The Story of Berlin - Part IV

To Part I & II
To Part III
To An(other) Epilogue

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You already know how the story ends. I went and saw him play for the last time. A packed out smoky room full of the usual, urber urban crowd that no one ever has a proper definition for. He still sang too fast and I still didn’t undertand a word he said, but I understood that he dedicated their last song to me, and I blushed as the audience turned around to look at me. After the show we sat at the corner table, and kissed over a glass of red wine, his prickly stubble scratching my face ever so gently. But its beginning to really hurt now.

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In my last few days here, I did all my favourite things with my favourite people. I shopped at the Turkish markets for all the ingredients for the Oasis Saland, and made it in our dainty retro and colourful kitchen and devoured it along with some devine sect with Suszanne; walked along the cafes and curiosity shops along Burgmannstr and went to the bookshop for dinner on Friday night with Wei; had a sunset picnic by the river with Franci entertained by spontaneous guitarists and fire jugglers; cooked Voku with Emma using gleaned ingredients and smoked rollies outside the Tea House; drank coffee with Amy on those long benches outside the local bakarei run by the Polish family; sat in the audience in Club der Polnischen Versager and saw Teresa pull off her finest performance as the feature act; a leisurely run by the river; tea at Ringo’s; ice cream at Isobel’s; doing homework in front of my open window looking into the neighbour’s windows – still trying to figure out whether there is a hidden rooftop library behind those green vines and purple flowers. Everything I’ve loved about Berlin, the people, the style, the flair, just like how I would have liked to live those every other day, not because these are my last.

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What is it like to make love to someone for the last time?

What is going on in your mind? Recreating something it treasured before so you can take it with you always? Consoling itself by savouring what little it has left now? Rewarding itself because it had made a wise decision? Punished by the aching body that disagrees?

What is going on in your body? In pain because it is about to lose something? In pleasure because the pain is so severe that it is so numbingly and intensely exhilarating? Fighting back the mind a little, giving into it a little?

There’s a battle inside you, the battle we have inside all of us. Love, hate, longing, resentment, passion, dread. Every emotion imaginable culminating inside you and you feel like you’re about to explode, the earth beneath shaking so hard that it splits open. And when you come, you come so hard because you are just so fucking angry. Angry at yourself, angry at him, angry at your over-competent mind and your incontrollable body.

No one ever walks away unscathed.

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My backpack is 11 years old now, and it has been to 39 countries with me. We are about to go onto our 40th. It has a favourite place to be: next to any front door, filled, clipped up, weighed and ready to be hurled upon my back.

Travel is an addiction, but the wanderer has to learn to live with the compromises. Every time I pack up an empty room there are mixed feelings. Exhilarated about the next destination, of the new colours and sounds and smells, and making most of the human experience; Lamented about leaving the place I’ve just become used to, of friends I can call now call family/ people that know me and understand me from just a few seconds of conversation, of leaving a place I’ve just managed to call home; Longing for the homes I’ll always have but I seem to never be ready to go back to, the birthdays and laughter I’ve missed, each petal that flowered and each whisker that shed that I never got to witness.

But I know these are my choices, because any of them are my opportunities, and that I have the knowledge that I have them, and the freedom to go down any of those paths according to the judgement that I am assured that I have. These are the things that my grandmothers or even my mother did not have, and to honour this, I will keep choosing for their sake and my sake, and keep going forth.

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I left Berlin on a Saturday. The train took me on a rickety line out of his graffitied suburbs, through broken depot yards and lines of abandoned carriages, out into the open green, until he simply turned into a little dot on the map.