im Gleichgewicht

Merry Fourth Day of Christmas, vom der staat Nordrhein-Westfalen im Deutschland!

I am sitting on the sofa at Inge and Karl Heinz’s house, watching the unhurried turning of the huge windmill’s unbelievable sails as the setting sun sets jet trails a blazing orange above the deep blue silhouettes of the mittelgebirge, themselves hunching shadows behind the tangle of black, bare tree branches across the field. Flocki the fluffy white husky snores next to me. It is beautiful here, and we were given a Deutscher Winter miracle today: a whole day of brilliant sun and cloudless sky. 

I arrived yesterday midday after a deeply pleasant train ride. Inge and Karl Heinz picked me up in Minden and we drove the 45 minutes to their home. Though the sun broke through in Minden, by the time we arrived home, the sky had clouded over again, and by nightfall, the clouds had landed on the house. The rest of the evening passed in deep, deep fog, which lifted only after I had awoken this morning.

Like a lot of other locals, we took advantage of this glorious day by getting out to a nearby torfmoor (peat bog) for a long, muddy walk. (They have found over 1000 well-preserved bodies in it, from northern Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the British Isles. The boardwalks are constructed the same way they have been for the last 2000 years!) We estimate we walked about 9km, and even Flocki was tired by the time we got back to the car, but if there’s one thing Germany has taught me, it’s that when the sun is out, you stop whatever else is on your agenda and turn your face toward it for as long as you can. 

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Too much time has passed since my last update and now I’m feeling overwhelmed with how much I have to share, pushing this post even later and building up the stores of stories even higher. So let me be brief with the biographical stuff.

My first term at Arthaus ended on December 13th. I began our last week feeling real grief at the prospect of a month away from the studio, my classmates, and our structured playtime. I ended that week feeling a strain in my nerves and aching for rest.

On Friday, December 13th, the last day of my term and the 90th day of my Schengen Visa, I had my appointment at the Landesamt für Einwanderung, where my request to stay in Germany for the two years of my program was granted. Unfortunately, for reasons mysterious to all of us, I cannot have my actual visa until January 10th—a sweet irony, since my next term starts on January 13th. So, while I have legal permission to be in Germany, until I get the right paper in my hands, I do not yet have permission to get back into Germany were I foolish enough to leave it. In short: I’m stuck here. (A post for another time: on the gift, as a highly privileged American, of joining the experience of millions of others around the world, being at the mercy of someone else’s bureaucracy.)

My dear friend Val arrived for a nearly two-week visit just as my term was ending, so unlike a lot of my classmates who are also stuck in Berlin for Christmas, I didn’t immediately fall into aimless sloth. Instead, Val and I quickly got on an authentic Berliner schedule, coming home from our various adventures at 1 and 2 and 3 in the morning, dragging ourselves out of bed for a kaffe around noon. We Berlined well! Highlights include clubbing, going to a spa, stumbling upon an unauthorized occupation of the Brandenburg Tor by Syrian/Rojava pro-democracy activists, about a thousand Weinachtsmärkte, and endless Glühwein. 

After dropping Val off at the airport last Sunday, I moved from my aggressively beige, overpriced short term rental on my beloved Stargarder Straße in my adored Prenzlauer Berg into Chez Coco, an absolutely gargantuan 3-bedroom artists’ flat in Mitte (which means middle, and which is, in fact, the whole sprawling middle of the city). I’ll be living with my classmate and friend Lelia, and there’s a third bedroom, the fate of which is currently up in the air, but which we’re working to turn to our own and our friends’ benefit. 

It was a strange confluence of events: my sudden aloneness after two weeks with Val, my home base in the city shifting only 1.7km south, but to an entirely different neighborhood with an entirely different feel, from a bland apartment I’d made my own to one with a lot more personality, none of it yet mine (and which is both enormous and empty, since Lelia is out of town for the holidays), a sense of structurelessness for the first time since the term ended, and the very sudden-seeming arrival of Christmas. 

I threw myself into deep-cleaning first my bedroom, then the kitchen. And on Christmas Eve I had a mess of people over—a mess in the sense that, though most were my classmates, some were not, so many of us met one another for the first time that evening. We had a great time, and I’m so glad I “warmed” the apartment for myself in that way, as one of the major attractions of this apartment is that it is large enough to host, and hosting is, as most of you know, one of my happy places. Christmas Day I woke up with the sun in my eyes—a rarity in Berlin in the winter, and a particular blessing, since another major attraction of the apartment is that my bedroom windows face east and get loads of sun, when there is sun to be had. 

I spent Christmas evening at the home of Seth’s Cousin Johanna and her partner, and with a small gaggle of strangers. This is a rumination for another day, but I am learning that Berlin, as a city of transplants and immigrants (not ex-pats—yet another post for another day), is full of these happy international tangles of strangers. It’s how we all get found here.

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And now I am here, in Raden, or maybe in Destel, being welcomed once again, this time by family friends I’ve known a long time. I was in this house once before, 25 years ago when I was 14 and on a grand tour of Europe with my parents. In 1977, Inge came to the US as an au pair for my godmother Melissa’s first child, Sarah (hi Melissa! hi Sarah! hi Inge!), and thanks to their warm hearts and relational aptitude, these two wonderful women are still in touch, and have woven my parents and me into their web of connection. 

It is a gift to be here. It is a gift to be in a beautiful place, in this beautiful house, with these two lovely people, to be meeting their friends and family, bobbing around in all the German being spoken around me and finding the occasional word or phrase to keep me afloat. It is a gift, in a way I didn’t know I would need, to feel that I’m in the same web with my family at this slick, wide-open moment in my life. Melissa, your Christmas card arrived today. Seeing your handwriting, and seeing your reference to the intimate group who would be partaking of the traditional Swedish white dinner on Christmas Eve, knowing that you and Dale, Pat and my parents, Sarah and the boys, were all around your warm table, pulled me in as though I had been there, and I really missed you all. 

It is time for new things. It is time for echoing empty flats and rattling around my grey-skied unscheduled days, for getting lost in a neighborhood built for tourists more than neighbors, for feeling every minute of the six- or seven- or nine-hours time difference, for finding whatever tenuous connection I can with a stranger I may never meet again but with whom I am spending a candlelit holiday. It is time to feel lonely and lost and strange. I have lived long enough now to know that the emptiness of distance and of feeling foreign is also the emptiness of possibility. This time next year won’t be the first time. This time next year won’t feel as empty; this time next year I will have my magical travel papers; this time next year I will know more people and know the city better and know the language better. 

It is good, this time of year, to feel in precarious balance: between the promise of light’s return and the still-oppressive dark; between the profound warmth of a near-stranger’s welcome and the strangeness of making small talk around an intimate table; between the deep grief of being far from the familiar and the dizzying possibilities of the unknown; between the aching longing for the past and the aching hope for a future that someday feels as precious as what I have left behind.