The sun’s been shining for nearly a week in Berlin. We’re talking clear blue skies with only the brief appearance of a cloud. It’s weather that has everyone talking about how bad the winter was, how impossible the spring started to feel. Of course I wasn’t here for any of that. I’ve been joking that I brought the sun from LA, adding a “you’re welcome,” to get a laugh. In my head I picture this like I drew a golden cloth of sun across the globe, unfurling it over the chilled city.
After last week’s rough start, I’ve experienced moments of genuine elation with the sense that I’m in the rightest of right places. There have been other moments of total confusion, a marked emptiness of thinking “Why am I here?” or wishing my phone would buzz. Mostly, though, there’s been a lot of time to think. I haven’t been putting headphones in for my walks so that I can take in the sounds of the city. It is a collision of noise—a jazz of sorts—and also a collision of architecture, aesthetics, and languages. This is one of the reasons I love Berlin: its contradictions and simultaneities make it difficult to sum up.
Between work and meeting up with people, I’ve spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood, taking in the buildings and proliferation of trash and the crocuses jutting up through the hard earth. Kreuzberg is the area I first lived in, and I’ll only be here another couple weeks before going to the opposite side of the city so I’ve been staying close by on my various jaunts, cutting down the wide tree-lined park from Oranienplatz to the swan-flecked Landwehrkanal, or walking through Mariannenplatz (where I saw a naked man scurrying behind a tree the other day) to my beloved Markthalle Neun for groceries.
Though much has changed in the last 3.5 years, enough is the same to give me a sense of this return being nearly ritualistic. Seeing the weeping willows newly fuzzed with yellow-green, I am connected to other times I’ve passed these trees. I feel the changes in me that have occurred since I first walked that path in 2017. It’s a sensation I have had again and again in the past ten days: as though the remnants of my past self there standing beside me. Like friendly ghosts, they remind me of who I was at other times on this street or in that museum or in this grocery store. It’s a gift of non-continuity of place, something I couldn’t experience had I stayed years ago.
Ultimately, though this week had its challenges, it was full of gifts. I’ve been heartened by how much better my German is after a year of doing online tutoring. The constant anxiety I used to have about a surprise interaction auf deutsch is gone, leaving only excitement for the chance to speak. I used the app Tandem to meet a 57-year-old dentist for coffee. She told me about growing up in a small town in Thüringen in East Germany, about the day the wall fell. That night, her family was sitting around the dinner table during a birthday party with the TV on in the background. Though they saw the jubilation on the news, they kept eating, assuming it wouldn’t change things as much as it did.
Other good things happened, too. After setting out on an aimless stroll on Sunday, I happened upon the Gropius Bau and saw Zanele Moholi’s incredible photography show. I met many new writers and saw an ex I thought I’d have complicated feelings about and only felt a sense of gratitude for the catalyst he was in my life. I went back to Jaja—a favorite restaurant in Neukölln—for the first time in years and ate a creamy raw cabbage salad dressed in nori and toasted sesame seeds (and drank three glasses of their excellent natural wine). I spent a couple hours at the Frauen Hamam—a women’s-only sauna—and laid happily on the heated platform until I was baked like a rotisserie chicken.
And perhaps best of all, I’ve stopped asking myself “Why Berlin?” as often, even as the new people I meet ask me with comical regularity. I’ve realized that I’m just here because I need to be—for now, for who knows how long—taking in the city, writing a new chapter of my life, waiting for the days warm enough to swim in the lakes, and for the answer to that question to become clear while I’m busy doing other things.