On our final full day in Berlin (Vic leaving that night, me early next morning), Vic and I met Bruna for brunch at a funky upbeat restaurant somewhere in Friedrichshain. I had a bacon sandwich and we talked about sex clubs in the city and how we’d all be far too prudish to join an orgy. I never knew I had a ‘line’ until I lived in Berlin. The city tests your limits – you can always go deeper, and nobody ever recommends you don’t. Sooner or later there comes a time when you’re faced with a situation you’ve never seen before, far beyond what you considered possible in the ‘real world’ beyond, and for the first time your mental green light switches to yellow then red – and you pause. And that’s it: you either turn back forever, or plunge in. Some people go to Kitkat and get their thighs spanked with a riding crop for the first time and think ‘Ow, get off’. And others – their irises turn to love hearts.
After brunch we went to Mauerpark; it’s touristy but I’ve always loved it on a Sunday – the music, the flea market, the slow bustle of people. The karaoke (my favourite bit) was still on-pause for the winter, sadly, but Vic, Bruna and I bought drinks and sat in deck chairs on a sandy little hideaway. After three days hanging out with Bruna, I felt very comfortable around her; she was at once silly and mature, head-screwed-on but with an occasional sense of devilry that made me feel at ease and unjudged.
After the flea market (Vic and Bruna sifting through the cardboard boxes to see who could find the weirdest tat – old family photo albums, ornamental gorillas, a viking horn), we went to a bar and sat for an hour and talked about whatever came into our heads – laughing a lot, wiping tears away – and I thought: today is really, really lovely. I could happily have made it a weekly deal, jaunts through the upbeat streets (so broad in Germany, catching so much sunshine) flanked by two goofy pals.
Vic had to leave after that to catch her flight home to Bristol – or just outside Bristol, where she’s recently bought a house and thereby fulfilled the impossible Millennial dream. We said goodbye to Bruna at her place and said a second goodbye in the street, to each other, and promised to see one another more often (once every six months is outrageous).
With Vic gone I felt a little floaty and sad and anxious – the familial sunshine street happiness already a fading memory – and I took the U Bahn to go find Ben, whose WG I’d be staying at that night. He wanted to meet up for the sunset, so I got off at Warschauer Strasse and met him on the bridge near the abominable Jezz Bezos tower that was built there five years back. We walked through the Urban Spree complex past all the art splashes, bought snacks and drinks, and sat on a bridge further down the train tracks where the young hipsters gather to watch a dystopian kind of sunset. It was funny, Ben and I met on the blueberry farm in Australia, and together we’ve seen the sun go down over forests and oceans and meadows; this was our first time together watching the sun set over a brutalist metropolis without a single tree or blade of grass in sight, just trains and fencing and peeling stickers and gleaming girders. Despite everything, there was still a certain charm to it. Except for the Amazon tower, that is. Fifteen minutes before the sun set, it disappeared behind the lone skyscraper and doused us in cold shadows.
“It’s a shame about the Amazon building blocking the end of it,” said Ben.
“That building can fuck off,” I said. “It’s a giant middle finger to everyone around. Why does every rich man feel the need to build a gigantic cock?”
I remember its foundations being set years ago: there wasn’t one person in the city that wanted it there. It was protested against, again and again, but it got built anyway.
“If you’ve got enough money you can just do anything you like and nobody can stop you,” said Ben. “Like build a big tower that blocks the sun from the poor people.”
I thought about the city sprawling before us in the golden glow of the last of the day. Such a bastion – such a staunch fortress of anti-consumerism, so violently, scorchingly opposed to the joy-sucking blandness, the leeching insincerity of planet-trashing, air-polluting, art-erasing, colonialising hypercapitalism, and still – still – the richest men on Earth can waltz in and slam a fuck-ugly tower right in the heart of it, like a stake in the heart of a vampire. The thought of it made me want to chuck a brick through a window – burn something.
“Do you reckon if there were more female billionaires we’d have cities with gigantic domes everywhere instead of towers?” I asked Ben.
With a mouthful of his drink, he laughed through his nose.
*****
Ben’s flatshare is enormous and colourful and filled with vaguely erotic prints and circus posters; very Berlin. For my final evening in the city Ben suggested either a movie night or heading out to a jazz concert; I practically bit his hand off to stay in, tired and a little spun out by such a vibrant, hectic weekend. I dropped my bag in Ben’s room and with endearing energy he showed me all the various projects he’s working on at the moment: a chair he’s painting and reupholstering, denim jackets he’s sewn colourful intricate patches onto, skateboards he’s made by hand, wakeboards, balance boards, masks, paintings, sketches.
