In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men.
Category: i wish
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a man of mouse
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wait what
When I got there the doctor said, “You know when we call you in at seven in the morning it’s not good.” She had called me in at 7.15am on Friday to give this news. I have cancer. She used words like ‘chemo’ and ‘metastasize’. She emphasised that these are words I may not need to learn. In my head there was only room for three words, the same three words recurring all weekend.
She gave me the name of a surgeon I’m to meet today, Monday, who will try to cut all the cancer out. She said, “You’ll be reassured to know that everyone’s going to be treating this as the utmost urgent priority.” I sort of half-laughed. “That is not reassuring,” I told her, wryly, and she made a comical face. I am proud of that wryness and that half laugh. Those are my courage.
She said she thought what they first found might have been inside me maybe a year. She said, best case scenario is I go into surgery this week and the new doctor, a man, cuts all of it out, he gets the lot, and after that I keep getting scanned and checked and tested for the next five years then for the rest of my life I will have to keep an eye on it and keep meeting from time to time with these doctors (“you’ll get sick of the sight of us, I promise you.”) Then there’s some spreadage and there is no cure so we irradiate it or poison it with chemo which doesn’t poison just the cancer but the host as well — me, in my body — and then at the far end is, the scans reveal it’s in your blood or lymph glands or your organs are riddled with it, we are sorry, there is nothing we can do, you have a few months, set your affairs in order.
Until the first tests come back there is no way of knowing how much cancer is in my body at this stage nor how far it may have spread.
The call from this doctor’s receptionist came as I walked out of the hospital from seeing Mum. That morning, Thursday four days back, I woke to texts from Mum at 4.30am saying hello I am very very sick and then from my brother at dawn, we are at the hospital with Mum, pneumonia and it’s not looking good. I went straight in to see her and I’ve never seen anyone so sick. She was shivering with fever and delirious and vomiting up coiling tubes of bright yellow foam like a pool noodle, like those batts you put into ceilings for insulation. We thought she was going to die. The doctors seemed to think so, too, and they told us, the family should come. When I came out of my own appointment next morning Mum had turned a sharp corner and by some miracle of resilience was sitting up in bed eating a sandwich. I was thinking what if she dies, what if she really does, what if she is dead already and she is gone and she’ll never know I have this. Instead, Mum seemed so much calmer and stronger and I visited again and made her comfortable in the too-short bed and listened to the doctors and my mother told me a story about her aunt, my great aunt, who died only two months back at 96. This great aunt had cancer, and I never knew. She had it cut out, and recovered to live this long life. Since returning from Africa at the end of 2022 I had been asking when could we drive up to see her. Instead, she died, and the day of her funeral I happened to phone and Mum said, Can’t talk now darling, we’re all in the car on the way to Warwick, and I said, Why, what’s happening in Warwick, and she said, “Auntie Berta’s funeral.” I said why — but why — how come I, and she said, smoothly, your brother put his foot down. He told us, if she goes, I’m not coming. And he’s a pallbearer.
I don’t know the source of this estrangement and no one can explain it to me. Soon it may be immortal, as far as anything human. I don’t know why my mother’s 84th birthday in November was held at this powerful brother’s house and I was not invited. I had been lured back from Ghana on the promise of the long-overdue reconciliation I had been asking for and working towards for more than a decade. That she let one of her last birthdays be celebrated without me, the whole family gathered just down the road, when I had been gone some twelve years and was actually living under her roof at that stage — I cried for days. And, in an aching gap in the crying I went to my first decent painting class and worked round the fire in my throat on my first decent painting. The boy’s name is Atta Bonye and his wry, thoughtful, sweet and spiced expression speaks to my heart. All I know is we are humans here together and life is turbulent and short. All Ghanaians know we cannot heal nor even address these painful things if the other party does not want them resolved. All we can do is cling to those things which bring life and give health, and try to distance ourselves from toxins, from cruelty in others and the impulse to cruelty if it should surface in ourselves, try to balance painful honesty with life giving kindness, try to be as real and as present as we possibly can, though it cost us everything, as they say in Accra, you have to “happy yourself.” -
a man in the house
I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering of people I didn’t know, who regularly host discussions of thoughtful topics. In a little while I was deep in conversation with two women, one of us Chinese, one of us Brazilian, and we were so relaxed and open together that our peels of laughter attracted a man in a blue linen shirt. He came and joined us, and when the Chinese woman kindly made him part of our intimacy by explaining, we were talking about online dating and what a minefield it is for women, he said, “I wouldn’t know about that, I met my wife before all this happened.”
