Stadthunger: The Pretty Anger
It was one of those summer days where the heat brands itself into your skin and the night doesn’t come. I was sitting with Eva somewhere near Prenzlauer Berg, working ice cubes to nothing with a straw while she watched the waiter move between tables, and she asked about Adam just to kill the silence. We hadn’t seen each other in years and honestly I didn’t care how his life was going. Then: How’s Sina?
Something in me stopped. I knocked my cocktail to the floor. Not an accident—I watched it break on the concrete, the glass and fruit and liquid scatter, and I smiled. It felt necessary.
Two years since the night she left my apartment screaming, and we haven’t spoken since. But I knew what she’d built: the right people, the right parties, something on a music channel, modeling gigs, affairs with musicians and TV people who mattered. I’d see her at events, sometimes photographed her in expensive clothes with expensive people around her. She’d smile for the camera like a professional, then walk straight to the bar without looking at me. Most nights that was when I’d leave.
The mathematics of it were brutal. While her life accelerated into luck and money and actual recognition, mine collapsed into self-doubt and rage and this grotesque gratitude for hating everyone. I started seeing her in other women. Moved through Berlin scanning faces—schoolgirls, designers, prostitutes—hunting for her scattered freckles, reddish gold hair, bright blue eyes, only to understand with increasing numbness that they were all just hollow imitations, secondary characters who could never be what she was, who could never survive the weight of obsession I stupidly placed on them.
By night I’d lie awake on pills and energy drinks, scrolling her photos with one hand and the other busy, jealous of every person connected to her, everyone who mattered in her life, everyone she let close. I’d become less than human—a ghost in a city made of glitter and drugs, exactly what she’d said I would be.
A few days after Eva, someone called and asked me to shoot an after-party for a Schweighöfer premiere at a hotel. I went late and already drunk. Candles everywhere, a bartender, a boss doing a full-bore New York accent that made me want to scream. I shot maybe two hundred frames and kept fifteen. It didn’t matter. I was an artist, was how I thought about it, and artists don’t have to care about results or utility or whether anything means anything to anyone.
I went out to the balcony to smoke and found myself alone with the city falling away below. I was trying to blow rings at the TV tower—some stupid superstition that a perfect ring pointing at it might bring it down—when I noticed someone else on the balcony. I could see her profile first. When I saw her face I had to cough.
Sina was standing three feet away, smiling at me.