Writings

First part of a story I'm writing

]It all started because I moved to Berlin. Berlin has one of the best art scenes in the world and it was the perfect place for an artist like me. I know what you are thinking. Why not Paris? Paris has all the romance and beauty in the world but I love the nitty gritty feel of Berlin, the Holocaust Memorials that shoot up in random places, the garish buildings and the dirty river. Sometimes I watch the tour boats go by and wonder why anyone would troll down that completely unappealing river. Sometimes I take the ring train and go around the city over and over again. I like the graffiti and drinking beer in the street. I like the pub crawls and museum insel and Turkish men smoking hashish, I like the weird calm I feel when I am there, I like the metro which seems transported from another era. Some new and shiny and some outdated and old fashioned. I like the clash of the past with the present, the world war two bombs that occasionally call life to a stop, the tiles marking the former Berlin wall. I like the designer shops and the communist monuments. Mostly I like how discontent I feel here. There's always something egging me on. A slight edge like there's something I need to do but have forgotten. A feeling of unease and unhappiness, like something is slightly off, as if I were in a sci-fi show and the nagging I feel is knowledge of another universe or a secret I can't remember nor keep. I suppose that is why I found Markitos in the first place. We were two malcontents driven together by the disturbing hole we saw in ourselves, a hole that couldn't be filled. A hole that drove us to learn German.

At first I was astounded by the remarkable ease with which I navigated Berlin. Everyone could speak English, in fact I almost thought there were no real German people in Berlin. But the nervousness and entitlement I felt every time I walked into the shop where I bought paint, or the sushi place or the supermarket was eating me alive. The fear that this time I wouldn't be able to explain what I wanted or that they were judging me for speaking English or that I wouldn't be able to get ibuprofen drove me to enroll in a German night class. I used to believe in fate, I think it was fate that brought us together. But it was a different force entirely, that destroyed us.