London, a love affair. Slight and sleek. The one I miss when I’m away from it, but feel so unfulfilled when immersed in it. Berlin, the love of my life. Thick and heavy. A homecoming.
I want cities to just be ghost towns: the structures and me. And their impact on my spirit and mind. Without the disturbance caused by the human element. London, the city I am so undecided about. Berlin, the city that speaks to the non-rational part of my brain. And the inevitable juxtaposition.
London, the city where there’s the whole world around you, and the highest concentration of billionaires per square metre. The city where you’re only silently judged because everyone is so repressed. The city that can string you along, and bear down on you so heavily you feel you’ve dug yourself into a trench. It embraces the moneyed, but if you’re a survivor, you can still enjoy its tricks. With the drizzle and the slush. And without the sun. The congested streets foaming with zombies. Brain stem death. They see and hear nothing. I need to be with humans, but they fled this city – and maybe this planet – a long time ago. It’ll never be my home, but I will always have intense feelings for it. A place which moulded me and helped me grow up. It’s big and beautiful and charming, sometimes even remotely caring. The best place I can be right now. But I will always see through it and will always be aware of its brutal, repressed heart even when I feel, fleetingly, that it embraces me.
Berlin always feels like homecoming. I would never have thought I could be even remotely enchanted by anything related to any government, but I can never resist the urge to return to Berlin’s government district. That space along the waterfront is imbued with the vibes of the empyreal Reichstag, the Spree winding through pieces of the best contemporary architecture like the Marie Elisabeth Lüders and the Paul Löbe House, and with that special tang of transparency and earnestness that pervades the whole city. Whenever I’m in Berlin, I immediately want to get rid of friends as I feel the need to spend time alone with the buildings. The Berliner Dome, the Holocaust Memorial and the Jewish Museum – the building which made me realise that architecture can be poetry.
No matter how many times I’ve been roaming the streets of Kreuzeberg and Neukölln, I always revisit them like an abandoned dog who returns to the places where she was regularly walked by her deceased owner.
Unlike in London, buildings can breathe in Berlin. They have enough space to impact the observer. In my dreams, Berlin is a ghost town and I’m the sole inhabitant of the entire city: surging in a sea of sublime structures and exploring them without noise. The amount of concrete, marble and glass, and their proportion in blending with the vast green spaces, is just right. I have my favourite fraction of space: between the Reichstag and the Marie Elisabeth Lüders Building. I can sit on its stairs for hours, staring at the Spree and the rooftops till eternity. You can feel that these buildings emerged from suffering, contemplation, guilt, and after all that, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung – dealing with the past and eventually overcoming it. And here they are now, standing majestically in a metropolis still in Weltschmerz but exalted and grungy, alternative and straight. The magnetism Berlin exerts on me is otherworldly.
But London is where I have to be now. I have to finish things here. In the clutch of my unsound, remote lover with whom everything is possible but nothing is truly delivered.
In the night, I find myself longing for a homecoming. Or just for another planet.
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