Seventeen Cents
I always had this idea of student life—perpetually broke, lurking around the city, drinking away future worries at basement parties, the same three clothes wearing thin because laundromats are expensive and vaguely terrifying. Somewhere in that fantasy is probably just my actual life, but yesterday I got a taste of the real thing at the Charité Mensa, or close enough.
The food was expensive, the place was packed. Basti wouldn’t stop talking—something about lazy unshaved people and whales falling from the sky, none of it making any sense. I wasn’t having the time of my life, honestly. The whole scene felt like a cliché I’d imagined a thousand times—students in a cafeteria, the kind of life I thought I wanted when I was younger.
But the weather was warm. The grass outside was full of actual unshaved students, and I found myself curious about them in a way I didn’t expect—their stories, where they were from, what made them different from the version I’d constructed in my head. And then I realized: probably nothing special. They were probably broke too, probably drinking themselves stupid on weekends, probably rotating the same clothes through the wash like the rest of us.
The real souvenir was the Mensa card they handed over—17 cents still on it. I kept it. Proof I’d touched that life, even briefly, even if it was just warm weather and other people’s chaos. Stupid and sentimental, but there it is.