Lucky Numbers
October 22, 2009
My birthday started with pancakes at midnight at a friends house, and continued this morning with a selection of blueberry and strawberry tortes my boss surprised me with this morning. At lunch we ordered in dim sum from Good Friends, a excellent Chinese restaurant in Kreuzberg. Tonight there will be drinks at Que Pasa at Gorlitzer. This weekend will be a party at my flat.
This is the year I turn the age of my birthday. Doubles have always been my good luck. Two two’s are a sign things will go well for me.
And what do I have to show for myself?
My mother sent me this jumper, and I am happy:
Music of the day:
Cry For Help – Flying Lotus
Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr – Andre Bukhonsky
Collapsing at Your Doorstep – Air France
It is a good day in Oliviaville.
Memories of Jetlag
October 1, 2009
Reading back through my old posts from this winter I’m overwhelmed by how vividly I feel the jetlag I had when I first arrived. The lack of sufficient daylight lead to me never getting over my jetlag the entire month I was here. I would wander up for breakfast at 7:30 at night, or 10:30, and find a pretzel at a pub, or make myself one of Erik’s frozen’s pizza. My diet was similar to his diet then. Lots of fresh bread rolls, thinly sliced meats, and salted butter for mid-day meals, frozen pizzas for dinner, and abundant clementines at breakfast, with yogurt and banana-flavoured soy milk. Lots of vodka-pudding whenever Erik left it over. Other things are remembered. The mushroomy smell of people’s boots right outside their doors, moist from the snow and sweaty from too many socks. The cold inside my cheeks that never went away, that followed me home, that turned into pneumonia. Even when I was cured and I woke up early to go online and catch a skype conversation with Johannes, I would listen to music from the winter and my cheeks would swell with the Berlin cold.
Berlin, January 1st 2009
My meals since I’ve moved here are very different. I eat lots of hummus and hallomi. I boil potatoes and save them to put my spreads on top of. In the morning I will pull a boiled red potato out from my fridge, heat it for a few minutes in the oven, and cover it in tomato basil spread, or in quark. Meat is disappearing from diet. I eat blueberry tortes at the local bakery with my fake family, with my fake kids. Johannes and I eat lots of Falafel döners together from Turkish imbisses we pass by. We split our baked potatoes wedges at a vegetarian bar over tofu and wheat burgers. We go to bed late drinking Polish beers in his loft bed, watching a film on his large computer monitor below. We wake up late and practice piano separately on his electronic and acoustic pianos.
In winter my anxiety made me crave salt. Now my homesickness urges me towards tropical fruits and food colouring. I miss mac-and-cheese from the box. I miss avocados slathered in lime and doused in salt and chased by a Corona. I miss single bottles of apricot beer drunken quietly under the extra blankets I kept on the couch. I miss my view of the Berry Good fruit stand, especially during the summer when dogs and bicycles sat unlocked in the makeshift parking lot.
My summer here is ending and the smells of winter are coming on, the cold feeling in my cheeks I now recognize as love, and the world I’ve been building for myself is slowly materializing. The Expatriate parlor/bookstore I’ve discovered may lead to more work, possibly an internship at the ExBerliner. The owner of the small bioladen where I buy my groceries gave me a bouquet of the summer’s last blumes on Monday. These mundane details are my privilege, my memories of midnight meat in December a pinch at my cold cheeks. Johannes and I: our meals now being the largest physical gap between us aside from the table we eat across, we grope beneath our tablecloth for each others’ hands in the dim kitchen. And here in the middle of the table, where our cold hands meet, I am at the middle of the blue-bridge again, where we met half-way to eat lunch, me from the east and him from the west. That is love the only way I know it, the half-way point underneath the table, over a bridge, between two languages, the summer in between our two winters and any more that come.
