1. Rotating Rosaries
In Berlin Cemeteries, death is not only celebrated but unfenced. Pouts are offered by people who feel the phenomenon of unexistence inching closer to them, or inching past someone they love. Tears offered as gifts, hoping that the watering of the grass grows a flower, from a seed, in a city with a history of walled emotions.
Leather is the core of a city’s personality for a two-day visitor such as I. Beautiful faces and dancing to techno in a vintage store with a 5 Euro photobooth fee. I meet British Tom in a coffee and alcohol establishment; I ask him what he does, learn that his name is Tom, and that he’s British. Today, he’s visiting a friend. For years, he studied sound art. Forever, he dreams, and so do I.
The wind rustles the leaves, but I stay in place. I’m a simple mass of opportunities chosen out of pride, or the yearning for a freedom that conveniently opens the door for me to be alone. “It’s time to go,” I believe it says. I tap my foot anyways, anxiously awaiting no destination or suffering an impatience for no reason.
At the charity-cause driven club we went to yesterday, I had a conversation with a man named Lucas. We talked about politics and violence. My friend got mugged for his iPhone later in the night. There might have been three German people against him, but when fists fly towards your soon-to-be concussed head, it might as well be four to make yourself seem tougher. Jokes aside, he’s okay, and he bought a new iPhone. The world is too ruthless.
Social dynamics are fascinating, yet universal, to say the most. Desire is complex, but made even more so without communication. That’s how I feel about some people in the program I’m a part of. On the most minimal level, miscommunication creates awkward tension. On the highest level, miscommunication creates an Iron Curtain around your heart and brain drain towards what you used to think you know.
What I know about people is what I know about cemeteries. We die, and then they love us enough to buy a tombstone and plant trees around our bodies. I feel the spirits, but it’s almost disrespectful to assume they stay in the little park that becomes anything other than a resting place. It becomes more of an arresting space, to be honest. Spirits hop on planes and study abroad too. Why wouldn’t they?
The city isn’t anything without its people. A diverse, beautiful, unpretentious, artful approach at wearing lace. In all seriousness, joking matters are shared with me only in a glance I could see and understand with the auditory simulation of a universal language – a smile.
In the line for the club, I met three Polish people. The one that lives in Berlin, ironically, is attending school for North American studies. I asked him what he knows about “us,” and he told me a lot, but not enough to be able to tell me due to his “imposter syndrome.” I wish I could’ve told him that the nomadic body is one where we are all imposters, as commonalities are not based on common place but instead a common yearning to find one. But I wouldn’t, because no one talks like that in real life.
The Polish man yearns to study a culture not of his own, to come to the conclusion that through his dedication, it becomes such a part of himself that it somehow becomes his adjacent culture. Becoming his intellectual culture, of sorts. It is the same reason why the academic director of my study abroad program is American. Yet he speaks Czech and has the cadences of what I believe a European to be.
Again, I generalize. But what is writing if not that, all the time? If I spent time being specific about how specific people are, I would never come to a conclusion 85% away from a lie. 15% from a full truth, that once you get 100% of, you realize never existed in the first place. Here I am, intellectualizing the collective experience we undergo to come to a conclusion.
I have a conclusion: tombstones are cool. Un-gated parks are cool too. We should all embrace, share, and understand death in a manner that is only a part of life. Some of my fellow students in the other tour group (of Berlin) complained that they felt such emotion from the Holocaust museum, sad and offended that they had to move on to other parts of the city.
As I empathize with their sadness, I must ponder about the artists’ beautiful intentions of creating an installation so heavy yet so centered in routine life. Children play on the stones, tourists take pictures, and I ate a chocolate bar while walking through it. The memorial then becomes the fabric of a beautiful objectivity, creating a lesson in the same function as this cemetery. That is, that life moves on.
2. German Kite
If I think I’m so human, and everyone else feels like an alien, what makes it so that I’m not the alien? What makes it so that we’re not all alien-eating each other? Being alone and getting to know people is inspiring, to say the most. I think the pursuit of love is my greatest fear – depictions of media in a phenomenon so common it becomes a non-phenomenon.
Hope is my heart as I beat myself to wish someone hopes to see me again. Nevertheless, I know it will be fine. Sometimes, fine seems not enough. Enough, sometimes, feels undefinable. Visions blur past the window; trees are indistinguishable from the ones I remember walking by. But they’re their own, just like the animals and people. A language divides as much as a reflection of my own face, obscuring the view I hope to see instead.
I suck at love sometimes because I don’t listen all the time. If it’s really a game, why must I speed-run it? Forward, to me, doesn’t always mean fast, but the world we have means forward and fast becomes attached to a road of hunger.
Jargon is my best friend, ramble is my cousin. Not everything will go my way, but sometimes I’m afraid the way I’ve gone is one of wrong choices! Something I can’t rewind, as if rewinding means rewriting, and as if either of those means redemption, or in a better word, continuing. The film program I’m in says to “show don’t tell.” I start to think that appeals to my life.
I love telling, showing while the words come out in a manner that excites the neurons in what I’m only confident is a brain when I’m present and so-called un-thinking in my approach to life. Isn’t that ironic, a rock of stubborn toes only walking to the beat of my own drum? To not think, to be present, is to use your brain at its full capacity? Unaware awareness.
In love, and life, I must be slower and more confident to say I have a brain as much as I am in saying I have a heart. None of this has to do with Berlin, but more with the general feeling of being solo-dolo in a program full of Americans in a country where people speak a language you don’t understand. Beauty is universal. So is insecurity.
I suck at love sometimes because I only listen to myself.