My bedroom windows face the street, my favorite way for my bedroom windows to face. On the lower half of the windows is translucent, prismatic contact paper, which I dislike because it keeps me from staring down at the goings-on below me, but which I appreciate because it distorts the bright lights that would otherwise shine in my eyes all night long.
My bedroom windows face east (my other favorite way for my bedroom windows to face), and, many miraculous mornings, while the sun is still below Berlin’s pervasive cloud ceiling, I wake up to rainbows shining in my eyes.
The clouds only race here. They do not scud, or laze, or meander, or hang there in the sky like celestial bunny rabbits. They race, and sometimes when they outrun themselves the sun breaks through and shines her might down on us. In the last two weeks this has happened with miraculous frequency.
When the sun appears, I can feel my blood pumping. Seduced by the miracle of light and being alive, I drop whatever I am doing and I put on my new shoes and I run out my front door. I have always wanted to be a runner, and I have tried a few times, but bad knees and terrible stamina have always stopped me short. Now, though, I have spent the last three months moving. Five hours a day. Rest is necessary, but indolence quickly becomes restlessness, and restlessness unanswered pulls the clouds down from the sky and around my mind like a dingy, downy duvet.
When the sun breaks through, my whole body levitates, and whatever I was doing falls from my sluggish hands, and I put on my shoes and I run out my front door. With my first step onto the patchwork sidewalk—paving stones, cobblestones, concrete patches, scorch marks from so many thousands of dragons taking flight on Silvester (the German name for New Year’s Eve)—I join an international flood of shoppers and tourists and transient neighbors and, probably, some dyed-in-the-wool Berliners, shuffling along the ocean floor, unbothered. I dodge big paper bags and bickering families, businessmen on businesscalls, delivery trucks and kids on scooters. I weave between parked bikes and trams and wind up at the park on the Spree. My feet find the dirt and I run straight to the river. The sun shines on the placid dark water, reflecting the grand European heart of Berlin: Museum Island. I look left and I see the omnipresent and iconic TV tower; to the right, the Berliner Ensemble sign turns and turns again—Berthold Brecht’s company, miraculously now my neighbor.
After a few turns around the dirty park, I meander myself lost on my way home. I pass the slick storefronts of high-end stores, the mannequins’ hips jutting forward, their precarious shoulders tipped back in the universal posture of too cool to care. I pass filigreed old buildings housing konditorei and bäckerei, candles crooking their flames like warm fingers in the windows, beckoning me to come in from the cold and get wrapped up in the scent of sugar. I pass Späti and Döner places, interchangeable until I remember that so many of these omnipresent spots, the building blocks of a Berlin block, are the manifestations of an immigrant family’s wild, diligent hopes. I pass bars trying to look trendy; at least one anarcho-communist autonomous zone, its politics painted on its face; ostentatiously minimalist neubau; concrete communist-era monstrosities, ugly but practical, full of life today as they ever were; bookshops and fußball pitches. Block by twisting block my curiosity pulls me along, as each new turn reveals another layer of history and humanity.
Although I feel out of place in my spandex and sneakers, I realize suddenly that I too am a part of the local color. I live here. These folks are all in my front yard, and I’ve got energy to burn while the sunshine fuels me. This is hands down the most urban place I have ever lived, right in the middle of history, commerce, and daily life, and I suddenly remember that I have always wanted to live in the mitte of everything, right at the glorious crash of people and purposes at the heart of a city. As rents have risen in cities around the world in the decades of my adulthood, I had forgotten to keep wanting that. Quite by accident, I realize, I have, in the last few weeks, fulfilled a lifelong dream.
Miracles on miracles on miracles.
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