What I Love (so far)

Not sure yet.

I remember this city differently. I remember it brighter, cleaner, greener.

I remember it...mine.

That was four years ago. I was coming off of two weeks in Tutzing and Munich. Tutzing: Exquisite. Quaint. Wealthy. And not alway an easy place for me to be. Ein vergiftetes Paradies, my cousin called it — a poisoned paradise — the lakeside home in which my mother grew up. The setting of a tempestuous family history that still hasn't righted itself, not even close.

And Munich: Beautiful. Preserved. Bourgeois-ist of the bourgeois. To my mind at the time, dead. Grumpy retirees in Bavarian get-ups. A younger jet-set, straight-jacketed into Marco Polo and LaCoste. 

In Berlin I found a pulse. Faces of different colors. Strangers who sometimes even smiled. Young people, everywhere. Each of their own mold. Graffiti blossoming like wildflowers. History embedded into street corners (and beneath!): the Brandenburger Tor, Hitler's bunker, the Old Jewish Synagogue, chunks of the Wall. Plus, pre-war Art Deco, old commie housing units, cobblestone streets, sleek new buildings by the world's best architects. Art studios you could simply wander into, music, theatre...

Everything felt fresh, vital, free. With fewer rules than in Bavaria for me to bump up against. A New York City abroad.

I was euphoric.

I should mention, it was also my first time apart from family in two weeks. That just might be part of it.

Four years later: None of that stuff I mentioned above isn't here.

But I see everything else, too, or I see what I saw before differently. The tagging, strangling the walls like weeds. Cigarette butts pressed between cobblestones. Young people, everywhere — and somehow, this time, younger than I. Hipper too. Especially in Friedrichshain, the neighborhood of my sublet. It's a German Williamsburg I've wandered into, and I feel myself no match. Besides, how do I find my way in? You can't just lodge yourself into a clump of hipsters and belong.

I was kind of tired of the sirens in New York, the filth, the humidity, the stink. Guess what? They've got that here, too. Just in different octaves/shades/degrees. I've already plugged my ears twice against fire engine howls; learned never not to look at the sidewalk when I walk; slept with the fan pointed directly at my blanket-less body; and held my breath on the oil-stenched U-bahn.

Also, oh my god, it's BIG. You come from New York, it's hard to be humble — how could anything be as overwhelming as what we've got? Okay, yeah, but Manhattan is a squeezed-tight isle. Berlin spreads itself far and wide. It is not one city, nor even two. It is six or seven, maybe even ten — every neighborhood a long distance from every other, functioning nearly as its own entity. A Kreuzberg local may never have heard of a street in Prenzlauer Berg; a native of Schöneberg gets lost in Wedding.

So, I am adjusting.

This city is not mine. It is foreign to me. I am foreign to it. We are circling each other, warily, two dogs on the corner of Kastanienallee and Oderbergestrasse: Do I trust you? Do I like you? Will you be my friend? Wait a second — do I even want to be friends with you?

Not sure yet. Still sniffing.