Confetti and Vodka and the First of May

Forget Christmas. Forget Easter. The real holiday in Berlin is the first of May—the day Kreuzberg becomes one long, open-air party that nobody planned and nobody can stop. Police and revelers circle each other in the street, sound systems compete from every courtyard, and everyone operates on the shared delusion that this one day justifies whatever came before it and whatever comes after.

We celebrated the way you’re supposed to. Confetti and vodka and a lot of kissing, moving through Görlitzer Park—the neighbourhood’s sprawling, anarchic green space—and the open-airs that surrounded it. We jumped and drank and made out. May 1st comes once a year, so we kept handing the camera to whoever was standing nearby and let them document whatever they saw.

Hungover the next morning, I plugged the SD card into my laptop and a few hundred shots came at me all at once. Sharp ones and blurry ones, overexposed and underlit, colours cranked up and colours washed out completely. It’s a perfect record, actually. That exact mix of clear and ruined is what the day felt like. Forget Christmas. The first of May is the one.