The City Cow
Growing up in the rural south of Germany meant parties in rusted trailers at the edges of fields, and the walk to get there took hours—through open farmland and forests that turned genuinely dark at night. The spirits were homemade and tasted like it. The girls spoke dialects thick enough to chew on, and by the time you were seventeen you’d probably fucked or fought half the people you knew, because the pool was that small and everyone was either distantly related or had been watching you fail things since childhood.
I led a calf gently through a future father-in-law’s stable once, and then stood there while it was slaughtered. Ended up in a sunflower field afterward, crying. For the calf, probably, but also for something harder to name—the weight of knowing everyone, the way that kind of familiarity can feel less like belonging and more like a net.
So I left. Berlin swallowed me whole and barely noticed.
There’s something genuinely liberating about moving through a city of millions without anyone knowing your name. For a long time I found it clean—all that anonymity, all those options, no one tracking what time you came home or who you brought with you. The city felt like possibility laid in asphalt.
But fighting through crowds of people who will never know you hollows a person out eventually. Friendships here move fast and burn fast. The connections feel thinner even when they’re real, and the abundance of options is its own kind of paralysis—you can do anything in Berlin, which sometimes means you end up doing very little, just standing in the middle of all that possibility going nowhere in particular.
I still don’t have an answer. Country life romanticizes depth because there’s not much else to offer. City life romanticizes freedom for exactly the same reason. Both are selling you something. My dreams still have trees in them. My actual life has a U-Bahn schedule.
For now I’m considering acquiring a small urban cow and walking her carefully across Alexanderplatz, one hand on her flank, the way I used to do in that stable a long time ago.