That is, rather than ask questions and be curious about the rapport which had drawn him, he winched the conversational topic out of our grasp and put it firmly inside his own experience.
In fact he wasn’t just conversing, he was pontificating, complete with didactic finger wagging and pompous tone. Within five minutes the man was doing all the talking as the three of us women supplied what Dale Spender has called ‘housework’. “So how did you meet? Wow, that’s interesting. Gosh!”
I pointed this out, in a friendly tone, thinking that in a group based on thinking, he might be interested to learn something from a perspective he has not considered. Instead he took immediate and lasting offense. “Or,” he said, “it could be that you just have a negative attitude.”
Some men, even whilst literally setting straight a group of women whose discourse they have interrupted and whom they don’t know, cannot bear to be resisted or corrected by any insubordinate females. Their only recourse is, I must hate men. Imagine being so accustomed to civil obedience that any disagreement must be read as hatred.
When I told him that in a group of people of colour talking about the experience of Blackness in a white-dominated world, he would not expect (one hopes) to come into a discussion and begin pontificating about his own experience, he looked blank. “This is no different to any other conversation I have experienced,” he said, and when I said, “Exactly my point,” he didn’t know what I meant.
Eventually the woman to my left, who is from China, graciously took him on so that the remaining two of us could return to our rapport. We talked until she had worked out what she wants to do with her career, having qualified in law in Brazil and her qualifications not considered applicable in Australia. This insight, which was merry and nourishing, arose through the free and open discourse in which strangers respected and made room for each other; if we had submitted without protest to the domineering man, we would have had a less pleasant afternoon and she might not have gained it.
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kwasia
I am leaving Accra today. I said goodbye to Nii and Kadija and Mariama, the littlest neighbours, and gave away all my pot plants. Unless I can earn enough money to come back from time to time to make music, that is the end of Ghana for me.
In five years it’s been so difficult and fraught. I leave studded with injuries, hauling one stiff leg from the torn ligament where a man calling himself Black Jesus kicked me, savagely, in the main street one night because I didn’t give him any money. I arrived five years back with a sore heart, longing to find or build some humble way to contribute to the personal, partial, overdue reparations I feel each of us in the hyper-industrialised world need to be making to support our oppressed and exploited neighbours. Last night I learned that the man I’ve spent the last two years trying to love has ‘a beautiful rasta woman’ as he put it and that this has been going on perhaps the entire time. He may have targeted me for my kindness, which would have been evident in the spot I was sitting when he approached me, from the friendships I have with local street vendors passing and the courtesy to all the serving staff. I have learned Ghanaians tend to see this as weakness. Not all of them, but some. Before this man I had first come here to spend time with someone who also said in love and love, a police officer whose entire family welcomed me with such generous kindness, and in the end once I had managed to struggle with five consecutive lawyers in Berlin over 15 months and had brought him to Babylon it quickly transpired he and his family and his entire community had been fooling me for three and a half years. He walked out while I was at the park, in the middle of the lockdown, in winter, taking only his passport and my key. And for months I sat trapped on the couch in that silent apartment with its white sky and ticking heating, trying to build a better novel from what I had written, trying to make a new business that would bring opportunities here to Ghanaians and to myself. I very slowly grasped reluctantly what had happened between us, which was not what I thought. I rang him and asked him to come back for the suitcase full of gifts he had left behind, things I had collected for him in second hand shops, the €20 pure wool handmade suit, the thick Danish sweater, the handmade shoes. He said, I don’t need those things, just put them out in the street. So I put my love out there, on the street, on my sleeve, and came to Ghana alone two years ago this month in a hail of his innuendoes and threats.
