In five days I will get on a plane and leave behind this place, the partner I had for 3 years and all the friends I made in the 2 years I lived here. The sky is threatening rain, which is nothing new for Berlin, and I can hear my compact washing machine spinning in the background. Chicken soup is on the stove-top and the apartment smells like an old Jewish lady, in the best possible way, of course.
Because I’ve never been much of a scenester, the memory of the places I’ve lived are always based on the apartments I lived in. But, as many agoraphobics I’m sure will agree, that apartment is a microcosm of the city at large. Take this apartment in Berlin. There are millions of weird details that would only be found in a prosperous European country. For example, the toilet has a shelf–or a German Stool Inspector–as my friend Lee fondly refers to it, and two flushing options. There’s also a special heating rack which you can hang towels on so the towels are nice and warm when you get out. This detail in particular held a lot of weight with me because when my parents went on vacation to Venice one rainy April in the mid 90’s, my mother came back raving about the hot towel rack. It became part of our conception of luxury, ditto with bidets. When I ended up in possession of one of these magic racks, it was a strange bittersweet reminder of how far away I was from my family and how different my life was from their’s.
Right now I’m imagining myself as an alcoholic old woman speaking mysteriously about her former life to near strangers in a bar; “I was in Berlin for two years between 2007 and 2009. The walls were gray and the church bells rang at 6pm every day and twice on Sundays. ” But I suppose part of this whole blogging business is a safeguard against forgetting all the details of your life at different stages. Maybe I’m afraid I won’t remember my gray walls when I’m drinking heavily in my 70’s. Maybe I’ll just wander around drunk telling people to google me. God how depressing!
And the irony is, Berlin embraces drunk 70 year olds. They still fit in at clubs and bars. The US is terrible in that respect. Women, especially, become invisible after 40. For some it happens even earlier.
And yet I am leaving this place and risking invisibility, suburban living, mass consumption, a population known for their irritating earnestness, dogmatic tunnel-vision, and overwhelming stupidity. Because at the end of the day, I can’t live with that towel-rack feeling. I can’t just reinvent myself in a foreign land and lose connection to my family and my homeland. For all my snobbery about the old world, I am an American and I want to wither and die there.
Auf Wiedersehn and Danke schön Berlin meine liebe! Thanks for the memories.
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