Buchloe, Four in the Morning
Small towns earn the name. Every cliché about them is true—not metaphorically true, not true-with-nuance, just factually accurate. Everyone knows everyone. The inbreeding rate is statistically notable. The local paper, which covers roughly six villages and a cow pasture, runs front-page stories about the garden club’s 75th anniversary and photographs children who placed third at the regional taekwondo tournament. Very exotic. Very special.
My small town is called Buchloe. It sits in Bavaria, somewhere between Augsburg, Landsberg am Lech, and Kaufbeuren, if those mean anything to you. When it was almost too late, I decided to leave—to Berlin, into the wide fast world, rather than marry my girlfriend, move into a house on her father’s field, and spend the rest of my life producing little FC Bayern supporters. An alternative lifestyle is not exactly encouraged out there in the Allgäu.
When I come back now, at Christmas or Easter to visit family, I feel superior. I made it out. That’s what I tell myself. I escaped the blue-and-white monotony and landed somewhere with parties and velocity and a certain proximity to things that feel like they matter. Or I stay home and jerk off because I live near the TV tower and some guy who wanders the neighborhood shouting things that make no sense in any language. The high life, approximately.
There were real reasons I left my friends behind in that dull idyll. Money. Variety. Perspective. The vague ambitions that can only be pursued somewhere with more than one bar. Most of the time I don’t think about how my life would have looked if I’d stayed—it’s been nearly five years. That question doesn’t usually catch up with me.
But then it does. Late at night with a bottle of wine and a Facebook feed full of familiar faces who chose the life I didn’t, or who were simply too comfortable to move. They’re at Fasching together, a little older, a little rounder, laughing and drinking and apparently unbothered by any of it. Not paralyzed by the risk of returning broke and hollow from a city that didn’t want them.
They work their eight-hour shifts at the beverage depot or the care home, get excited about the McDonald’s twenty kilometers down the road, and meet every evening at the same bar they’ve always met at. When they want something wilder, they drive to the big disco a few villages over and go off to David Guetta and shout at the TV when The Bachelor comes on. Standard Saturday.
Sometimes I miss these people. I know exactly who they are—the ones who send Facebook app invites, who post photos of abused dogs and write things like "whoever did this I’ll cut his dick off!!" in the comments. Bavarian social media is its own ecosystem. But they mean it. There’s a directness to it that I grew up with and that Berlin doesn’t really have, for all its supposed openness.
Then the nostalgia really hits, and I remember drinking Jägermeister in the warm summer rain outside one of those wooden huts, Groove Coverage pumping out of a bad speaker. Breaking into a caravan and getting beaten out of it by the owners, then waking up to find ourselves described as "rampaging youth" in the local paper. Sitting on the small wooden bench by the brook at midnight with Jule, her climbing up onto my lap, ostensibly to show me shooting stars. And then somewhat less astronomical activities.
It makes me genuinely sad—a specific, four-in-the-morning kind of sad—to see that these people are still friends, still together, some of them married now, some with kids. We were idiots who made trouble everywhere we went: streets, fields, schools, forests, lakes, apartments, bars, basements, bedrooms. And they stayed, and they’re still there, still with each other. And I’m here. Very far from there. With a wine bottle and that particular kind of melancholy that only hits when you’re too tired to defend your choices.
Before I fall into restless sleep, I ask myself the questions I already know the answers to. Would it have been so bad, the small-town life? Was all of this worth leaving my friends behind for good? What would I be doing now if I’d never gone to Berlin? Delivering pizza? Working in a warehouse? Living on benefits?
In some parallel version of things, I’m sitting in Buchloe right now, wondering what my life would have looked like if I’d left. Then I open the local paper and read about the garden club’s 75th anniversary. And I feel glad the children placed third in the regional taekwondo tournament. Very exotic. Very special.