Last Saturday, I was crying to my sister over peanut butter and marmalade toasts. The petite existential crisis I’ve been in since last October felt more present than ever. It felt like the contents of my life were sprawled lazily, messily around on the floor, wondering if they’d ever get up. Not enough freelance work. A dispersed bunch of friends. No home. Single with no real desire to change that. Etcetera. (Okay, not so petite, more like grande.)
I’m someone who does well with goal-based velocity. When I was writing towards a deadline for the second draft of my book, these other concerns were easily shunted aside. Then I threw my back out, could barely move for ten days, and the reality came rushing in. Seven weeks remained until my flight to Berlin, and the window of time stretched before me.
Of course, it’s not not connected to the pandemic. It can’t just be me (can it?) who’s feeling like vast swaths of life have gone fallow during the past two years. “I’ll do that when the world opens back up,” is the unspoken refrain. It’s boring to talk about covid, and yet it’s unavoidable. Life isn’t always interesting. Sometimes we are living in the white spaces between paragraphs, or the material is not interesting enough for scenes at all. Things happen between the last sentence of chapter 1 and the first sentence of chapter 2, but who really wants to read about them? I’ve just been languishing in the lacuna.
My sister suggested making an action plan to help me harness the rest of winter. Spreadsheets were mentioned. Various self-help books were invoked. We left for a walk, movement always being a good answer. It wasn’t for 36 hours until it was obvious: I needed to leave LA. I’ve been here in the best possible version of a holding pattern. Seeing my sister everyday, coercing Ellie onto my lap while working, drinking too many of my brother-in-law’s gimlets, hanging out with old friends—it’s been incredible. But the liminal state can only be sustained for so long. Though I love being here, I’m not living in my life.
For years, I’ve consciously and unconsciously constructed my life around one thing: getting back to Berlin. Living with this singular, simultaneously impossible goal acted like a sort of permission. I didn’t have to think about those other elements of my life—community, roots, living in the same place for more than a year—because eventually that would all change. It’s a lot of pressure for one city to bear, especially when I have no doubt it will be a difficult adjustment. Certainly, I will be lonely at times. Dealing with Berlin bureaucracy scares me. My German is nowhere near the level I’d like it to be.
I couldn’t have known when I left 3.5 years ago that it would take this long to get back. I feel less brave now, the stakes feel higher. Then I think: why? Because I’m older? Because moving abroad alone at 34 to pursue an aborted dream isn’t the kind of story I’m used to reading? I mean, it is weird and so different from the lives that my friends are living. Lives that are full of meaning and joy, that have become increasingly populated by babies I love, all while I’ve been getting a PhD in the threshold lifestyle.
The answer was clear. Until I find out what Berlin actually means for me, I won’t stop languishing. So, I moved my ticket to February 28th and set up an apartment starting March 1st. I felt a zipping up sensation in my body, as though I were gathering all those dispersed elements of self and replacing them back inside me to start this new chapter.
The thing about thresholds is that they are meant to be crossed. The liminal is by definition meant to be transitional, not permanent. Assuming the borders stay open—a thing I have learned not to take for granted—I’ll be there in 18 days, crawling jetlagged beneath an absurdly small German comforter. Then, I’ll wake up, walk to my favorite coffee shop, and begin anew.