Four Years
Four years. The number sits differently than three. Four years means you’ve stopped being a newcomer by any available definition, stopped having the excuse of not knowing better.
I could write the expected thing about Berlin summers—the way the city uncoils in July, the Spree at midnight, the sense that something important might happen around the next corner at any hour. All of it true. But once you’ve embedded yourself, once your routines have calcified and your face is recognized in certain doorways, the magic doesn’t disappear so much as it recedes into the background hum of a Tuesday afternoon.
The trends that felt electric in the first weeks reveal themselves as self-consuming loops. The hip events fill with the same hip faces, and sometime around year two you start to see the whole machinery as theater—sometimes beautiful theater, but theater. Nowhere else are truth and its copy seated this close together.
The city has its own metabolism, one that runs on sleepless, frantic energy. It destroys newcomers and then, if you survive long enough, it normalizes in you, becomes the water you move through. But the adjustment isn’t neutral. I’ve watched friends surrender to it—not tasting what Berlin offers at 4am but swallowing it whole. The clubs, the cheap drugs, the cultivated enemies, the absolute commitment to not thinking about tomorrow. And when I ran into those people again, months or years later, they were shadows: eyes dulled, carrying regret they wouldn’t name.
The real luck of the city belongs to whoever stops chasing the obvious. The ones who find their own path through its streets and Altbau staircases, who build something genuine with the small number of people who actually earn their time. Not the type who ignites you on contact with the suggestion of limitless energy and then silently evaporates behind some industrial door before dawn.
I carry specific moments: a long kiss under fireworks on the Spree embankment. The first sunlight of morning on my face after a night I probably shouldn’t have survived, a favorite song running through headphones as the city woke up around me. The quiet, clean feeling of work actually paying off—some small acknowledgment that the effort meant something, that I’d gotten something right.
Four years is enough time to love a place completely and on your own terms. But it’s also enough time to understand it isn’t the final destination. There’s a larger world I keep glimpsing through the gaps here, and eventually I’ll go look at it. For now: four years. So much, and yet—god—so little.