Being back has been all too much. My body is toiling through an endless misery of sudden change and dark culture shock. And it feels like during the four days I have been travelling underwater, through endless airports and then a change of climate, into dark short days and misty frozen nights, the Western world has caught fire at both ends – America seems to have exploded in all of its underlying injustices and Australia has now from what I can gather officially turned its back on the Refugee Convention of which we were originally one of the instigators. Berlin is overwhelming and dirty and livid with struggle and grime. The two of us have been sleeping, incessantly, on a narrow mattress which requires everybody to sleep on their sides and all turn at once. At intervals we get up and stumble about in the cold, following the dog whose yipping almost split my ears when we first picked him up. My partner got on eBay and looked up mattresses. He has bought a decent, little-used bed for a price we can afford. The guy is about to go away for the week up to Cologne. Oh god, seven more nights balanced on our sides. “Well,” said the mattress owner, “why don’t I leave the key to my apartment down in the garden house and you can pick it up and come take the mattress away.” “Okay…” “Just take the mattress,” he said cheerfully, “try not to take any of the other stuff.” Some people really rock.
Tag: misery
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whiskey sour
Dear God, if there is a god. Save my soul, if I have a soul. Today grew miserable and I cannot say why. It was silly really. Guy in a cafe was rude. So rude! We grew happy again. The way bean stalks grow beans. Who cares about him. Anyway I set out on some work I have put off a long long time. Perusing old photographs for a publishing project. It took ages. Was frustrating. How unhappy I was, way back then. Finally I took off my computer and turned to my host and one-room housemate, who is also the man I like, and we had a blazing dark anchor lightbulb row. It didn’t make any sense. I hated him for being him he hated me for being me. God, we were furious. I felt like hurling things. I wanted to hurt someone. Not injure them but hurt them. I stormed out, fuck you. He had thrown my suitcase ineinander and stowed it by the door, Get Out~! I found a bar a few doors down. Ich was the only customer. Leaving, three hours later, I hugged across the bar the keep and told him, I was so unhappy when I came in here! Yeah, he said. I know. Anyway at first I asked him could he make me something strong, some kind of cocktail. Maybe something old-fashioned. Maybe a whiskey sour, he said. Sure, I said. I had three of those, then four, then five, Kai (the barkeep) showed me the postcards of his uncanny, dreamlike horse portraits, he used to sing in a band but now more photography is the dream. In his bar the lights were low-low and the music song by song. I think of you Brisbane. I think of you all the stupid men I have loved. Evolution, evolution. A third person came in, a “Handwerker” in heating whose name was Robert. I asked, was this the kind of song you like was that. How was it when the Wall came down. God, it’s ridiculous, we loved each other. Then I spilled out onto the street, I paid with all my hackneyed coins some of which are from Denmark and some Swiss and the rest, we promised we would look up one another’s blogs – cos we are modern – and I came home so enlightened with drunkenness that I just embraced my daft would you agh! lovely loving roommate and all is well, a well of wells, we are one Leute and I am here in Berlin the city which almost killed me and das Kiez, the neighbourhood, that saved my life.
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the bowled soul
Today I had to face some things inevitable but leaving pain. They are not my fault nor anyone’s and there’s nothing I can do about them. But it’s ok. You know how you grapple til you get to grips.
While I was grappling I walked the streets. As I walked I passed a very well-dressed woman talking with an equally well-dressed man. They were speaking in English. As I passed, she said: “and sometimes I feel like I could just lie down? and cry? You know?”
The clipped question marks at the ends of her sentences showed me a desperate soul. How courageous to tell it all to this man who had on a leather jacket and who when she said these words put both of his hands behind his back. I wove round some parked bicycles and came up beside her. “Excuse me. Did I just overhear you say, sometimes you want to lie down – and cry?”
Her eyes were blue and spiky with mascara. To her infinite credit their pupils did not shrink at this accosting by a stranger. “Yes,” she said.
I put my hand on her arm. I have no shame. “I feel that way too… sometimes. May I just say – as a stranger – please – just do it.
“Find someone who can hold you, and really hear you -” (we both inadvertently glanced at the well-dressed man, hovering nearby with a studiously disengaged expression on his face) “- or maybe a counsellor, and just do it. Don’t try to be brave.”
She was wonderful. I just loved her. Her face crumpled into compassion – for me. Women are incredible. “Oh,” she said, “that is so kind of you.” She put her hand on my arm too, as though we were dancing. “Oh thank you.”
As I walked on I felt the tears on my own heart lift and leave. How can this world be bad, that has such beautiful persons on it?
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higgle & piggle, hither & yon
Felt overcome by everything today & could not get out of my room until 4. So I went for a bike ride and found this basement cafe with a fireplace in the corner, right down the toe end of the sock on some higgledy-piggledy medieval street. O, comforting, o, deliciousness! But oh, no. Going up to pay I realized I had left my bank card lying on the desk at home. I could see it: scarlet, round-sided, shiny. The guy serving had made me the richest hot chocolate of my entire winter and didn’t look as though he wanted to call the police. We spread all my coins on the counter and sifted them. Australian cents with bandicoots on them, or are they bilbies? Or tiny wrinkled dugongs? A coin from the United Arab Emirates – on a long flight you pass through so many airports. There were three flattened rusted bottlecaps, valid in my own personal parallel universe, a shard of blue-painted china thrown out by the sea, and a badge which says Without Me You’re Just Aweso-
I turned over the docket and grabbed his pen. “Can you draw me a mudmap so I can find my way back here? These little tiny streets. I’m not used to them.” He did, with much head-scratching, and then we both looked at it: a long, wavering straight line with a dot on one end (the cafe) and a dot on the other (an intersection I would recognize). “This is a terrible map,” he said. I said, “It’s a great map. And it has your address on the back so I can ask someone. See you in two hours, max.” Probably his name is not Max but I daresay we understood each other.
