winter diaries
shorter than usual, i don't have much to say
January 8th
I’m on my final hour of an overnight flight to Copenhagen from Toronto. For once in my life I’ve managed to get more than a couple hours of sleep on an aeroplane, thanks to slow release melatonin and the iron strong understanding that I’d be absolutely fucked if I didn’t.
I feel no urge or need to write about my time back home. I’ve tried to find the words many times in the past week but nothing has sat right on the page. Last year going home for Christmas made me ache through my bones and this year it was no more tender than a light bruise. I think this is good. I think this is an omen of adulthood, though I can’t explain why or how.
When I land I have roughly 40 minutes to make my connection to Berlin. When I arrive in Berlin I have roughly 5 hours to go home, make myself clean and fuckable, repack all my belongings into an even tighter travel bag, and go back to the airport before I’m once again thrust onto a flight going somewhere I really have no business being. Sometimes I believe it’s time to leave chaos behind me once and for all. Usually I’m more realistic than that.
January 12th
After a few flimsy years and some sturdy months in between I have somehow found myself loved again. It feels like a fairytale, probably not in the way that it should, because whether I am a princess and he is price charming is so far beyond the point, there is simply no third party villain, we are the only ones who could ruin this. In this fairytale we are both little red riding hood, we are both the big bad wolf. There is a warm house filled with somebody I should trust, somebody I want to believe that I trust already, but I’ve had fangs bared and fingers bitten from so many figures in the past that I’ve become so scared of dogs in all forms. I fear the wolf and yet I know, really, I’m the one laying here with open arms while holding a snarl on my teeth. I am the warm house with a nasty surprise, I am the one who has forgotten how to love and who, surely, should not be trusted. I love him and he loves me. Maybe it’ll turn out to really be so simple.
January 16th
Some items on my “2026 goals and resolutions” list, that I wrote from the salt-dusted floor of an Airbnb in Montreal:
Lower screen time to 5 hours max
Go to Bosnia
Be less pessimistic
Cut down on drinking (only drink socially)
9k+ daily step average
Since being back in Berlin I’ve spit in the face of all of these fantasies. Some people only keep their gym memberships through January and some people can’t even be bothered to start. Somehow I’ve stooped lower than the latter. Maybe my bed is too comfortable or maybe Berlin’s January isn’t worth the effort. Maybe I’m depressed, it’s hard to tell. I believe in my Google Calendar like it’s a bible and I schedule every movement I hope to make. Shower. Dye my hair. Wash my sheets. Go to the grocery store. Take the Ubahn to work. Take the tram back home. Every other moment is muffled by my bed and by cellphone. My screentime is as long as my waking hours.
January 21st
This weekend was good and I needed it badly. I sang and I screamed and I made a lot of noise and people watched me and they liked it. There is another world out there where I spend my whole life in the spotlight but in this world I simply microdose it. It’s better for the ego this way. I haven’t done a lot in this world worthy of a big ego anyway.
January 28th
This past week I have almost been living. It hasn’t been perfect but it’s been close enough to life to make me feel like I’m worth something. I’ve been cooking with spinach and arugula. I’ve been walking a lot, even though my gloves are too thin and my fingers keep going numb from the cold. I’ve been writing again and reading even more. I have signed up for Pilates classes and convinced myself I will change my body and therefore my life like good delusional white girls so often do. I have been drinking lots of red wine and convincing myself it’s good for me like good delusional white girls so often do. My head feels like it’s sealed under frostbitten soil. I am chipping away, I have almost freed it. I can touch it again and warm it with my breath, but it’s still stuck. It may be stuck until the first day I can let my naked arms touch outdoor air again.
February 4th
Last night I had a dream that my grandfather and I were shoplifting from Walmart together. My grandfather doesn’t show up in my dreams very often, it was a pleasant surprise.
Every morning I wake up and pray to whatever god is listening that the Berlin postal service center will spontaneously combust as an act of divine justice for losing my residence permit. Every morning it doesn’t happen. I went dancing this weekend in a room that felt more like a sauna surrounded by an it crowd that looked more like a middle school semiformal. You never really notice unwarranted attention until you’re not allowed to sink into it anymore. My hips become stiff when men look at me. I cannot take a night off. Nights off feel unproductive.
My neck is always tense and my head is always prickly. I’ve realized that I’ve lost my sense of identity. I can’t remember when I last had it and where I could’ve possibly left it. I keep my mouth quiet when I should be loud and I speak too loud when I should be quiet. I do not defend myself or others. I keep secrets and I have many faces. I cannot recall the last version of myself I understood because I only ever view myself through the reflection in other people’s eyes. I am selfish and I am a liar. I do this so everybody loves me. I am so used to contorting myself that my shoulders cannot release, even when I am alone and nobody is watching me anymore. Nobody asks me to do this. I’m far too lost to stop now.
February 5th
What do you do when you don’t have anywhere to scream? I’m so much of an open book that I’ve lost the key to close myself up again. Nothing that I write here is fiction. It would be stupid to begin posturing it as such now.
