The flight was only short, but arduous. We took the train from the airport to our hotel in Mitte—where we’d spend the next four days. It would be our first time in Berlin. Our first time away together, in fact. We’d met three months prior in a dive bar where sometimes I’d sing. She’d seen me a week before and fallen madly in love with me right then and there—or at least that’s how I’m going to tell it.
As I think back on it now—walking those German streets for the first time—I recall the brutalism of it all. Greys mostly, sometimes red brick, but not often. Baking in the hot sun, we wandered between those buildings and through their shadows cast over the cobbles—that were black, and then were not. Even the heat was brutal. But I sucked on a beer, smoked a cigarette or two, and never once dared complain. I’d never had it so easy. So beautifully easy. And we laughed, and we ate ice cream, and we laughed some more. Sat for long periods by the water. Took photographs with disposable cameras—one of which I have with me now. We moved endlessly from café to bar to restaurant, our worries buried deep in English soil. With straight spines, we walked like we had something to prove—what that was exactly, was unknown to us then.
And all of this from an old photograph, from an old camera, from an old mind.