Between Berlin and Berlin
"just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."
Before the pandemic, I learned not to speak with any sort of certainty about the future. This was hard won knowledge, which is to say, I gained it through the metaphorical equivalent of repeatedly banging my head into a window after thinking it was just air. I had to come back to the US from Berlin on October 14th, 2018 for family and work reasons, thinking it was a three-month visit. I had plans to move back (including plane tickets) in February 2019, March 2019, May 2019, September 2019, August 2021, and finally (?), in January 2022. Had the pandemic not closed the borders in March 2020, I’m sure that list would be much longer.
Now, just over three years since leaving Berlin for my three-hour tour, I find myself unconsciously repeating the script to friends. “I’m moving back to Berlin,” I say, but the words clang in my ears, reminding me of the irony in my use of the definite. Perhaps it would better to say, “I am theoretically moving to Berlin, unforeseen circumstances pending.”
It’s easy to forget that none of us knows what is in the future. The pandemic has driven that point home with comical force, like a mocking know-it-all, but still, if you believe in linear time, then there can be something comforting about sheltering in the idea of a certain future.
You might be wondering at this point in reading, or perhaps you’ve asked me in person before: “Why Berlin?” It’s a question I still don’t have an answer to, and that I imagine I’ll continue asking until it becomes clear, however long that takes. I know I can’t answer it from afar. For some cosmic reason, however, I have been Odysseus out to sea for the past three years, just trying to make it home to Ithaca and Penelope.
This summer, I took a workshop with my favorite writer Garth Greenwell, which was the most profound experience I’ve had in my writing life to date. During the first class, we discussed another student’s story about a middle aged man who’d—coincidentally!—spent time in Berlin when he was younger. When the story takes place, we meet this man reflecting on how his life with a wife and son in the midwest compares to the intensity and adventure of that long-ago time in Berlin. The message of the piece was that Berlin was gone for him.
In response to the story, Garth said, “a life takes shape by closing doors.” I wrote this in big block letters on a post-it that sat affixed to my computer for weeks. Every day, I looked at his words and thought about their truth. He was saying that the point of the story was not that the man made a mistake in coming back to the US and settling into a suburban life, but that quieter, quotidian lives are as valuable. We all make choices as small as what to eat or as large as who to marry, and those inevitably close doors. But, I thought, I cannot close the door on Berlin.
I very easily narrativize my life—it’s both a natural writerly instinct and a coping mechanism—and for three years, I have known I was still “inside the story.” Some of the most widely agreed-upon advice for memoir-writing is to wait until the story is done and truly processed to write about the events. Even knowing this, I’ve opened countless documents in an attempt to give shape to what I was experiencing. The words resisted form; not only was I still inside the grief and longing, I was busy being waylaid by sirens and getting turned into a pig.
So why write about it now, when I know that I very well might not be able to get on that plane on January 5th? There might be another pandemic (god forbid) or I might get hit by a car tomorrow. A meteor might wipe out my beloved city! I cannot know. Perhaps I’m writing because I want to bring the uncertainty of my hope out into the open. To acknowledge how strange this journey has been.
There’s another reason I’m writing about this experience of limbo, which is that I can’t write openly and honestly without talking about the truth of my life. When the outcome felt so uncertain, when the story was so clearly still underway, I was afraid to acknowledge what I was going through. I receded from social media for many reasons, but being unsure of how to categorize this time in my life was a main one. Even writing this now, I am uncomfortable with the messiness. Despite that discomfort, I want to be open and bring you along on the journey, even if it turns out I’m not about to dock in Ithaca, but rather getting blown back out to sea.
Right before my plane landed in Berlin last month, I had a moment of doubt. I was only there for two weeks, would that be enough to know if this plan of returning was right? The plane jolted as it transitioned through the clouds, then leveled off as we coasted down to the tarmac, which was lit with beams of wan autumnal light. I looked at that strip of asphalt set between green and brown fields and thought: No place or person can live up to three years of longing. And yet, when I sat down on the S-Bahn with my too-heavy bags for the ride into the city, I immediately knew: I was home.
Those two weeks weren’t just joyful revisiting and planning for my return. I quickly remembered the difficult parts of living so far away from my family, the challenges of time zones, the anxiety of speaking German, and the complications of setting up a life in another country. Then, on my first morning back in Seattle, I sat down on my couch, as I always do: swaddled in my cozy robe, mug of tea in hand, stacks of books surrounding me. I felt so comfortable, so at ease, even as I knew I needed to go. The challenge of what life really will be like in January and beyond hit me. Am I brave enough to do it? Especially now, single as ever at 34, creating an entirely new life in a foreign country when so many people in my life are having baby number two? Sitting there, looking out over my beautiful view, I realized that this comfort was actually a vortex for me. Soft and warm yet lonely while dreaming of Berlin isn’t enough. I can’t be comfortable and be brave.