As long as I’ve known him, Ben has been a geyser of creativity. During our time together in Australia I sometimes used to look at him on sunny days and wonder how he had such an athletic build while never seeming to exercise. Soon after I realised it was because he simply never stops moving – never sitting down for more than five minutes, never not striding somewhere to do something. Hammering, sanding, carving, hewing, hacking, digging, painting, drilling, sawing, planing: he needs a steady and unending stream of stimulation in the way a border collie does – and when he doesn’t get it, he picks up the nearest object and begins figuring out ways to transform it into art or a tool or both; that’s the reason his bedroom looks like somebody threw a paint-grenade into Willy Wonka’s office.
Ben is so much of what I wish I could be: masculine, energetic, fearless – a proper outdoorsman, he knows about every plant and animal – practical, capable in so many situations in which I have never had a clue. I couldn’t build a beautiful axe out of branches and offcuts off metal – not if you gave me five years to do it! But Ben did, in Australia, in a week, with no instructions or guidance – and he did it while being drunk half the time. I am so often in awe of him, so often envious of the life he leads, which is why I was so surprised in the evening when we talked about our lives and he said:
“I dunno man. I was thinking about going to Canada, learning carpentry. I messaged Hattie over there and she told me I could stay with her. I think I miss being around, like, country people. They’re my people. Berlin’s cool and there’s a lot of crazy interesting people here, but I just connect with outdoorsy people. I think it’d be good for me.”
My heart ached and laughed to hear such thinking, because of course I’d had the same idea, or a million similar notions – in fact I myself had messaged Hattie only the previous year; she’d invited me to stay too, only I’d chickened out at the last second at the thought of such a lifestyle change. Tree planting in the vast sweeping wilds of Canada? I wanted it – of course I wanted it, in theory; fresh air all day, nature, and if Hattie was to be believed, good pay, good people, and a beautiful tranquillity far removed from the artificially-intelligent uncanny valley of city life.
But how could I make such a bold commitment to alternative living at an age where everyone I grew up with is having babies and buying houses? It’s the reason for all my stagnation these last two years, all my frustration. I’ve been sitting in the dust of this crossroad for two years now, scared to take a step, knowing that this is it – that I’ve reached an age where I can no longer have everything at once. I can no longer travel without feeling the weight on my shoulders of the imaginary family I am postponing. Do I even want it? No, not really – maybe? – whatever, I’m scared to take any course of action that might move me further from the possibility of it, just in case. To move forward requires decisive action, and I can’t decide – so I do nothing. I sit in the quiet of this crossroad, watching day turn to night and back to day and back to night, while at intervals cars filled with laughing faces zip past and with apparent ease choose left or right and disappear into the haze and leave me once again in silence.
*****
We ordered burgers and watched a Tom Cruise movie that evening. The next morning Ben cooked me a quick breakfast, then we hugged goodbye and I flew home to London. I’d hoped the trip might offer me a decisive answer as to whether or not moving back to Berlin was a good idea, but of course the fog of my confusion remains, only now deepened; a few new plus points, a few new minus points. The universe isn’t going to make the choice for me, strike from the sky and imbue me with sudden inspiration. It’s got to be my own choice.
I’ve always been drawn to mad people. I sat on a bench in Ruskin Park near my house a few nights ago thinking about it – how I seek to surround myself with people who crackle with energy and strangeness and spontaneity; I love to sit in their company and just listen, to follow along on their schemes and see what happens. I remember meeting my old friend Stephanie for the first time years ago at a soup kitchen we were both volunteering at in Kreuzberg: “Let’s go salsa dancing!” she said after we finished washing up – and we did.*
*A few years later she ended up working in the White House for the Biden administration. What’s more, bizarrely, I predicted it – back in 2017.
I like being around people who drag me to things and have bigger ideas than I do, because deep down I think, for all my explorations and theories and odd decisions, I think I’m actually quite a normal, socially-constrained, law-abiding person. I don’t like to get in trouble! I don’t like to make a scene! I don’t like to be judged! I observe things and write about them – I don’t make them happen. I need other people to make them happen. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling nostalgic for Berlin at the moment; I barely made a single decision when I lived there, I was always just swept along through the strangeness on the colourful coattails of the freaks I made friends of. Today I labour with the feeling that, if I was just a little more mad, or at least coated in the shaken-off fairydust of other mad people, I might be able to make a better go of it in London, or anywhere else. If I didn’t give such a shit about everything – if I wasn’t wrapped in this straitjacket of timid English etiquette and acceptability, constrained by the double-edged sword of self-awareness that helps me write but also makes me fear what people think of me – I might dress louder, dance more freely, get fucking stuck in to the culture here instead of watching it all from a faraway sideline and thinking forlornly ‘oh that looks fun’. There’s got to be a bohemian scene here, right? It can’t all be corporate? Arty skint people, free-lovers, anarchists, punk poet weirdos with big hearts – there must be tons of them. But I need someone to introduce me, to give direction to this nervous energy which, with no outlet, crackles around the shell of my body endlessly and manifests as angst. If I was only a smidge more mad – just 10%, 8% more nuts – I might be able to stand up from this blasted crossroads, dust off my trousers, and fucking pick something.
