Berlin. Again.

I loved this city for the first time in late Autumn, and I'm glad for that. I tumbled off a plane from the US, planning a bit of a jaunt around Europe on my way home, but I landed in Berlin & refused to leave. Even cold, empty and windswept, this city felt right. And fuck but I needed that comfort, after a year's hard slog trying to make San Francisco work for me, and mostly failing. I mean, I figured SF out in the end, found a few friends, found a few comfortable spots, lined up some dates, got a job- learned that city and learned how to make it (kind of) fit, but it was hard work. Always hard work. It should've worked for me (where else to Go West, Young Queer, when you're a baby femme pervert hunting for her people?) but it didn't... quite. Oh well.

Berlin, though. Berlin in late Autumn, dark all the time, bare trees, greasy canals, grit and graffiti and fuck you everywhere on the streets, Berlin felt like home. The first week, all alone and avoiding nosy Eurotour teens in my hostel, I walked and walked and fell in love. Hauled some bad, basic German out of the depths of my memories of high-school education, enough to buy a felafel and a beer and a packet of cigarettes, got on with falling in love. The second week I found a play party, found some of my people, found a place to stay. But they were secondary comforts to the just-right-fit of being alone on these streets.

It's the height of Summer now. My third time in this city, which gets stickier each time, makes itself a little more obviously home. Summer in Berlin is a different beast. It's so easy to love this city in Summer. The sun never sets and there is so much light in the day in which to sit somewhere beautiful and engage in the imperative Berlin activity of doing absolutely fucking nothing. A long hard day of doing absolutely fucking nothing followed by a long hot night of whichever option you choose from the non-stop of buffet of bars or parties or- what I mostly choose- nothing at all. But I'm glad I loved this city in her down-time first, that it wasn't the glamour-dazzle of the easy-living Summer that got me in, that I can love this bright and golden time and watch it slip away and know that I love the next time just as much.

The thing about coming to Berlin is this: I tell people in Sydney, or London, that I'm off to Berlin for four months, and people say, "What are you going to do?" and I have no idea how to answer them. You get to Berlin and say you're here for four months and nobody asks you what you're going to do because, well, it's obvious isn't it? You're going to do that strange, perfect mash of nothing-much-maybe-an-art-project-and-a-bit-of-work-and-bike-riding-and-lake-swimming-and-LIVING that this city makes so possible. I'm going to wander off to the markets on Tuesdays and Fridays and drink my coffee on a platform surrounded by the trendy globetrotters watching a jazz band play and swans cruise the canal. I'm going to throw in a hand with the DIY queer film festival, haul crates of beer and dig trenches and whatever else needs doing. I'm going to jump on a bus to Budapest because they need queers from this metropolis to support their bruised & assaulted Pride. I'm going to spend weeks looking for the perfect bike. I'm going to sleep, and cycle, and cook, and happen upon people I want to see, and stand at the top of beautiful bridges at 4am watching electrical storms rip open the sky and not worry about getting up for work in the morning.

And I'm going to keep planning the big jump, the time that I will come here and stick for real. I'm looking for the threads of life here that stretch beyond a Summer or an Adventure. I spend a day up a cherrytree in my friend's Kleingarten (harvesting a 10 kilo haul that is half what the tree produced last year, but still enough to keep his friends in jam all year) and realise that it is more possible, more achievable for me to acquire a Kleingarten of my own, put down roots and prepare and love a piece of dirt here, than it is to do it in Australia. This blows me away, and I fall in love with this city a little harder. I work on my German, slowly, and look up language schools so I can get good enough to wrestle with the bureaucracy that I may stay, with employers that I may work, with my Kleingarten neighbours that we may swap tools & seeds & wisdom. Good enough, eventually, to make local friends in their native tongue.

I am having a golden-glowing time, a truly happy time, with splinter irritations of accommodation and money and love dynamics but nothing that steals away the light of being here, of having successfully brought myself back here, of the pride I have in each new set of roots that spread out of me into this city, of being the kind of person I need to be in order to live this life that I feel such true love for.

I call myself geographically commitment-phobic or location polyamorous, wrinkle my face up and shrug when people ask where in the world I'm likely to be in this month of that year. I have no idea. The shift from nomad, passer-through, to migrant is a hard one, with high walls to scale. But every time I go back to Australia I know that I belong there a little less, and every time I am here I belong a little more, and it becomes less a matter of 'returning home' than acknowledging that I already know where home is, and doing whatever it is I need to do to stay.