the vaccine: leaving berlin
dear friends,
I’m in new york city. sleeping on a futon in the living room of a friend (and first ever tango teacher’s) apartment in queens, where all the people of the world meet in an explosion of ethnic grocery stores — chinese, turkish, puerto rican, korean — on one street — in the season where peach, magnolia, and cherry blossoms have already peaked, under a light drizzle of spring rain, in a neighborhood I’ve passed through often but never lived in, such that being in new york city feels very much like a destination to me — like a smooth continuation of my travels.
it’s been a year and three months since I left this city I once so loved and hated, a city I moved to at eighteen, and left at twenty eight. and if home is a place, a constellation of places where the heart lives, then, I am here, questioning my heart: which parts of you still live here?
wait wait wait, you say. weren’t you in berlin — what and how, why and when - did you cross worlds so fast, change channels on the TV like this, as if by impulse or accident, what happened, how did a whole play get called off, an entire life disassemble in the blink of an eye. do you remember? do you remember what I wrote in a pandemic winter in berlin? I hold the strings to this pop-up life intertwined in my fingers and know: how suddenly the winds can blow, how kite strings can snap, how it can all blow away. in a day, an hour, a second. into nothing.
so do I write the truth I’ve lived, or do I self-prophecize the future? did I not tell you how I was feeling restless in berlin — how spring weather brought a strange melancholy in me; an urge for movement — how I felt premonitions so witchy they scared me? I was the dangerous combination of restless and comfortable; which meant I was highly combustable; trauma-friendly. in that state, life will throw in a crisis or two to trip me, trigger my emotional immune system, and then, within twenty four hours, I will scorch the earth I stand on, unravel my sanity, unveil a bitter sobriety, upheave everything, and leave.
this time, it happened like this:
01. LEAVING BERLIN
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that night, I slept two hours and woke up to a complete solar eclipse in me, followed by a week of debilitating anxiety, in which I struggled to move through the hour, let alone the day; waking up at four am to cold sweat and my heart racing. my sense of reality had completely inverted itself, warped under heat and darkness like a dali painting. each moment was laced with swords. I could not move, breathe, think. if I could not trust in my own conviction, then how could I trust in my perception of reality? how could I trust in myself at all, how could I trust in — anything?
for five days, I did almost nothing. I woke up and felt blinded by daylight. I sank into varieties of darkness. then, on the sixth day, I got up. and within twenty four hours, I did everything. I booked a one way ticket to new york city — departing in three days. I checked airline and country regulations. I filled out health declaration forms. I found a friend to host my self-quarantine. I took a coronavirus test. I checked appointments for vaccines. I packed up my apartment, my entire life in berlin, found a new home for my plants. I texted a few friends and wrote: I’m coming. then I texted my stranger-love and wrote: I’m leaving.
in retrospect — sitting in silence on a nine hour flight to new york city — I marveled at the sheer power of my particular kind of crazy, as if it were a Dionysian force beyond my control; a mythological beast in me that I could not fully tame; a creature of infinite destruction and creation — capable of bending time, space, and reality, an entity that completely possessed me. what energy I wielded in my being — like a great tsunami or earthquake — enough emotional momentum to propel me across an entire ocean in three days; to pull me out of one life, and throw me into another. this, too, is a journey: to become comfortable with my own kind of insanity. my afflictions of the mind and heart. I am creator of my own disease. I give myself the vaccine.
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