February 10th
Some weeks are beautiful and some weeks are shit and some weeks make you feel as though it might just be time to cut it all off. Cut your tongue off from its base and your fingers from their third knuckle, run into the street at rush hour and scream, be declared as a basket case and bound in a soft box away from every to-do list that has ever corroded your soul. One day I will print every email that’s ever made my neck tense up and I will bring them to a shooting range. I will splurge on 100 rounds of the deadliest gun.
My residence permit is still missing and my new glasses never arrived. My flight to Manchester was cancelled due to black ice on the BER runway. I either have bronchitis or some rare, fast acting form of cancer. If it’s cancer, please god, hurry up and finish the job. If my life does not improve by Thursday at 11:59pm I think I will walk out of my apartment and straight onto the tracks of the U5. If you’re reading this on my open laptop because I just finished the act, publish it, and don’t let your title give away the ending
Moments worth noting, if nothing else:
Dinner in Mehringdamm with my friends. Realizing spaetzle is good, actually. Not sure why I thought it wasn’t. We were the loudest people in the restaurant, the only foreigners, I think. 2 beers and a glass of water. This is what maturity feels like.
The Deftones mosh pit at encore
The mess that followed. There are two points in which you are immortal: when you are committed and when you are so open that your free body starts to build up a blockade of its own, to everyone. Only when you care is your body fallible for damage. I do not remember getting home that night.
A day to myself, art galleries, the year’s first 4 degree afternoon. Photographs that make you miss something you never had in the first place. Dinner and a glass of white wine. Now, typing this
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I might be a sex addict. Or maybe I’m just freshly in love. They do feel all too similar, they both hurt the same
February 18th
Everybody is around and everybody is hugging me and I have forgotten what was making me so sad at the start of the month. Nothing important, I suppose, since it hasn’t clung to me.
The weekend over Valentine’s Day was love in all forms. Love met me at the arrival gates of BER Terminal 2, which is hardly a gate, really, just a creaky corner that smells like mildew and makes time feel claustrophobic. Love ran down Hermanstrasse, tipsy before the pre-drinks began, into the arms of a best friend who left but also never really did, never really will. Love sat shoulder to shoulder with us at our favourite bar where we mixed all the wrong liquor. Love is laying in bed at 4:50pm, when the sunset should be happening but the city is too cloudy, mood lighting painting the walls the color of pearls, soft music filling the space, half asleep in the arms of a person that makes your stomach hurt. Love is beating someone at skeeball 3 times in a row. Love is eye contact. Love is watching a baby laugh at the Bonobo enclosure at the zoo. Love is smelling somebody on your bedsheets the night after they leave. Love is all of these things, but at its simplest and most pure, love is fresh bread, gooey cheese, and a cold glass of wine.
Love, love, love, I feel drunk on it
February 22nd
Boogeymen are real, and they exist in the form of personal statements and Instagram stories of people you know getting day drunk in Thailand.
I feel as though I’m being edged, because my vibrator keeps dying while I’m using it and every process in my life has been frozen in administrative hell. I would buy a one way ticket to the corner of the continent but all my proof of identity has become fragmented across the western hemisphere. I keep falling down phone-shaped rabbit holes of other peoples adventures while I’m stuck in bed with a cough and poor posture. I keep ending days with more uncrossed items on my to-do list than when I started. I keep thinking of words I want to write down but then I keep drinking beers and forgetting them.
Housewarming parties fit like warm sweaters that have been shrunk in the dryer. Claustrophobic coziness, a bottle of red wine with a nice label that was cheaper than it looks. High ceilings and snacks on the table. One bedroom, one bed. I’ve never thought I’d be able to handle not having a space for myself. Their rent is the same as mine when they split it in half. Domesticity calls to me like a siren’s song. I have always been easily influenced. All the girls I know who live with their boyfriends are the ones who actually might stand a chance against it all.
The people I know who live in shared flats cut lines at the bar at 8pm on a Thursday. These are the ones I spend my evenings with, but even these schedules don’t suit me, because I’m a lightweight in every sense of the word and I’m not good at staying up past 3. I’ll be the most awkward person at the pre and I’ll huddle into the bathroom stall for moral support while never touching the key. I’ll spend 50 euro on an assortment of overpriced cocktails but claim I can’t comprehend how people always have the budget for a bag. Berlin is not the place for caution, and I didn’t think I was the person for it either, but perhaps I’ve got myself all wrong.
February 24th
Sunday marked two years since I moved to Germany. I didn’t do anything to honour it. I spent the day in bed, hungover. It’s hard to celebrate something that has overstayed its welcome. I sent off my university applications. I began working for a new English academy. My period is a week early. My skin has never been worse. I have a 100 euro credit in my RyanAir account and the overwhelming urge to ruin my own life crawling underneath my skin. I have ordered every meal I’ve eaten this week. My hair is so oily and my face is so dry.
I have nothing worth saying and I’m beginning to feel stupid for ever feeling as though I did. My life is not a narrative worth following. I will not stop writing. I am far too conceited and far too romantic for that. One day these diaries will burn me. I accepted that a long time ago.