A Bird Released
So life gets cold; it's what happens in Europe when the summer ends and the autumn rolls in. I knew this in theory but to experience it in practice has been enlightening. Within a month of the start of autumn the temperature had fallen from the equivalent of the warmest Sydney summer day, to the coldest Sydney winter night. A shift that takes 6 months in Sydney takes place in weeks here, and then it gets colder, then colder still. It's the pace of the change that is startling, how much more climatic variation is packed into the months than I'm used to.
I spent the first few weeks of the coldest weather freezing, and grumbling, until I eventually sorted myself out. There is strategy and technology for dealing with the cold, stuff I've never had to learn. Stuff about layers, and materials, and adaptability. The entire city starts dressing alike, and it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals at outdoor events, because we are all wearing exactly the same thing: thick trousers, heavy boots, a torso-distorting puffy vest, black coat, flip-top gloves, wool hat, scarf wrapped up and over your face. Gender is impossible to distinguish, body language is muffled: glasses, height and taste in hats become our only identifying features. I become exceedingly popular when I make a hat with detachable, button-on beard, because it serves the twin purposes of keeping my face warm and identifying me in the shapeless crowd.
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After all this time, I write again just to tell you about the weather?
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I was supposed to leave Berlin for Barcelona at 6 o'clock this morning, but I didn't.
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I have been somewhere strange (compared to what?). Long, quiet months watching this beautiful city shift through late summer, autumn, early stages of freezing. Putting off decisions, putting off life. Traveling not as an exuberant hurling outwards of self, no: traveling as a muted, reflective space. I could say 'disconnected', but that would be a lie: there have been connections, strong and beautiful, finding their way to me through miles of cotton-wool vagueness. But mostly there has been me, my own company, sifting and shifting and observing, and sometimes nothing so active- just existing. Me, this city, my bike. Canals and swans and trees changing color up and down the banks. Cobblestones growing slick and slimy beneath growing layers of fallen leaves.
To emerge from that space is a recent surprise. Oh! I think. This is who I am with my volume turned back up again. Here is me with pom-poms in my hands, chants on my lips, swelling with pride at a fearsome squad of queer cheerleaders I somehow helped to create. Here is me on this dancefloor, that grin I forgot I had, these silvershiny stomping boots, a flick of hair and I'd love to buy you a drink. Here is me manning this squat bar in this broken concrete lot, newly occupied space, us in here, the cops out on the street, knowing something about this culture and these people, the ways they (we) live, the things they (we) do. Here is me living, full of life, engaged again. Thank fuck whispers the part of me that has been in some shaky kind of shock since the days before I left Australia.
I find myself beaming at the beauty I am surrounded by. An afternoon spent getting to know a girl and a truck, a city-centre wagonplace with flocks of geese bustling busy through yellow leaves, a tiny perfect hedgehog (igle) in a pile of rusted bike frames.
So. I decide not to leave, not to go so far so soon. I make the equally terrifying decision to stay, for a little while. I have a job, somehow, or at least a little bit of work, and every day of work is another adventure I can afford to have. I want to go places nearer to here (Prague next week, maybe, according to a bubbling and excited conversation in a wood-heated wagon tonight). I want to revel a little bit in this somehow-surprising place I find myself in: Europe, and happy, and alive, and thrilled with it.
I spent the first few weeks of the coldest weather freezing, and grumbling, until I eventually sorted myself out. There is strategy and technology for dealing with the cold, stuff I've never had to learn. Stuff about layers, and materials, and adaptability. The entire city starts dressing alike, and it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals at outdoor events, because we are all wearing exactly the same thing: thick trousers, heavy boots, a torso-distorting puffy vest, black coat, flip-top gloves, wool hat, scarf wrapped up and over your face. Gender is impossible to distinguish, body language is muffled: glasses, height and taste in hats become our only identifying features. I become exceedingly popular when I make a hat with detachable, button-on beard, because it serves the twin purposes of keeping my face warm and identifying me in the shapeless crowd.
---
After all this time, I write again just to tell you about the weather?
---
I was supposed to leave Berlin for Barcelona at 6 o'clock this morning, but I didn't.
---
I have been somewhere strange (compared to what?). Long, quiet months watching this beautiful city shift through late summer, autumn, early stages of freezing. Putting off decisions, putting off life. Traveling not as an exuberant hurling outwards of self, no: traveling as a muted, reflective space. I could say 'disconnected', but that would be a lie: there have been connections, strong and beautiful, finding their way to me through miles of cotton-wool vagueness. But mostly there has been me, my own company, sifting and shifting and observing, and sometimes nothing so active- just existing. Me, this city, my bike. Canals and swans and trees changing color up and down the banks. Cobblestones growing slick and slimy beneath growing layers of fallen leaves.
To emerge from that space is a recent surprise. Oh! I think. This is who I am with my volume turned back up again. Here is me with pom-poms in my hands, chants on my lips, swelling with pride at a fearsome squad of queer cheerleaders I somehow helped to create. Here is me on this dancefloor, that grin I forgot I had, these silvershiny stomping boots, a flick of hair and I'd love to buy you a drink. Here is me manning this squat bar in this broken concrete lot, newly occupied space, us in here, the cops out on the street, knowing something about this culture and these people, the ways they (we) live, the things they (we) do. Here is me living, full of life, engaged again. Thank fuck whispers the part of me that has been in some shaky kind of shock since the days before I left Australia.
I find myself beaming at the beauty I am surrounded by. An afternoon spent getting to know a girl and a truck, a city-centre wagonplace with flocks of geese bustling busy through yellow leaves, a tiny perfect hedgehog (igle) in a pile of rusted bike frames.
So. I decide not to leave, not to go so far so soon. I make the equally terrifying decision to stay, for a little while. I have a job, somehow, or at least a little bit of work, and every day of work is another adventure I can afford to have. I want to go places nearer to here (Prague next week, maybe, according to a bubbling and excited conversation in a wood-heated wagon tonight). I want to revel a little bit in this somehow-surprising place I find myself in: Europe, and happy, and alive, and thrilled with it.
