My Personal Crusade
The sky over Alexanderplatz is gray, the kind of heavy cloud cover that seems to catch on the TV tower. Perfect weather for what I’m doing here, which I’ve been telling myself for the last month is a personal crusade, though that word feels too grand for what is basically me trying to stop being haunted by a shopping center.
Jenny and I haven’t been together for just over a month. She’s happy with someone new now, which I’m genuinely glad about in the moments when I’m not awake at three in the morning running the same conversations in my head that never needed to happen. I don’t think I’m an addict. Not to drugs, not to weed, not to anything I’ve ever considered a weakness in myself. But if I’m honest, I’m addicted to girls who leave me. I hate losing people who matter. I don’t know how to function when they’re gone.
The Alexa shopping center was our place. I can still see us walking through those big glass doors, laughing about nothing, arms linked, browsing for DVDs or games or just wasting an afternoon. A shadow seems to hang over the whole building now. I haven’t been back since we split. The memory of it was too heavy, so I just didn’t come here. For a month I avoided it like something sacred and terrible. But last week I decided that had to stop. My brain decided it. My heart, battered as it was, agreed.
A month is long enough to mourn someone. Long enough to miss what you had and let yourself feel the sting of them not wanting you back. Long enough to accept that they’ve moved on and you’re not part of that anymore. I’d managed it before with someone else, so I could manage it now. So I went back.
I did it deliberately, methodically, like some kind of ritual. Bookstore—picked up something I’d been meaning to read. Game store—found a couple things for my DS, which I hadn’t touched since the split. Music section. McDonald’s at the end. It sounds stupid as hell, but it worked. Walking through these places again, doing normal things, buying normal things, stripped the poison out of them. They stopped being monuments to something I lost and became just a shopping center again. The weight lifted.
It’s a strange thing, having to let go of someone who once meant everything to you. You have to forget them in stages, in small ways, moving through the spaces you shared until they stop being haunted. But that’s the thing you have to do. That’s the work.