Ready to Leave
I’ve been in Berlin five years now, and I’ve done just about everything this place has to offer without destroying my life completely in the process. Sunday mornings at the flea market in Mauerpark when the sun’s out, getting annoyed at the tourists while being one myself. Nights dancing through clubs, wrecked on whatever we’d taken before we left, sleeping in different beds after, and then at dawn finding myself on a swing somewhere watching the sun come up. I’ve met the kind of people you remember, people you kiss, people you lose. All the things Berlin’s supposed to be.
But standing here now, walking down streets I’ve walked a thousand times, the air smelling the same, the crowds doing the same dull thing—I can feel how little Berlin has moved. The city’s frozen. Maybe it’s been dead for a while and just doesn’t know it yet. You want to believe the experiences matter, the people matter, that five years of something means something, but the city tells you different every time you leave your apartment.
You can keep building along the Spree. You can keep closing clubs and opening them somewhere else. You can keep cycling through art shows and pop-up stores and vegan restaurants and startups and graffiti walls and MacBook cafés—everyone photographing it, posting about it, moving on. It doesn’t matter. Berlin’s suffering from something frozen at its core. Its creativity is asleep, kept in that sleep by the people who want it to stay free and elite forever, like those things can exist at the same time, like holding time still is the same as keeping something alive.
Everywhere I go I see the same faces in different people, the same types, the same stories repeating. I’m trapped in a place that talks about nothing but change while it starves for it. Full of people who came here as real individuals and got smoothed into copies of other copies. I watched it happen. I even called it out and people just stared back at me.
It’s not the coke or the beer or the casual sex or the music that bleeds you out. It’s the ruins of a place that’s lived through too much and is too tired to keep going, that’s gone quiet and barely breathes anymore. Your footsteps echo up through the tall old buildings and past all the painted rubble, down the long avenues and into the clubs at night, and nobody hears them. A rotting collective of imitations doesn’t hear anything.
I defended this place for years. Loved it. Said it was the only city that would ever give me what it gave me. And I meant it then. But I’ve seen through it now and I can only smile tired smiles at it, wave my hand. Five years in Berlin and I’m ready to leave. Maybe for good this time.