Chaos and Eternity

I arrived at the apartment on Pappelallee after traveling for six hours (it felt like) in a van, in the middle of seven people I’d never met. Two parents and their five kids to be exact. Big family.
It was nice actually, in the end it felt a little like it was my own family moving me into the new apartment. The mother squeezed me fondly— call if you need anything!—goodbye. It was a good thing because an hour or so away from Baerenort I started..to..panic inwardly.
Now, I’ve lived semi-alone, or been alone, been to Berlin by myself, gone plenty long periods without seeing family, or without seeing friends, and it’s not as though I didn’t think about this move a lot…but somehow I just suddenly wanted to go back. To say, no wait, I changed my mind…and to perch again on my window overlooking the birch trees. All the moments I’ve spent in that house con fuse together and stretch out into an eternity in my mind. It is out of time

Perhaps it is not really Alex’s fault, but the apartment that day was appalling. The rooms in various stages of disarray, the dishes and cups in various stages of being encrusted and covered by little flies, the bottles of cremesoaps, shampoos and toiletries in various stages of falling over themselves onto the soiled bath rug. And I walked through the rooms in various stages of dismay. I couldn’t handle it, in fact, so I walked out. I stuck two hours into the cracks between oversized granite sidewalk stones and fifty year old thumb holes still in building walls, and sniffed around asia markts, the nearby pharmacy, the chocolate café, feeling my way around the street-car vibrations, the female sex toy shop, the second hand stores, the sandy playgrounds.

Playgrounds in Berlin are the best. They still have all those dangerous playpieces, high rope webs, towering slides, wooden castles or ships with fading paint, round metal spinning plates that dizzy children fly off of …things that in America I’ve either never seen or have been replaced by trashy plastic lego-like jungle gyms and banal corkscrew slides in the name of insurance costs, I mean, kids’ safety. There are these spielplätze and then also newer more innovative ones with elements like strangely carved and curving bridges around poddish elements. I sat on one of these a moment and then, it was time to go back.

Returning to the chaos, I think I have never seen so much dust, but somehow it all was conquered and now my room is…barren but beautiful. Not quite mine yet, but it is getting there.