In The End, It Was All About Love

by Musa Okwonga

Sooner or later Berlin will punch you in the stomach. When it does, please try not to take this personally—instead, try to treat it as a passport stamp, as a sign of your arrival. You won’t get on here if you don’t. If you hang around long enough, it will give you a kiss on the forehead, it will invite you to the less harsh parts of itself.

Berlin is not Germany, people will tell you. What they mean, of course, is that Berlin is not like the rest of Germany. But Berlin is deeply German.

Nice

Ah, mood swings. Though Berlin is a place of extreme seasons, this city’s divergent turns are not confined to the weather. Its inhabitants will shock you with acts of rudeness and kindness, often in the course of the same day. For that reason, you might find Berlin addictive. If so, that’s because it’s both too much and not nearly enough. You can saturate yourself in this city, but still find yourself deprived.

Is berlin just german philadelphia??

There is a specific time and date you have been fearing for much of your adult life. When that moment passes, you will be precisely one second older than your father was when he died, and you will have precisely no idea what to do next.

you will make it down to the top of the beach, where it will be late by then and you will sit with your knees tucked up to your chin and try to spot that point where the horizon meets the night. You know from the last time you were here that you will be unable to. Instead you will watch as the slowly-drifting sea perfectly reflects the skies overhead and the entire view becomes a bath of stars.

When some of your friends discuss the winter, they do so in quietly respectful, almost fearful tones, as if it were a mythical beast who might be trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Are you ready for the Berlin winter? they ask you.

what is remarkable for men is routine for women.

But you do not respect me, you say. We never argued and then suddenly you acted as if you hated me. I do not hate you, she says.

Been right here, to this day never got a straight answer to anything i asked her after.

so you now believe her view that you are a terrible person. Given this verdict, you are afraid to inflict yourself on anyone else. You will stay single until you have fixed what is wrong with you. ***

somewhere where you can pass out after the arrival of the sugar rush, then there’s that quiet spot in your neighbourhood, the one where the atmosphere is almost supernaturally gentle—

when you fall asleep here no-one nudges you awake.

It is the place where you are sitting where you heard from a dear friend for the last time, when he sent you a text message from his deathbed to remind you that, on that particular day, you were doing exactly what you were meant to be doing with your life: not worrying about making money, or what everyone else was achieving in their careers—just being. If you want to remember him, you go and eat there.

see also: place where you received news someone passed

where you were just beginning to build up the courage to ask out the woman who you had seen working there for years and then she left her job.

You do what you always do. For the first ten days after the break-up, you make sure you’re out each night. Not going wild with drink or any other substance, but hiding beneath dim lights and shrouds of bass-heavy sound. This is going to be fine, like it always is.

When you’re lonely, cities grow around you.

real

You have successfully navigated so many of life’s challenges by yourself for so long that it no longer feels to you as though you need anyone else, and maybe that’s how it comes across to others. Solitude seems to suit you so well these days.

I ask myself constantly if this is the case and if so do i enjoy being like this

Increasingly, being single feels like some form of punishment. You wonder what is wrong with your heart, why it seems unable to connect with others.

Your desire for love is the closest that you come to religion. Intimacy is the only thing you pray for, even as you avoid it.

also real

You spend a lot of time thinking about trying to leave your mark on the wider world, but you rarely think about the effect you have had on those in your most intimate surroundings.

you slowly begin to understand that maybe the most important work you will ever do is the work you didn’t notice, the type you did while you were running off somewhere obsessed with seeing your name on some imaginary bookshelf or festival billboard. It is the work of stopping and listening and caring, and you make a note not to get distracted from it too often in future.

Maybe you should not be so surprised that Berlin, for all its beauty, is a sideshow: and that you were enough.

All you have to offer her is you, and you are worried that will not be enough.

You were like that when you left London, slinking away on a morning flight—you would have left without seeing anyone, had a dear friend not thrown a surprise party for you. That made sense to you, because leaving home was as devastating as a break-up.

i dipped on everything over the course of six weeks

the friendships which never quite take root.

You hope they have something to show for their time in this town. You hope they recognise their bravery in having attempted to make a life here.

moving to baltimore alone is the scariest thing ive done so far

fair

You don’t really tell anyone this but a key reason you write is to save yourself—not in any spiritual way, but in the sense that any form of activity is better than slipping further into despair,

and writing comes more naturally, if not more easily, to you than anything else.

Well, you’re a slow one, sometimes a lazy one. But you are still there—and, though you perhaps set out with less equipment than you thought you would need, you are still ascending.

Maybe they could offer you rope, but you don’t ask for it, not yet. For now, their encouragement is the only draw you need.

the terrible truth that your discomfort is self-inflicted, that you are here in this state of financial precarity because you chose it. That is your punishment, to be endured silently, and so you keep your mouth shut.

Jealous, not merely envious: you not only want what someone else has, you resent them for having it. You are utterly disgusted with yourself—and, worse still, you are disappointed.

You wonder why you have not met anyone like that, or whether in your vanity you pushed them away or did not notice them at all.

You are so jaded at your lack of romantic success that you now doubt you would recognise the opportunity for love if it was presented to you.

Imagine what you would do if you were confident, and then do it.

Independently coming to the same idea

This loneliness is the reward and the punishment for having escaped most of whatever you are running from.

It’s just the price of any kind of physical and emotional freedom. But if I am still paying it then I can’t be free? And then Dr. Oppong, in that voice—always in that voice, like he’s telling you the end of a fable—ah, but you can’t truly understand freedom without captivity. Then he pauses—because he doesn’t want to make light of your suffering—and says: but seriously. When the loneliness comes, welcome it. By coming to you in a quiet moment, it is honouring you. Don’t distract yourself from it—treat it as you would treat a dear friend who has travelled many miles to reach you.

Because there are people who have tried to love you, but you have not allowed them to do so.

Some people say it is because you are looking too hard for it. Some people say it is because you are not looking at all. No one, including you, ever tells you that it is just bad luck.

Another friend tells you that you always seem to do things the hard way, to find the most aggressive way to test yourself.

That’s why you listen whenever your great-uncle speaks; because, after ten minutes or so, he always starts telling stories like this.

It’s about coming back to the places where parts of you belong, and part of me will always belong here. To be here today, I have travelled a circle the size of the world. I have travelled through love, through cities, through countries. And through it all, I have carried your name, as close to me as my passport.