Journal Entry IV

Did you post witnesses? he said. To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you’d quit them?

That’s crazy.

Is it? Where is yesterday?

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Memory is something, as Julie pointed out in feedback this week, that shows up in most of my reflections and longer journal entries.  This one isn't going to be any different.

I'm sitting in the Jetpack Ecolodge in Grunwald, just outside of Berlin.  It is Monday morning.  I have just said goodbye to Zosia as she headed out to get her taxi to the airport and, though Sophie will be here another day, I feel pretty alone in a way that is both sad and exciting, and she too will leave tomorrow and then I really will be the last one in Berlin.

It makes a strange sense:  I was the first one of the group in the city, followed by Sophie half a day later, so I should be the last one out.  To truly complete the palindrome I should have stayed in Lichtenstein again but I wanted to see trees and animals before I left, not apartment buildings, and so I am on the opposite side of the city.

Of course I am not truly the last one out.  Manuela will be here.  Muhammad will will be here.  A few others I've met as well.

I kept telling myself this last week that it makes no sense to miss a place; that a place exists as we know it only so long as we are there, and then changes into something unfamiliar when we aren't.  You can only miss the way a place was, you can't miss how it is.  Only people, I told myself, can be truly missed.  They change too, of course, but you can experience them from a distance and know and still miss them as they are now.  Or you can miss the way they were, if they are dead or something else.  But it makes no sense, I said, to miss a place.  It is only the people in it.

As I walked into Grunwald I saw a slug.  I passed it, glancing, but then turned back and squatted next to it.  It was just a slug in the dirt, but what struck me was that it looked like any other slug I'd seen, and any other dirt I had seen.  There was nothing to tell me that this slug on this dirt was in Germany.  Everything here has been slightly different from home, just enough to be able to tell the difference, but no matter how hard I looked I could find no difference here.  I sat there looking at the slug until I had to look away.

It was, in that moment, as though I was in both places simultaneously, as though some of my next world had bled through into this one.  It was beautiful being able to experience both places at once in that small way, but awful to, even for a moment, be able to miss both places simultaneously.  I think you need to be able to be in a single place to have a point of reference from which to long for something else.  Without that it was overwhelming, for me at least, to feel that longing for both the place you are in and home.  I discovered abruptly that I was wrong about not being able to miss a place.  You can miss it just for how it was and might still be, even if it doesn't make sense.

Zosia and I had a conversation a few days ago that we won't truly miss Berlin until we are on the plane home.  When I know she's landed, I will ask her if that was the case and I know, no matter how I phrase it, it will be with the same anticipation and curiosity as you would ask a friend: "Did it hurt?" after some medical procedure, before you undergo the same.

I will finish the assignment closer to the due date, to compare how I feel now with how I will feel then, and to actually address the prompt completely.  People are waking up now for breakfast.  I think I will go meet some of them.

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It's now about three weeks since the program ended.  I'm back at home in Seattle writing this when I should be getting ready to go to work.  I read back over what I wrote almost exactly three weeks ago and I'm surprised how intensely I felt about some of the things that had happened.  I almost deleted a bunch of what I had written, but how I feel now isn't any more valid than how I felt then and at the time I felt like that was what I should write.  But I guess the word I picked above to describe how I felt pretty well sums up my experience in Berlin: intense.  Everything was bright and vivid and dreamlike.  Even small things like walking to the laundromat were an adventure and a chance to explore.  And when it was over it wasn't like waking up from that dream, it was like finishing a long run and feeling exhausted but accomplished.

There are many things I'm still thinking about three weeks later, and there were many large memorable events (dinner with Mohammad, working at the workshops).  I could write about those but I don't feel like I have a lot of time to write now and, if I'm going to, I'd rather write about the small things that I'm at risk of forgetting.  So here are a few of those that I hope will stick with me:

• Sitting on the bus on the last day with Sophie (she ended up staying longer than I thought in the first half of this post) and asking her if she thought we'd forget how strange it was in Berlin, and how strange the whole trip was in some ways.  She said it was already fading, and I know I don't feel the full impact of it anymore now.  But, when I think to that moment I can remember some of how it felt, if not have that actual feeling again.
• Walking around Prague with Zosia and Clayton.  I have plenty of pictures of buildings and things but one of the best parts of that weekend was just going off on our own and hanging out in Prague together and there aren't many pictures that really remind me of that part of it.
• Walking around Berlin the first few days with two Australians and a Lithuanian I met.  I lost a bunch of pictures off my phone from the first two weeks, but we went to some museums and restaurants together.  It was really nice, thinking back, to walk around and try to think of differences between our countries to ask about.  They hadn't really been in Europe long and I was one of the first Americans they had really met, and they were the first Australians and certainly the first Lithuanian I had really talked to.
• Going out in the rain to get food after we got back from Sachsenhausen.  I had just changed into dry clothes and offered to go get food if other people paid for it.  Five us of sat in our hostel room and ate Turkish pizza and de-stressed from that whole experience.  I found I really didn't mind walking in the rain, and still don't, after everything that happened that day.
• Walking everywhere is something else I got used to on that trip that I hope I don't lose.  I walk to the grocery store here now even though I used to always drive.  It's only a mile and a half round trip, I'd say, why not?
• A ton of other small things.  The sound of the U-Bahn, the look of the stations, the feeling of walking on cobble, looking up at the TV tower, walking abound museum island at dusk and listening to buskers, always watching for pickpockets near Checkpoint Charlie and the big stations, sitting in Catherine and Becca's room watching movies with people until 1am, looking at the transit maps and figuring out the best ways to get places, going to the chicken place over and over, running down the sidewalk at midnight racing Clayton and Catherine and Brian and laughing when Clayton won in his dress shoes.

When I turned in my community asset map I zoomed out and looked at Berlin for the first time since I left.  It was sad leaving, like I thought it would be.  I rented a car and drove to Frankfurt to get my flight, and I had meant to stop at a few places in the city before leaving, and then just didn't.  Before I knew it I was out of the city and wasn't turning around.  It was sad to know that I had left, but I felt like I had seen almost everything I knew I wanted to see, and tons of things that had been surprises.  I hope I go back someday, but more importantly I hope I'm able to bring someone with me, Sarah, or my sister, or one of my parents, so I can show them all the neat things I found while I was there.