thawing diaries
February - April
February 27th
I spent 10 euros on two drinks at the spati, which is a ridiculous margin of inflation in a city where beers can cost 70 cents, but I was too dedicated to my mission to care. It’s a 33 minute walk from Frankfurter Tor to Gorlitzer Park, and the foot traffic around Warschauer Strasse Station was abysmal (I cannot stand slow walkers), but I swallowed it for the sun. I had an Aperol Spritz in my hand and a Vogue Bleu between my fingers.
There was a moment later in the afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to dip and paint the sky pink. The appeal of being day drunk doesn’t lie in the moment, but in the afterglow, when the sunlight has been dancing with the liquor under your skin for long enough to make the borders of your body feel fuzzy. The streetlights were beginning to flicker to life. Falkensteinstrasse always looks like a movie; fairy lights tangled in tree branches, rusted dining tables balanced on cobblestone sidewalks coated in beer bottles and ashtrays and tobacco pouches. Talking hands holding cigarettes illustrating stories in the air between the bodies that own them. Spati workers soaking in the sticky evening air outside of their shops. A line up at the gelato parlour. More bicycles than cars. I had a bottle of Corona in one hand and a popsicle in the other. My friends were walking ahead of me and telling me a story.
February 28th
I woke up too early today. The slices of sunlight that cut through my blinds always fall right on my pillow in the morning. Someone was playing Fade Into You on repeat from another bedroom. It’s been a while since things have been like this.
I took too long to get out of bed and even longer to get ready. I bought fresh cut fruit and three cans of cider at the grocery store. Most of the trains in Berlin weren’t running today, so I followed the neverending procession of soldiers armed with bottles and blankets through the dug up Friedrichshain streets. We formed a single file line over Elsenbrucke, how very German and proper of us. The edges of the spree were still frozen over. The grass was dead and wet and people poured themselves over it regardless. I used my flannel as a picnic blanket. On the walk home there was an open air party at Renate. Spati doors were river mouths for a steady current of bodies. There was always music in the air and you could never tell where it was coming from.
March 3rd
Sometimes I want to be a facsimile. I watch children hand in hand with their mothers and fathers walking down the street ahead of me. The parents swing their children over the cracks in the sidewalk and the children scream with joy. I want a backyard and a fireplace and a rattan basket filled with knitting yarn resting on the mantle. I want more than just one shelf in the fridge, more than just one cubby in the pantry. I want fresh asparagus bound in twine and I want to use all the potatoes in the bag before they begin to billow with sprouts. I want a ring with a gemstone and split rent in a two bedroom apartment and a salary. I watch women with prams take up too much space on the U-bahn at rush hour and I curse at them quietly.
I smoked an old stale Vogue out of my window and watched the full moon. I’m nursing a warm mini bottle or Rotkappchen rose. My hair smells like chemicals and my shirt smells like sweat. One day soon I will teach teenagers to be better people than the woman I’ve become. One day soon I will live in a different country. I will relearn my developmental phases the same way I did when I arrived in Berlin. Oral, anal, phallic, genital. Every new place brings a rebirth. With every new beginning I become more invincible and more sinister than I have ever been.
Sometimes I want to be a black hole. I see women in bars with sly eyes smothering their victims with heat and I want to be just as encompassed. I want to ruin my own life and turn the ones I love against me. I want excess to fall from my bones like tender meat. The moments in my life spent walking down the street with mascara dripping from my chin and liquor burning the lining of my stomach have been the moments where I’ve felt the most significant. Sometimes I want to be nothing more than a narrative.
March 5th
Yesterday I had a dream that I had a baby. A boy. He was sweet and gentle. I was terrified. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t abort him. I couldn’t stomach the thought while looking him in the face. I dressed him up in fuzzy coats and funny hats and he always smiled when he looked at me. It was nice and I loved him and that was the scariest part.
March 7th
Days spent on trains are some of my favourite days except for when the nights prior are spent drinking. The elasticity under my skull has been pulled to fray. Germany has tall skinny trees and sprawling fields patchworked with new bloom and rot. I have written about German train rides many times and I have run out of new observations.
March 8th
The McDreams Motel in Wuppertal is perhaps the most American piece of architecture in all of Germany. It sits wedged in the corner of a concrete swamp, guarded by a gas station up front while a discount grocery megastore forms a wall at its rear. The motel has no lobby or reception, just a mud room with a broken coffee machine and a series of cracked mailboxes. The rooms trail across the top floor of a strip mall, above a dingy pizza shop and an auto parts dealer. The motel’s name has no affiliation with McDonalds, but it really feels like it might as well. I could stand with my feet against opposite walls in my single-bed room if I spread my legs far enough.
Wuppertal has a suspended train that runs over the length of the river that cuts through the city. It’s just mildly terrifying. Their version of a high street was a ghost town, even on a Saturday, and I sought refuge in a British pub where the German bartender took a liking to me. He told me he spiked his pint of Guinness with moonshine and he offered me a sip, I took one and it made me feel dreadful, as if my body was bracing itself for an influx of poison, because not taking drinks from strangers is one of the first things a young girl is taught short of saying please and thank you and making up a boyfriend when a man isn’t taking no for an answer.
