What Alexa Meant
The sky over Alexanderplatz is the particular grey that means business—heavy clouds snagging on the TV tower like they’ve got nowhere else to be. I picked the right weather for this without meaning to.
Jenny and I have been over for more than a month. She’s with someone new, apparently happy, doing the things people do when they’ve moved on correctly. I’ve been doing the other version: sleepless nights, thought spirals that feel profound at 3 a.m. and embarrassing by noon, and that vicious form of hope that keeps showing up only to laugh at you. I’ve never had many addictions—not cigarettes, not drink, not anything I could identify and fix like a sensible person. But there’s one pattern I can’t argue away: I get addicted to women who leave me. Not women generally. Specifically the ones who are already gone. I don’t know what to do with that information.
What Türkheim was with Ana, the Alexa shopping center has become with Jenny. It sits near Alexanderplatz in glass and steel and I’ve been routing around it for weeks, the way you route around a street where something happened. Today I’m ending that. My reason reached some kind of threshold and issued the order unilaterally.
I stood outside in the rain for a moment before going in. My iPod chose exactly that second to die, which felt like a comment. Then I pushed through the doors.
We used to come here on weekend afternoons—browsing DVDs and games and things we didn’t need, doing the whole casual domestic ritual. The ring section once. I remembered that as I walked past it. I didn’t stop.
The logic of the crusade was simple: every shop that carries a memory, walk into it and turn it back into a shop. At Thalia I bought a book. At Media Markt I picked up something for my Nintendo DS, which had been sitting untouched since the breakup. I bought the fourth season of The O.C. because I’d just finished the third and the story needed to continue regardless of my emotional situation. I ate at McDonald’s. Stated plainly, all of this sounds faintly absurd. It worked anyway. By the time I came out, each place was just a place again—the dark charge that used to arrive with even thinking about them was gone, or at least reduced to something manageable.
It’s a strange kind of grief, having to systematically defuse someone who once mattered that much. But you do it or you stay stuck, and staying stuck doesn’t preserve anything—it just means you keep hurting in the same doorway indefinitely. I’d managed it with Ana eventually, all the way to the end. I’ll manage it here.
The sky was still grey when I came out. The tower was still there.