LATE/NEVER

Berlin, love of my life, apple of my eye. The time has finally come for us to part ways. At least for a little while.

I am so sorry it got this far. Maybe you know the feeling when you desire something so much and hard and you identify with that desire so thoroughly that it becomes such fundamental part of your identity that you can never let it go? Probably not, you are a city, a chaotic and unregulated mass of desires and hopes and love and pain and beauty. You do not desire, you are desired.

Maybe this is the core of the problem: the wrong kind of people desire you, now – or rather, no longer my people. They are making of you something you were not, and i have started to accept this as a life lesson. Things change, and they more often than not (at least in this ugly timeline i ended up inhabiting) change in a way that does not sit right. And that’s ok. At 33 years old i finally get one of humanity’s most basic lessons. Better late then never, wasn’t it? Another platitude that at a certain point in life will ring truer than ever, i guess.

Summarising here how much you taught me would be impossible. I changed so much since i moved here, at 22. My head spins if i try to look back. In your cold embrace i was reborn, more than once, i got lost and was found, i laughed and cried and laughed some more. You taught me that madness and creativity are some of the few things that make our disgraced species worthy of kindness. You showed me that beauty can be found even in the greyest of winters. And it is solely thanks to you if i understood that life is bearable only if i don’t take myself too seriously.

However important you have been, you are not all there is out there. Hopefully one year will be enough to find my centre again, and maybe that centre is going to be you again. But i don’t know now. We shall see.