I walked to the club regardless. Wuppertal is strange in the dark. It was hard to feel convinced a world existed outside of the veil of streetlights lining the road. The town was steep with brutal edges, yet it felt clumsy and cloaked in humour, as if it was built out of lego blocks instead of concrete. In the center the suspended trains soar over your head. They gutted a World War II bunker and they turned it into a nightclub with polished slab surfaces and expensive speakers. I went and I danced alone. It wasn’t like the nightclubs in Berlin, where the dancefloor is laced with unease and precarity, because someone could collapse from the complications of a powder cocktail next to you at any moment. The people of Wuppertal must not be as escapist, or maybe they are, but not in the same way. They danced like they were possessed, but not without control, as if they were working with the demon inside of them. I swayed in the corner on my own. The main dance floor held a bassline that got caught in your throat. I left early and bought fresh fruit from the convenience store and called a taxi back to the motel.
Everything went wrong on my train ride back to Berlin. I feel no desire to talk about it. What I will put on the page is the eeriness of the town where we broke down. The only sights visible from the train station platform were an oppressive red-brick car factory that looked as though it was poised to step on you, and an industrial playplace with a six story tower leading to 4 slides that all looked like they could kill you. I never want to return there.
March 15th
I have roughly 5 months, give or take a couple weeks, until I will be living in London. Likely for no less than £850 a month, likely in a shoebox flatshare with humidity problems and unsealed windows, likely sandwiched above a vape store or a matcha cafe and below a couple of heavy footed young professionals in the AI industry with questionable waking hours. Hopefully in Finsbury Park, possibly in Haringey. God forbid in Tottenham. Islington would be a pipe dream, but I’ve had just enough good fortune in my life to know that you should never say never. Although this is all I’ve hoped for, although this is something I’ve been working towards for months, it only feels right to articulate it like a threat.
My interview at the university started in the morning and it finished well past midday. Afterwards I had just enough time to walk around the neighbourhood, take a tour through the semi-soulless stadium of a football team that I enjoy, and stick my cutlery into my Nando’s lunch before I’d received the acceptance email. We celebrated by spending a bit too much time at a Wetherspoons in Camden market, one with a beautiful terrace next to a cobblestone bridge and a lock chamber, but it’s still a Spoons all the time, meaning I left feeling grimy and childish regardless. I spent an hour the next morning doomscrolling on SpareRooms and gnawing on my own tongue.
I like London. I like the canals and the houseboats with names like The Painted Lady and Princess of the Regent etched in golden calligraphy on their exterior walls. I like the way pubs glow from street corners at dusk and I like the laughter that swells inside of them. I like exchanging niceties with strangers at the bar while waiting for a pint. I like the way that London accents thud onto tables like something damp and warm and soft to the touch. I like marching down slick Soho streets at midnight while kebab shop boxes and slouched half conscious bodies litter the sidewalk. I like the endless labyrinths of tube stations, the sour humidity of the train. I like casual greetings. You ‘right, love? Cheers, mate. I like the state of bumbling perseverance the city seems to push its people forward with. I don’t like paying 8 pounds for a drink that costs 2 euro in Berlin but I can learn to get over it.
I took the train from Euston station up to the north of Wales. Something is different about the air up there. The sheep look softer and the hills look greener. If land was capable of flashing you a face, Wales would smile with full rosy cheeks. Scotland would wink. England would scowl. My boyfriend lives in a village so small you could run through its whole length in about two minutes. We played billiards at one of its only pubs and had lunch at one of its only restaurants. The houses are stout and they hold each other close and they’re all flushed with cool pastel paint. The village leans over the Menai Strait and boats line its algae-green shore. There’s a children’s playground by the water. The area smells like seaweed and freshly cut grass.
In the spring sheep give birth to their babies. We went to a petting zoo on the island and played with orphaned lambs. The night prior we went bar hopping in the city whose title as a ‘city’ really must just be a complication, because we had hit almost every venue with a beer tap that the area had to offer in the span of a couple hours. I laughed with every stranger I could muster the courage to speak to. The next afternoon my boyfriend showed me the house he grew up in. It rests wedged in rolling hills sounded by livestock fields and old winding trees that would tell riddles if they could speak, that drape themselves over the roads as if they are protecting something precious. My boyfriend told me stories of that road and of his childhood, of apple picking in his neighbours yard on his journey home from school, of being offered food and water by an elderly lady living in a cobblestone cottage in the early hours of the morning after a night out drinking in his teenage years. From the front of his childhood home, the mountains of Snowdonia crown the liquid hills of green below. If I grew up in a place like this I think I would be a better person. I would be less bitter and more peaceful. I would know how to take a deep breath.