I came in secret. He knew if I came back here I would come across phrases like ‘mugu,’ an exploitation, a con, and I would start to piece together why he had listed himself on a dating site in Berlin in the first place.
In Ghana ‘kwasia’ means you stupid, you nothing, you are nobody to me. I have never experienced such a long con of a thousand million approaches from this ingenious and determined, near universal, relentless and ruthless exploitative smiling opportunism. Alongside ‘thief’, in Ghana ‘a foolish man’ is one of the worst insults. I have been foolish. I have loved and hoped, have planted seven gardens in seven humble rental properties where subsequently someone came and dug up the maturing plants to sell or they just died of neglect or got paved over. Foolishness is joyful, as it brings so much celebration and appreciative focus, and there is sweetness in every leaf but my heart is swollen and it burns and I long to be a part of someone’s life. I feel alone. It is ten years since I lived in Brisbane and everything has changed. My brothers now have glorious teenaged families and I go home to the final realisation at last that the babies of my own I longed and long to love will now never be born. My nephews and nieces are strangers because at an earlier stage in our painful family history I was not permitted to get to know them. I want to have a cat on my lap and a garden outside my window, I want to have a window, I want an arm around my shoulder sometimes, I want a hand to hold. Life doesn’t seem to offer these precious everyday treasures to so many of us, no matter how we are willing to work for them. But I cannot give it up, I yearn to be absorbed in something other than writing and trying to learn to draw and compose music and sharing with such glee the everyday streetlife joys of existence with a hundred dozen thousand strangers. I long for something more personal, more lasting and filled with dishes and meals, errands and home time. Will I ever know a household as the world comes to its end. And all this big love inside me that aches like sunburn, will it ever find its channel and home, its child, its tree, its man. -
birthday season
Have you noticed how racists feel the description of their racism is worse than the actual offence? Someone will say something that’s steeped in hatred and if we say, that’s racist, they bridle. “Are you calling me a racist?” To name the crime, it seems, hurts worse than the attack itself.
It’s also true of men who use violence. So many of them are cowards who seem to feel that the description of their deeds — a story like this one, anonymous and public — is more unforgivable than threats and intimidation, insults and blows.
Last night I learned the violence of the man I had been learning in recent months to slowly love. He seemed so outraged by the deliberate pain inflicted by my ex. He showed his gentleness and all his curiously and then, all of a sudden, over nothing: you dirty, nasty, evil woman.Get your stinky white skin away from me. Skin cancer sick old white skin.
He was lounging on my tiny verandah as he said this, using my light socket to charge up his phone. You have to go, I said. I was trembling with rage and fear. And he spat. In my face. And that is what I’ll always remember.
Imagine spitting in somebody’s face. This is how we treat genocidal dictators and men who rape children. No fury could ever carry me there.
So I shoved him. I threw his shoes over the verandah. Just go. Go now. He doubled up a fist and shoved it towards me, to show me. I’ll punch you.
Paunch, he said. I’ll paunch you. Like a come-on from a cruise ship Lothario.
This was around twelve hours ago.
We need to learn to stop teaching our men to train all their rage on us and blame all their anger on women. All around you don’t you see it so incessantly: in advertising, in porn, in the entitlement of cat calls, in the idea that any man becomes a woman when he says so, in the women who say when they phone, sorry, it’s only me, in the girls who are told if he pushed you — it must mean he likes you.This man does not like me and this is not love. When he left he said over his shoulder You are a loser, no one loves you. It’s my birthday in eight days. Birthdays hurt in this season of my age when I tried so hard and hoped so long and longed to have a child, when I was so measurably fertile and no decent man made himself known. It rained heavily overnight and this morning I went down to the garden and brought in this bouquet.
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for crying out quiet
Eleven weeks ago today my husband walked out. I went to the park and when I came home, he was gone. When I closed the door behind me that morning there was no warning this would be our last night under the same roof, our last day as beloveds, the last time I would ever kiss him behind his little ear, or hear his voice under my cheek.
