, new women. The city has been generous. And now spring is coming, which in Berlin means something specific—the light changes, the parks wake up, and it becomes possible to go running in the evening without earning frostbite on your ass. I’ve been waiting for that particular pleasure.

The web design work is moving faster than I expected. Clients keep materializing—TV stations, electronics companies, car brands—and the work is good and getting better. Soon I’ll find my own apartment, get out of the student dorm situation, and actually live here instead of camping here. Kathi made that move and it suits her. I want that too.

But right now, walking away from the platform in the cold—I don’t want to be anywhere else. Stagnation is death, someone wise once told me. So: the champagne is somewhere in the back of the cabinet. Let’s open it.