I love London but I’m scared, because London is really just another city, and I have spent my whole life surrounded by concrete, and I’m becoming tired of seeing so much grey. I tell myself I love the busyness, but I think that’s just my way of justifying my inability to calm down. When I stare out the passenger window of my boyfriend’s car, drifting past the pastures and cabins of Anglesey, I can see myself in fifty years time, standing in the front door of my stoney old cottage, with a view of the Irish sea–or maybe it’ll be the Mediterranean, maybe the Bay of Biscay, maybe even the Gulf of St Lawrence. I can see myself in a village so insular that I know all of the other residents by name. I will keep to myself, spending my days writing until the pads of my fingers grow tender. I will have a couple of scraggly cats and a wild overgrown garden. I’ll spend as much time observing as I do writing, curled up in a rocking chair on my patio, staring in silence as people pass my driveway. I’ll often flash a smile but rarely one with teeth. Maybe the children in the neighbouring town will see me as a witch. I’ll only go into town for groceries, only for special peculiar items, because I will grow my own vegetables and buy fresh fish from the sailors living by the water. I will be a recluse and make up for all the time I spent in my youth being afraid of isolation.
I will have a great year in London and then I will leave. I will force myself to slow down and I will stop living with my body in a constant state of high alert. I can afford myself one more year of acceleration. I will live in London and I will kill myself and then I will start all over.
March 20th
Last night I went to a spa and had an ego death in a sauna. My body felt at ease for the first time in years. When I woke up I found that I had crumpled and clenched and bunched my muscles all up again in my sleep. I had a dream that there were insects climbing out of my thermostat.
April 1st
I am once again in a nowhere town in a German state that I cannot pronounce, only accessible by a carefully constructed chain of trains that could break at any moment due to a missed connection. I am counselling again. I have a four bunk bedroom all to myself. I am using old duvets as privacy curtains. I have a sink next to my closet. I have nothing outside my window and I am scared to open my blinds when it’s dark outside.
The camp sits on the edge of a lake, down a winding dirt path that borders a farm. Three horses live on the field. They have long knotted hair and they watch every person that passes them by until they’re out of sight completely. Across the street sits a hill of bramble and old decaying trees which is crowned by an abandoned manor. Every window that isn’t boarded is broken and the embattlement around its roof is chipping away. At the rear end of the manor stands a cinderblock watchtower, out of place and imposing like an angry, watchful father. Decorative fountain bowls and balconies lie littered throughout the yard. The whole estate looks haphazard and doesn’t make a lot of sense. If there has ever been a haunted place, it’s here, peering over a hill 100 yards from where I sleep at night. I will never open my curtain when it’s dark outside because I’m afraid the ghost of the manor hasn’t taken so kindly to my curiosity.
On Sundays in nowhere towns in German states you can’t pronounce the world holds its breath. There are no feet on the sidewalk and no cars in the street. Driveways are full but there are no lights on inside the houses beside them. Restaurants are empty and grocery stores are closed. There are birds in the trees and cats in front gardens but they don’t call out, as if they too know the rules, that it’s rude to make your presence known on Sundays. I could’ve screamed in the middle of a four way stop and no one would’ve come to check on me. If the ghost of the manor decides to come for me, I think I’ll be completely on my own.
April 4th
I have a pin on my messenger bag that says La breithe sona dhuit. It’s maroon and orange and has a picture of a girl playing a guitar in the centre. I don’t know what the phrase means. It’s Irish. I was gifted a pin by a woman playing the accordion on the side of the street, one day in Dublin in 2023. I remember passing the woman and stopping to watch her play. We made some small talk, she asked where I was from, when I told her I’m from Canada, she said she’s always wanted to go to the mountains in the west. I told her I did too. The same conversation as always. I asked her if I could take a video of her playing the accordion. I stood across the road and filmed her while people meandered between us. I gave her 3 euros and she gave me the pin. I’ve carried it with me ever since.
I’m not sure why this has been on my mind recently. It has nothing to do with the current state of things. The current state of things are juvenile and terrified and comfortable and regretful. I left the nowhere town in a German state that I couldn’t pronounce. I don’t have to sleep in a bunk bed anymore. Children fall in love in three days. They all exchanged phone numbers and claimed they would stay best friends forever. I got struck by a sick sense of guilt at least once a day, out of nowhere, and it paralyzed me and made me mute until I was able to shiver it back out of me. I’m sure there is a deep, horrific, clinical explanation for this but I really don’t care to know it. The police were called one night. The children cried all of their party makeup off. It sat in muddy puddles under their eyes.
Sometimes I find myself in situations that I wish I could explain to myself from five years ago, like sitting in a basement bedroom of a German children’s hostel, using craft markers to write thank you notes in the sleeves of English class workbooks. Sometimes I think the girl I was five years ago would be shocked, but sometimes I think it wouldn’t phase her. It would be a conversation as mundane as discussing the weather. I don’t remember myself from five years ago very clearly. I might as well have been born in 2023. I think in many ways I’m younger than the children I care for.
I just googled it. The pin on my messenger bag translates into Happy Birthday To You.