We weren’t actually married. But how he loved to call me his wife. Every taxi driver and all his friends: Mrs Him, my woman, my wife.
He had moved to Berlin to be with me, never having left Ghana before. His whole family came down eight hours from the village and he stepped bravely onto a plane all alone after his secondhand phone died suddenly overnight. Imagine walking away. You go through the passport control, take off your shoes. You leave the ground. And now – you’re in the air. Accra falls away like a toy, like safety. You fly nine hours across Africa, and across the white continent where everything costs five times as much. In your pocket, the phone is dead, no way of contacting her, or anyone.
It had taken us fifteen months to get him here, five lawyers, a serially declined student visa, a costly private college sponsored by my mother, who believed in our love. We moved in together to my artist’s apartment so joyously. The little cat fell in love. Then the winter came and then, corona: the twelve weeks’ isolation at home, at the end of winter’s grim five-month lockdown. We both got stressed, alongside everyone else on this earth; we had a fight, and spent the night in separate rooms. In the morning I went out to sit under the trees and read a little while to calm my mind. We had been six weeks in lockdown: I read Mary Beard, on women and power. Then I came home, and he was just gone.
Eleven weeks. I have seen him only about half a dozen times. I had only been gone about an hour. There was no note or sign but the door was deadlocked and his bicycle was gone; as I entered the house his absence quivered in the air like a guitar string. I had no way of knowing I would never kiss this sweet man all round the hinge of his jaw again, white people kisses he calls them, on the hairline, and he wondered aloud with his friend who has a German girlfriend, “What did I do to deserve all these kisses?”
For three days he didn’t answer my messages and I lay awake wondering was he ok, would a person breaking the curfew get arrested, was he sleeping in a park, where would he go? I tried not to imagine Berlin’s fearsome Neo Nazis having cornered him and pulped him, that he might be brought home in a wheelbarrow. Another Ghanaian man who lives in our street had been menaced right around the corner, a gang of seven spread out across the road, they toyed with him until they had made him afraid and then, he said, he all of a sudden just got so tired. He said in German, Ich will einfach nach Hause. I just wanna go home. And the leader told his gang: let him go home.
Let him come home. It’s been two and a half months and my throat thickens with sick tears every time I think of him and how we’ve parted. It’s so abrupt, sometimes my heart itself still feels quivering, like a guitar string dying into silence. That he will not give our sweet love a chance. That he believes I would move mountains to get him here and then on a whim in a rage tell him, get out, you have no place to go. That I said to him: Get out! Get out of my house. How could I, a white woman, say this to an African man. I cannot forgive myself and at the same time, I can’t understand like a dog locked outside this endless punishment. It feels like we were on a long journey together, we own a tiny property in Ghana, we have a business, we spoke of our longing to raise a child. His friends called me Mrs Him. She misses him. We were on our long road trip into our lives, two lives sustained by love and enhanced and emboldened by each other into great and wild adventure. He threw me out of the car, and drove off. He left me here standing at the roadside in a landscape I don’t recognise, and just drove off without me.
Everything in our world, as Europeans so comfortably call the place, must be so foreign and so strange. We went walking and he was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt, with the tongue. “Are you a fan of the Rolling Stones?” I asked, and he said, “What rolling stones.”
When he wrote to my mother to thank her for her sponsorship, he signed the letter with his name and Cx. That’s how I always sign mine. I guess he just thought that’s how white people end their emails.
Can’t you be curious, I have said, about the miscommunications that evolved between us, for it was never a difference in our values, it was never a lack of love. When I put my hand round him in bed he yelped my name. The two of us were strong and open and free together. Don’t you want to be loved, I have asked him: don’t you want love and affection in your life. My love and affection. Don’t you even want to be curious about what might still be possible? Why would you move across the world to be with someone, that someone being me, and then… refuse to have the painful or uncomfortable conversations, including with yourself, that might have cleared up our enterprise and given us our free channel down through the mangroves and out into the lovely sea.
