Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

They are long days—altogether, the working hours probably exceed those of an office worker—and yet, unlike in an office, here no one is counting hours, because in this life work plays an important role without being an obligation or burden. On the contrary, work is a source of growth and creative stimulation, the bassline to the tune of leisure.

Their friendships were surprisingly easy, but there was also something precarious and brittle about them. Anna and Tom had been welcomed with an almost suspicious level of interest and openness, proof of a loneliness everyone was trying to exorcize.

There was the odd sudden, unprovoked defection, but never any fully fledged rifts—they weren’t close enough to warrant actually hurting each other. Instead, the group would undergo internal realignments, opportunistic shifts in allyship.

That sense of instability manifested as a constant nervous energy. Every winter, every weekend, could be one person’s last and another’s first. It made Anna and Tom feel alive, fueled their curiosity and sense of adventure, and reinforced the impression that the city was inexhaustible.

The results of that love were all around them. Delicious hot meals, their bills paid, a job and home they liked—the details that comprised their life.

What was happening to the city—the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity—was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.

It did occur to them that, had they arrived now, they probably wouldn’t have found an apartment as good as theirs, or not one they could afford. Sometimes this realization prompted a flicker of anxiety, as if the solid life they had built was merely an accident of timing.

Though it remained unspoken, Anna and Tom would both feel the crush of nostalgia. What were they doing there? It wasn’t so much their hometown that they missed, but something they had taken for granted back when they lived there. They couldn’t say precisely what that something was, but its absence made daily life in Berlin feel intense, draining—more exciting, maybe, but ultimately harder.

They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

The problems back then might have been more urgent, but they also had clearer solutions. Now there were too many choices, with each one leading off on endless branches, preventing any real change.

the very idea of office work had something shameful and defeatist about it—although this feeling was far from clearly defined.

But doing things steadily went against everything they knew. They did a thing properly or not at all;

the seductiveness of the images made them forget all the stress that lay just out of frame. The life depicted in those photos was free and exciting. They were also the photos with the most likes, and the ones that tended to attract comments months after being posted.

Anna and Tom, surrounded by friends, with their bags packed and an exciting new city awaiting them, their apartment dotted with candles and an autumn rainstorm pounding at the windows, soaked up a feeling of freedom and adventure that they hadn’t felt for a long time.

They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in Berlin and then tried and failed to find again that winter. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs.