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.

To survive here, you need to be at least half wolf.

you might find Berlin addictive. If so, that’s because it’s both too much and not nearly enough.

The startling dryness of schnitzel is in keeping with the Germans’ apparently robust attitude to discomfort.

The language sometimes seems like a neverending blizzard of syllables,

You wonder if it is Berlin that has enabled this, a city so stark in its challenges that it forces people to form unusually strong bonds.

Whilst this town offers many escapes, many vices, yours is icing.

hiding beneath dim lights and shrouds of bass-heavy sound.

When you’re lonely, cities grow around you.

What a time to have a migrant body. What a time to live within this terrifying vehicle, this dark bulk.

now, with each passing year, your identity is being divided up, with each element progressively more dangerous.

You love surprising people who come to Berlin, who expect to hear the bass drum and end up entranced by birdsong.

maybe the most important work you will ever do is the work you didn’t notice,

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

You need to earn the Berlin summer by struggling through the cold,

Take your joy where you can in Berlin. Get that extra drink just before closing, always.

Relatively few people take taxis in this city—for those who do, it is a sign of bad planning and therefore of a very good night.

You’ve made it. You are not making it, you have actually made it—you have made it to this city, at this point in history. You have found this sanctuary, in amongst all the madness, you are paying your rent, and the work is somehow coming from somewhere and you are loved.

Berlin is a universe; if it doesn’t engulf you on your first visit, you aren’t doing it properly.

that Berlin may sometimes want you to suffer, but never to rush.

Berlin is not a bubble. Many people will call it that, even those who should know better. It is not a bubble. A bubble is a carefully-sealed world whose occupants are oblivious to everything that happens beyond it. Berlin is something different. It is a refuge, an enclave, a safe haven.

How To Walk Home In Berlin. Years after your arrival in Berlin, you will still stop on your own street corner and take photos of your walk home, as awestruck as a tourist. That’s because this city has a magic to it.

In many ways, despite its flaws, Berlin works—and maybe that is why its relatives are so ashamed of it. A place this unruly wasn’t meant to be a success. Berlin is the queer kid who ends up as a happy adult.

Before you arrived, you had thought it was mostly hedonism, harsh architecture and partitions; now, you realise that Berlin is an introvert fiercely disguised as an extrovert.

Love is thinking ahead, being proactive about helping your partner to be happy—it is planning a surprise dinner for them the day they finish their exams six months from now. It is remaining grateful for them, it is continuing to thank them for the same things you did when you first met them.

This city is an army of misfits, and maybe that’s partially why you make friends so fast here: because people are in such a rush to build something better than that which they grew up in.

most of your team-mates are far better with the ball than you. In previous teams you had generally been one of the more gifted players, but here you are one of the least. For some reason, that makes you enjoy it all the more. After all, you reason, you are all in this team to build the same thing: and though you may not be the star architect, there is an equal value in laying bricks.

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

need to go to therapy: you know that because you have slowed down and you have seen nothing to encourage you to speed up again, and because in your flat there is now a thin film of dust on everything.

Nothing worked, till he stumbled across the office of a black doctor, A cheerful middle-aged man from Munich

That the air above a city carried the memory of brutalities past.

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

Outside, when approaching a local, make sure you greet them in their own language as soon as you are within earshot. Integration!

When going through Customs, don’t look too cocky. You’ll get stop-searched if you look too free, if you’re too gleefully crossing borders.

visibly broken souls do not smuggle drugs.

you are now the only thing faster than hate, which is the speed of a fleeing refugee

There are so many photos on your phone of this city. You take them every time you feel supremely happy.

You are probably happiest in transition, in that space between completing a satisfying piece of writing at your desk and heading out to embrace both your loved ones and the long night ahead.

they never really left Uganda, were always drained by thoughts of those they had left behind.

Maybe, to you, home will always be a moment. For some, home is a building, an actual place, but for you it is a feeling, the handshake of an old friend or the embrace of a new one, the first mouthful of a meal cooked with love.

imagine what you can do with all that energy you once spent escaping.