Kastanienallee at First Light
My thoughts had been thought to death long before I reached the street. I couldn’t tell if it was fear—probably it was—but I’d been calling it love for months and by now the word had worn smooth. That morning I was the first one out. Just me and the city that had been keeping me for three years, and I walked Kastanienallee like a man saying goodbye to a body.
The air was heavy, not quite rain. That same grey-tinged air I’d been breathing for three years had worked itself inside me, and I walked with it spreading through my chest, seeing faces. The small red-haired girl with her enormously fat cats. The curly-haired one who carried tragedy and joy in equal measure, always at war with each other. The one who twisted feelings for a living and turned the lens on himself when he ran out of other material. I had won each of them, in time, and let each of them go when the moment arrived. That’s the only way I know how to do it.
There was a specific night. There’s always a specific night. She was fighting something inside herself, kept going under and coming back up, and there was something about her—the way she held still—that told me she’d already been given to someone else. No kisses. You could read it on her face like a sentence: just no kisses, not now, not from me. I looked anyway. I explored her, bit into her neck, pressed her into the corner of something I no longer remember the name of, and I won’t forget a minute of it. This is apparently what I do. Flee from sadness. Stay for the spirit. Follow whatever calls loudest. My particular curse as a wanderer: I pass through the walls of other people’s lives without slowing down, and sometimes those walls belong to the dead.
Because there’s someone I need to address, even here, even now. I still want to scream at you—how the fuck did you think it was acceptable to go before me? I screamed. I wept. I arrived at acceptance and walked back through the door marked grief because the emptiness you left isn’t the kind that fills with time or intention. I’ve tried everything. You are my guardian angel now, which I find simultaneously comforting and completely enraging. You stupid cow. Why did you have to die.
The sun was coming through the treetops by then, catching my face the way it used to when we lay somewhere in the morning and let the light find us. That light is the loneliest time of day. The wet in my eyes was already changing into something else—warmth, the weight of memory, three years settling into their final shape.
Berlin is home. It became home before I noticed it happening—took my skin, worked on my soul, absorbed what needed absorbing and didn’t charge me for it. But I’ve known for a while that this city isn’t the end of the road. It never is. There will be more cities, more walls to pass through, more people I’ll win and lose when the time comes. We are all just restless nomads chasing happiness, understanding, something true, and losing ourselves somewhere in the narrow space between love and breathlessness.