City Cow
I grew up in the country down south, hours from anything. I mean actual hours—walking across fields and through forests just to reach some party in a rusted trailer where we drank homemade schnapps and had no real idea what to do with ourselves. Farm life. Calves in the stable. Sunflower fields that went on forever. I watched animals get slaughtered and it stuck with me. Everyone knew everyone in that small universe. Either you were related or you had what we called a deep friendship—the kind where there’s nowhere to hide because you’re too tangled up in each other.
I got out as soon as I could. The sameness was suffocating. One real road. People who’d known you your whole life but never actually saw you. So I left for Berlin and just disappeared into the crowd. In a city of millions, nobody gives a shit who you are. I thought that was the whole point.
But something gets burned in a city. Friendships don’t deepen—they vanish. There’s always something better somewhere else, someone more interesting, somewhere else to be. You’re drowning in options and end up completely isolated anyway. It’s different from the country, where you’re alone together, where the closeness is just built into everything. Here, choice means nothing goes deep.
I still can’t figure out which is worse. The suffocation of roots or the emptiness of freedom. Sometimes I get this stupid image stuck in my head: walking a cow down the middle of Alexanderplatz, petting its head the whole way. Just putting the two things into collision—the countryside and the city—and watching what happens. It won’t fix anything. But that’s kind of where I’m at. Caught between two things that both know how to hurt you.