*****
This search for the ‘mad ones’ comes from Kerouac, obviously. And I thought about Kerouac, too, sitting on the bench in Ruskin Park. I thought about Kerouac and Hemingway and Plath and Twain and London and Dumas and Camus and Fitzgerald and everyone else I’ve ever read and thought ‘wow’ and sought to emulate. I feel them constantly in my decision making; I measure myself against their scratched-in heights in the doorframe of my mind, and every time I come up short. I can never be bold like them. I can never write as prolifically, I can never travel as passionately, I can never garner praise like they did. Not even a fraction of a fraction. I can never live as they did.
And I realised, on the Ruskin bench, watching the clouds turn purple as the sun set and the warm air of the day grew crisp and cold, that they all have one thing in common, the writers I admire most: they all died fucking ages ago.
Because how the fuck would Kerouac have handled Instagram reels? What would Alexandre Dumas have done in a world with TikTok and Bitcoin? Hemingway, shuffling around his office trying to find a USB cable to charge his phone. Camus browsing Reddit when he ought to have been writing!
It’s bollocks, I realised, to judge myself – my progress in life, my decisions or lack of – against such people, as much as I love them. To live in the modern world is not innately selling out. I do not have to drag myself through hoops simply because it’s what I think dead famous writers might have done back in their day. The world is different. In Hemingway’s day (as he details in A Moveable Feast), as a young and little-known writer he could get up in the morning, go to a cafe, order a beer for 3 cents, write a 500-word story with a pencil, and sell it to a newspaper for, like, eight hundred dollars. The world is not the same; I do not have to judge myself against people who were playing a different game.
What’s more, self promotion is not selling out. They all did it! Every single person I’ve ever admired, I can only admire because I’ve heard of them – and I’ve heard of them because they strove to be heard. So I can cut myself some slack; creating an Instagram account for my writing (or whatever), is not a betrayal of Sylvia Plath’s ghost.
*****
I met this old lady on the bus in Leeds once, back in 2016. I was 21 at the time, and I had not read many books and I had not lived in many places. She was called Jill, and she came and sat next to me at the back of the bus, simply because she wanted someone to chat to for the journey. She told me she was going to a singing lesson – she taught me what the word ‘soprano’ meant. Silver haired and frail, and still taking singing lessons. She asked about my life, and I told her I’d recently got my first job as a writer and wanted to travel the world. She smiled and told me she’d been a teacher in her youth; she’d taught in Morocco, in Tunisia, she’d spent four years teaching English in Mumbai when she was twenty-four, back when they called it Bombay. She told me she was chased by an elephant there, once. She told me to go; that I was guaranteed an adventure if I did. She was, I suppose, the first ‘mad one’ I ever met.
I stayed on the bus until the end, missed my stop, because I wanted to listen to her for longer. She gave me her phone number if I ever wanted to chat – a landline – and we parted smiling.
The thought of Jill, old but happy in her hobbies and still learning – it gives me comfort. Life is a long journey, and I have to remind myself often that it’s very normal not to understand it right now; my confusion does not have to be some great embarrassing failure on my part. It’s alright to feel the pressure, to struggle to prioritise – and all the fiction I’ve ever read tells me I am not the first to feel this way. I might marry and have kids at forty, in eight years. I might have kids later than that, or sooner, or never. I might spend a few more years being poor and then sell a book and everything turns around overnight, or I might soon decide the best option for now is to focus on making a comfortable nest, earning good money, and simply enjoying life day to day without worrying about the bigger picture – free from the compulsion to live up to long-dead heroes. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I might teach abroad, like Jill, and I might stay abroad – or I might return home and do something different. When I abandon my notion of self and societal expectations and the pressures to be a certain kind of writer, I am free to feel my way forward with my own intuition alone. It’s not a question of what I am capable or incapable of doing; I have faith in myself to learn and rise to whatever challenge I’m set. The simple question – and the one I hope to answer in some form before the year is out – is: what, next, do I want? I’m not quite there yet – I’m not quite ready to take a step off the crossroad. But I’m working hard at unravelling the mystery of my stagnation, piece by piece, and I can already feel things will move again soon – and that, whatever direction they begin to move in, it will be okay.