How life is transformed when love is present. How everyday living is sweetened by waking up with someone whose presence fills you with longing and desire, by taking our breakfast together, just coming home and hearing his voice. I had been living alone, and eating every meal alone it felt like, for a thousand years. Now I was outside my lonely castle and at large in the free and wild ransom of the garden.
It was two and a half years. Australian poet, Ghanaian athlete. Our conversation had a terrific ease right from the start. We met online and I went to Accra to meet him, for three weeks, stayed three months, cried at Kotoka Airport. We went from penpals to shacking up together on our first night, so ridiculous and it shouldn’t have worked – but did. I am a few months older than his mother. When he met me at the airport we’d had only a few satellite calls spaced by a bad line, hollering, What? Can you repeat that? He went to work our first morning and came home and I felt I was home at last; the second night when he texted to say, I am at our gate, I ran pelting down the alleyway my bare feet slapping on the concrete and flung myself against the steel gate and he grabbed me and dragged me against him and we pressed each other close between the curling bars and kissed passionately.
Why would you leave that. How could you leave.
No one ever crossed the world before to be with me. Then he fled as abruptly as a battered woman flees a violent man. Waiting for the moment of safety when he is out of the house. He fled carrying only his passport. He won’t tell even his mother where he is living. Do not call me, he said, and I tried and tried not to call. For eight weeks, very little contact, and I sent the most occasional possible messages. Yearning for him. Sleepless for the smell of his skin.
He said, nightmares, and not sleeping, and I kept thinking somehow maybe he would come home. I was angry, too. He didn’t listen, men don’t listen. He tried to tell me what I am. I could feel once he had gone how he was vibrating with fear and trauma and I longed so to comfort my young lover, just to hold him and calm him and be held and cosseted, without these elements of safety and love what is my life even for. My heart bleeds pain all day and night. I am so crushed and devastated, I’m unable to rise, and he writes me ‘I am trying to get up from this blow.’ He says he loves me, he tells all our friends, I love her. Then he says, no hope, please don’t hold out any hope. I come home to my rooms from the suddenly radiant day and have to hold the radiator while dizziness passes, I am trembling like an animal.
I cannot understand and that makes me not forget. My heart is a hot water bottle far too full. “I have something to live for now,” he said, casual ly explanatory one day, months ago in Accra, “- and that’s you.” If all my love, and my devotion, and all that I am, was not worth fighting for – then what am I. What is this life, if we cannot get through to one another. “I love her,” he says to my mother, on the phone one night: “I love her.” “He said it over and over, maybe five or six times,” she tells me, and I bow forward on my couch where he lay around me with the tiny sickened cat in our arms a little family for those few sweet weeks or months or really – were they years – and we waited together the three of us for the vet to come.
One minute we were a little family, the three of us, two naked and one wearing her sweet lovely fur coat. The next minute unexpectedly she had died, horribly and in pain; he has simply vanished. I stay alone in the house with this long, slow, sharp pain. On the phone my mother starts up her familiar orchestra. Oh, so delicately. “I think maybe you were too much for him.”
We were living on separate continents, having grown up in different worlds. Every day I spoke to universities and read student forums and called lawyers. He was turned down for his visa and we had to appeal. A year went by. One afternoon the phone rang and his lawyer said, he’s got it! I said, “What? I’m crying!” and the lawyer said, “So am I.”
I booked him a ticket and went to Tegel to meet him. As I stood there waiting I had the feeling I had been standing waiting at the airport for eighteen months, to bring him home.
He won’t discuss it. “I have something to live for now, and that’s you.” When the Berlin bank gave him a debit card he handed it solemnly over. “You keep this, sweetheart, in case you need to spend it. Because I won’t be using it.” He told me, “We are one.” His friends say they have never seen him walking with a girl before. I weigh up his innocence with his responsibilities. His mother phones and tells me he’s not sleeping, he is ok, he’s having nightmares, he is fine. Her name is Patience, and she tells me, “We are all one family now.” We meet at last on the old abandoned meadows unkempt and flowering in the middle of Berlin, and I forfeit this chance to talk by breaking into hopeless tears and he lets me drop my head on his knee and cry until the denim is soaked through and when, ridiculous in grief, I howl, “Am I somehow unlovable? My mother keeps telling me there’s something wrong with me,” he is so angry he has to jump up and walk around, his voice breaks when he bursts out, “Well that’s just a big fat lie.”
