Notes from Berlin
Observations from a work in progress
10/5/2025
MRI machine - feeling that no one would come to get me, of being suspended, of another 20 minutes over and over - resulting in fear/preoccupation with enclosed spaces or delays, of another 20 minutes - that no one will come to get me - juvenile fear of dilapidated [?]s seemingly stuck in time or out of time - the sense of coming too late, maybe
11/5/2025
In Berlin - our sublet is a small flat at the vertex of three neighbourhoods, where the canals meet. The building is on O____, right on the line where the wall was - our unit is just in the East side. We’re a minute walk from the canal, near cafes and beer gardens. I’m still jetlagged - we both woke up & couldn’t fall back asleep for hours, slept until one. Then slowly got up, showered, picked up coffees and simit and croissant at the café at the end of our street, ate in our kitchen - light-filled, a big open window looking over a courtyard, huge chestnut trees, pigeons and magpies, sounds of children at the playground, the chestnut flowers fragrant, filling the kitchen. J works at the table, I wash the dishes. In the night I felt pushed away, bad dreams, he can’t sleep with me touching him & I can’t sleep without him holding me, felt like the trip was a mistake. Today I feel good, like I could live here, doing all the same things I do at home - buying yogurt and granola, making tea, challenged in a new way - I’m still asking J to order for me at cafes and restaurants, my german is bad - I know zwei is two, when he orders zwei kaffe. That’s about it. I want to be independent, feel like myself, instead I feel like a wife in a Rachel Cusk novel - moody and capricious, frigid, two dimensional, the outline of a villainous ex. And my behaviour - bursting into tears last night, or my head down on the train with cramps -
There are kids singing pop songs on the street below our balcony where I’m writing, I want to be a mother, it’s Mother’s Day, I thought I was pregnant - my period came a week late. I brought a test on the trip. Instead now I’m heavy and bloated - Midol, rosehip tea, no cigarettes, only one or two drinks. Where am I?
13/5/2025
We’re at our second café of the day - a Vietnamese place where I had delicious mango curry, and J had tofu in peanut sauce. White fluff from the chestnut tree keeps floating down on us - the canal is just to our left. Still failing to find a normal iced coffee. Yesterday we queued for podium seats at the Philharmonie - standing in line with my hot americano (I’d ordered it iced) and J feeding me pieces of simit - ein kleines Stück. We got the tickets - my period is heavy - a woman in front of me looked so much like M I started feeling guilty about her last email again. Afterwards we walked a long way - through the Tiergarten, where J had wiped out on his bike carrying library books - the blue bike that was stolen from his old apartment in W___ - the Holocaust memorial - the Brandenberg Gate - Alexanderplatz - this is our tourist day - J the whole time narrating the city’s history - I thought, how lucky I am, how special he is, could I really live without him? We took the U-Bahn, stopped for doner and hummus-taschen (a wrap that was all hummus?) - before going to a biergarten - pints of locally brewed beer, fresh pretzels still hot.
When I exited the train I was completely destabilized, overwhelmed - a light in his eyes I haven’t seen for a long time - but now I feel on my feet - our third full day in the city, me reading and him typing across from me - later will cook dinner in our flat and meet his friends O and G at a bar in Kreuzberg
23/5/2025
Tonight we’ll go to D’s to watch a movie with their friends - A, G and his partner M. I still think about G saying, of O’s ex-girlfriend, that she was not the woman of his life. Am I the woman of his life? Am I [?] the woman of my own life? Stupid questions [?] but even still…
29/5/2025
Sitting in a too-warm café - I’d rather be outside but J needs to work. Every time I feel sure again I start feeling unsure. I’m sorry I’m tired. I feel in a petulant way I need to apologize for myself, my moods - J says I’m not moody, that he doesn’t see me as moody or experience my moodiness. Maybe I’m good at hiding it but I feel so transparent - here, everyone looks at you. Unlike in Halifax, I’m learning to find it not as judgment but just openness - that people are more open here. Most, but not all of his friends feel particularly open. This table is uncomfortable to write at. The bench is too high, I’m dizzy looking down & the heat. I’m ignoring work messages (‘work’)
We’re outside now, it’s colder and windier than it was earlier, but still better than being inside. I am learning to accept a degree of uncertainty, to forfeit some control over some things. I want to be light, I am always chasing lightness. I want to set everything free. Thinking about someone else feeling a fondness for what has become so familiar, looking at him with a new tenderness shaped by what feels like barely any time - I don’t want to always live in fear - I am scared all of the time. I am always scared - attempt to have control - etc. I am searching for a new pattern of being. Lightness.
How people dress here - practical, whimsical, colours when there should be. I don’t feel at home here but I like it - I like not knowing, observing other ways of being. J says I’m sweet. Sweet isn’t how anyone else would describe me, definitely not how I have ever thought of myself.
We have moved tables four times - now we’re back inside, next to the window, it’s cooled down from the wind. How the finches steal bread from the tables outside. How everyone has dogs and children here. How everyone looks and I feel less visible here than I do at home. People wear: chore coats, striped scarves - everyone has a scarf, sensible shoes - no heels, not even when going out - mostly sneakers, maybe clogs or hiking shoes. How everyone smokes, at tables, in bars, how the tables face outwards towards the street - an openness, desire to participate in public life, not yet a degradation of public spaces, or maybe there wasn’t such a divide to begin with. Less visible poverty, more begging. Everyone is slim here - everyone bikes, walks. Everyone bikes. I have fewer desires here. Food is more satisfying. Women have short hair, cropped pixie cuts and springy bobs. I am wearing my hair up in a clip for the first time in a long time - it’s finally long enough and J prefers it this way. I wonder sometimes who he wishes I was, who he [
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I wish I had brought a scarf to Berlin & I wish I was in better shape. I wish I had two eyes & two ears. How does one live? Yet I am still beautiful, in Berlin on a sunny day with a beautiful man who loves me, with my book, a plate of food, coffees, Jess & Max on the train, all of these things, and so I must have done something right.
6/6/2025
We’re at the Turkish café we’ve gone to now many times, on the canal.
I’ve been thinking a lot about pregnancy, malleability of the female body, womanhood/femaleness as porous/state of flux etc. Lise Haller Baggesen - ‘motherhood is a fourth [sex] […] one sex among many’ - that disability is a fifth sex / state of womanhood - talking to Jess about gender, presentation, being-seen - how disability [?] one out of womanhood, could be part of maleness/masculinity but is inherently un-feminine - only takes away from femininity - and so one experiences a permanent, fundamental tension between the felt self (normal, beautiful, or capable of beauty, woman) and the perceived self (anomaly, not beautiful or beautiful-despite) - fine line between woman and anomaly, always.
I’ve been sick this week and claustrophobic in my body - never been sick around someone else like this, sleeping in the same bed even while sick. I started my period today, early, cramps are bad, feeling of wanting out of myself but still going out later to see his friends.
Watching a spider floating in my coffee. Runny nose, cramps.
10/6/2025
Reading Erpenbeck’s Kairos in the Hague - so this is happiness (Woolf) - on dissembling an apartment in East Berlin, the space in which a relationship exists, photographs on the wall, soup packets
not forgiveness but thorough inspection of the wreckage
on mirrors/mirror images
palimpsest/disorientation
