Berlin in Autumn Is a Dying Friend
Berlin in autumn is like a good friend who is dying.
Summer ending never goes unnoticed here, not for long, even when the sun tries to fool you with warmth it can no longer really afford. Breathing comes harder when I rush through the alleys. The leaves go yellow when they lose the fight against unstoppable time. Hearts go cold precisely when you need them warm.
I take more time in autumn—to get clear on what I actually want, from this city, from my life, from whatever I’m supposed to be building. I go out less. I throw myself headfirst into work to suppress, to stay occupied, to make something move. How else do you build a memory?
When the trees go bare and the streets lose their color, the city’s ugliness reveals itself. An ugliness I’m otherwise not conscious of, buried under all the laughing and music and excitement—but I know it’s there, because it shows its face every time there’s nothing left to cover it.
Suddenly I’m wandering again through the soulless mixture of crumbling buildings and corrupt architecture, smeared walls and lost shit, black-clad masses and a grey sky. With every autumn the raw life drains from the city. The pulse slows. Adrenaline dries up. The nights feel endless.
The bass retreats underground. Hollow figures who fled to this place to forget seek shelter from the clarity that has suddenly arrived. No light in the head—just no light in the head. What they’ve seen should stay in the dark; they’re not celebrating to celebrate, they’re celebrating to survive. Autumn is their enemy.
Young and old, they feel it. Visitors and long-timers, they know it. When summer leaves for a better place, it takes that one specific feeling with it—the feeling I had when I first set foot in this city. The one that fired me up and killed the doubt. The doubt about whether this was really where my new life would begin. Absolutely, certainly, without question.
While winter contains an ending everyone accepts without a word, autumn seems to mock you. You pull at it like a small child—no, please, not that, leave the joy, leave the life, leave the meaning. But it just looks down calmly and makes its eternal round. There’s nothing either of us can do about that.
Berlin in autumn is like a good friend who is dying. Nothing to do but say a quiet goodbye and swear you’ll manage without him. A fulfilled life, an honorable one, an unforgettable one. The hand I’m holding dissolves. Nothing remains. Except the memory.
I step outside. The trees are cold. The streets are colorless. No laughing, no music, no excitement. Black-clad bodies stride quickly past. That they were just naked on the beach dancing, with some lost love in one hand and a well-rolled joint in the other—they seem to have forgotten. It’s not only the nights that get colder.
In autumn the doubts get louder. Whether it was really a good idea to throw away my old life and start over here. Whether Berlin was the right choice, out of all the possibilities and cities and chances. Whether what I’m doing right now, in this exact moment, is something I’m truly, truly satisfied with.
If summer is the distraction, autumn is the mirror. One you can barely escape. You look in and see only yourself. No friend can step between it and you—what you see is you, nobody else. And it wants only one answer, every time: have I conquered this city, or have I simply let it swallow me?
Sitting in the café, staring at the dark figures whose existence seems justified only by their search for this same answer, it becomes clear to me that the end of the hot days doesn’t have to be my end. That I’m capable of more than just promising myself I’ll use the next summer better than this one.
More parties, more drugs. More love, more sex. More success, more money. Whatever this summer couldn’t deliver, for whatever excuses, the next one had better provide. But it won’t. Because it’s my own fault I didn’t use those sweat-soaked days and heated nights. No one else’s.
It isn’t only food or raw materials or money that gets wasted—it’s time. Time I could have used to fill a dull existence with moments that will play back in a giant, monumental, orchestrally scored highlight reel right before I die. Right now that reel is still frighteningly short.
Berlin in autumn is like a good friend who is dying. Before he closed his eyes, I had to make him a promise. Not just to wait for him to come back, but not to let the time until then drain away worthlessly. Whether or not the trees are bare and the streets are colorless. The mirror demands an answer.