The tawdry but beloved little honeymoon cottage in Accra, the mouse droppings in the cupboards. The three weeks become three months, and the tall steel gate. The flowers he sent me before we had even met, on his meagre salary, freely, beautifully, the casual sacrifice of such extravagance. The super-costly one way air ticket purchased at short notice at the height of summer in Europe and the feeling, as I prepared my house to receive him and told my cat, that now – I will be able to breathe again.
He texts me saying do I need anything, let me be there for you. He makes insightful suggestions about our business, which just as we paid off our loan totally stalled, the borders were closed and all our tiny guesthouse bookings were cancelled. He gets angry. Nearly every time we speak, he says, I love you.
Two years ago I took a screenshot of one of our video calls, to capture him, so far away, his soulful gaze and the interruption by satellite which ran an explanatory text across our screens, ‘Your connection is poor.’ “I disagree,” I told him, “I think our connection is rich and deep.” My sleep champion, my healthy role model of sleep, lying awake in some room whose address I must not know, sleeping on the couch of some friend he will not name, Europe looming on all sides of him like high white cliffs.
And me left behind, in the wrong kind of abandonment a lover dreads. I have rearranged my house; I’ve dragged furniture on rugs and hammered in pictures before it gets too late. I’ve asked him to redirect his mail. He has lied to me about money and told me the truth, today, about Tinder. He has told me: I don’t love you anymore. -
how white people got this way
Hey Europe! It’s like this. We stole the whole world from everyone. Retired behind desks to administer the plunder, lost our fitness. So we envy the godlike build of men who spent generations labouring enslaved. Fantasise about their sexual prowess/accuse them of rape. Racism is envy.
Now we mistrust everyone because they ‘want what we have,’ retreat to gated communities and single-person households. We imagine ‘them’ envying our riches and ignore that the reverse is also true: we are most of us longing for connection and family, searching for purpose and meaningful service. So we spend our days whining in five-bathroom houses with a pool table, “I’m so lonely. So depressed. So bored.” Consuming and disposing of the little left of everything that has not already been ruined — for comfort. The End. -
cherry tree, wait for me
Today I would give anything to run outside into this suddenly warm sunshine. I woke to birdsong and discovered I had left my window open all night. This is the first night since October that’s even been possible. I don’t feel the icy breezes snaking round my feet in the chilly living room, I can’t hear the ticking of the heaters. When I stood in front of the glass and gazed out I could feel the sun’s mighty warmth on my face. My eyes sting with tears thinking about it. It’s reached us.
This winter staining gradually into pink blue yellow spring is now extended indefinitely, perhaps eighteen months, perhaps twelve, perhaps three, as if by a bad council order. Such a long winter under such low grey sunless skies.I miss cafes, I miss walking past people and feeling the foreign-communal energy of their own brisk, or vague preoccupations. The feeling of their thoughts and breathing fringing and wrinkling my air. I just miss them being there. I miss the little coughs and the unconscious throat clearings and sighs and the faint breeze as my neighbour in some plinking humming bistro turns a large page in his sagging newspaper.That’s how we sit, that’s how I spend time with people. Cafes are my communion. I love the delicacy of their shared but parceled space. All along the old wall strip, the dead zone through Berlin that divided families like a terrible quarantine, the decades of no mans land that now is all overgrown with trees and nested with sweet birds, torn down one by one for new apartments as the city swells, one Japanese cherry tree after another will be touched by the sun and burst into its perfect ineffable colour, its blossoms fluttering and the sky a web of blue trapped in its branches. I want to lie there dazedly noticing the comings and workings of ants for whom springtime is an unending toil. I want to hear the punks on their houseboat creaking and clinking at beers in their foldout chairs. I want to feel a fast bicycle zip past me. Lie under the trees and feel their placid embrace, like two hands turned slowly outward to show me something.