I used to know about bravery. For years, I lived by the mantra that fear was an invitation to be courageous. I set that down in 2018 while learning to recalibrate how hard I pushed myself and learning to tend to my body. But now, it’s time to pick that mantra back up. This time, though, I’ll attempt to practice alongside the skills of self-care I’ve learned in these three years. What I know now is that when I take care of myself, I can move more freely in the world.
Even in moments of extreme confusion about what the hell I’m doing with my life, books have kept me company. First, while living with my parents, before heading down to the kitchen to develop recipes for Help Yourself, I escaped into books. Then, here in Seattle, during what has perhaps been the loneliest 14 months of my life, I’ve continued to take refuge in others’ words. The list below is held together by a feeling of permission to live a story that is not predictable. They remind me that just because I might not recognize my life in what I read or watch, that my story is uniquely valuable, just like each of ours is.
No One Tells You This by Glynnis Macnicol
The first epigraph in Glynnis Macnicol’s No One Tells You This is a quotation from Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God. It says: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” I feel that acutely, and it makes sense to begin this book, which tells Macnicol’s story of reckoning with turning forty and being single and childless (seriously, try to say childless without using the negative). It spoke to me as I made peace with moving through my life in a different pace than others. In the book, she asks: what kind of story are you living in if your life doesn’t fit the narratives provided by culture? My copy is covered in a constellation of stars marking beautiful and profound passages, like this one about looking at social media:
So often in the last year there had been no way to take any pictures of the life I was leading—the divide between the messy, painful reality and the screen had been so huge I’d felt unable to bridge it…Sometimes I saw radical images, a wonderful reorganizing of what we considered beautiful and valuable, and I knew others were struggling to find a language for their lives, same as me, and I was grateful for their courage and resolve. But many of the pictures that sent me into a state of envy or despair were taken by women who I knew had been sold the same idea of life that I had, and it sometimes seemed to me they were willing to go to great lengths to pose in those roles, whether or not they had turned out to be real-life possibilities. As if they could fake it until they, and all the likes they accrued to help them, made it.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t true joy in so many of the images I see on social media, but they are snapshots in time that usually portray the best moments or ones that fit an acceptable narrative of struggle or failure. (As in, one that has ended and has a clean outcome.) So many times in the past three years a thought has looped in my head, “I feel so rarely witnessed,” which was enhanced in the pandemic. What photos show this growth, this story, this Odyssey? I cannot splay my beringed hand on my fiance’s chest and proclaim a happy ending. Does that make my life any less worthy? I love Macnicol’s book for letting me engage with thoughts like this and recognize a mind that’s doing the same.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor
Andrea Lawlor’s wild romp defines narrative permission. As far as I know, no human can change their genitals and other body parts at will, and yet the metaphor of being able to continuously reinvent and explore the self seems apt. In this funny, hot, and completely original book, they rework fairy tales through the lens of queerness. Like any of us, Paul is figuring himself out, but he can do it by shapeshifting—for instance quite literally manifesting a vagina in place of his penis. There’s something so tender about this story, which often shows Paul behaving badly and hurting other people, yet the narrator never turns against Paul. For the queer and trans writers out there, Lawlor teaches a day-long seminar called “The Joy of Queer and Trans Writing,” which I took earlier this year. I cannot recommend their teaching enough. If you sign up for the Shipman Agency’s newsletter, I know they’ve taught it at least twice.
A Burst of Light and Other Essays by Audre Lorde
“A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer” is the long section of Lorde’s diaries at the end of this collection, which chronicles the years from 1984 to 1987 as she reckons with a return of cancer, the struggle for equality as a Black woman, and as a lesbian. The paragraph I quoted in the epigraph of Help Yourself includes Lorde’s oft-cribbed words that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
I have to remind myself regularly that rest is necessary, that my body has changed in what it is capable of doing, that though I am doing better in many ways thanks to changing how I eat, new pains continue visiting themselves on my body. After getting ready to return to Berlin in August once the borders had reopened, I had a week of pain worse than anything I’d had before. My doctor said that it was best I push back the move, and so I did. Yet, there was Berlin, across the ocean, still far away from this place I was living indefinitely, reading books, feeling alone. I wish I’d reopened A Burst of Light this summer and read what Lorde goes on to say in the epilogue. She wrote:
One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe…This is my life. Each hour is a possibility not to be banked. These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living…It’s not as if I’m in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again.
That’s the lesson I had to learn in these last three years, between Berlin and Berlin—this is my life. I am living it here, now, in Seattle. I was living it when I barely changed out of my bathrobe in my parents’ home for two years in Wyoming. To view my life as on hold is to believe that I am immortal, when the only thing that’s certain is death. And yet, what I’d forgotten for a long time is the beautiful news: if I am not dead, that must mean I am alive.
P.S.!
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