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Who am I?!

Who am I?! Who am I when I sit across from you in a corner of the city?! This endless world that transforms out of the deepest layers of my being into clumsy words and trickles into your ear — can it settle its debt to me? This speaking person before you is an incomplete image, dismembered and paralyzed. Who am I outside of myself?! Can I step out of myself at all? I have lived outside for several decades among the incomplete faces of others. If only I had the chance to show you my inner self while I roam through your inner self…

Winter had Berlin firmly in its grip. The clouds lay heavy over the sky, the winds marched through the streets and the raindrops had conquered the ground. Winter showed its face and had taken the city for itself. And I was a traveler in the Berlin alleys, which now belonged to it. The wind had to beat into my face so that I fled into a café in the heart of the city. Inside I found a warmth that had escaped the winter. And suddenly I saw your eyes as if the source of this warmth lay quite near them, hidden between your lips. The cutting wind accompanied the winter, and your breath belonged only to you. Perhaps the sun could have saved me, for your lips held my gaze fast, while outside the winter waited.

In the moment when I saw you for the first time, the reflection of the light hurried from your face across my retina into my mind and was reborn there, deep in my feelings. For years you have been a traveler within me, and I travel incessantly with your thought! This version of you longs ceaselessly for you. I have painted you as I feel you… Within me is a museum, and in every room hangs the same question: your face.

You have come into my room. Into this small space that has carried me for years, as if it had no end. Now my room has depth, a depth that your arrival has opened. Your gaze brushes over the bookshelves, while the light slides over your shoulders and catches for a moment in your hair. I see your outer world, while the one who writes this text remains locked inside me. We both look at you.

Where is the world, actually? Is what I see really the world, or only a reflection of my own? Perhaps the world lies somewhere within me and at the same time far from me, in a place where the words end, where within me waves arise that lay themselves into the form of your hair and hold me captive in their threads. A place in which one can sink and still live on. A place in which one can feel with the eyes. When I left my home and stepped out into the world, I searched in one of the city's libraries for my own story. And suddenly I saw you outside of me, in a quiet corner of the library. I was overwhelmed by your birth in my eyes, while you knew nothing of my existence. Perhaps… if you had lifted your face just a little from the pages of the book and looked into my eyes, I too would have been born in your inner self.

Recorded at the bookshop Der Zauberberg, Berlin

It was my fault that I searched for you among people, among empty souls who cling to masks, whose world exhausts itself in the surface of their eyes. While I pass among the passers-by and carry you within me, I lose myself in their gazes in the hope that one of these eyes might devour me in its deepest depth. Perhaps, who knows, eyes themselves are the source of truth.

Sometimes, in a Berlin night full of clouds, the stars begin to rain. Not really, and yet in such a way that one believes it. Light falls into the air and dances as if it had a breath of its own. Below, the earth continues your steps. Your feet walk on, guided by the melody of the city, by this invisible rhythm that dwells between traffic lights, windows and voices. The stars lose their glow in the streets. And you… you lose your hair in the wind, as if you were strewing something of yourself over Berlin. I wish a piece of this city were also for me. Not as possession but as place. As a place that does not constantly remind me that I am only passing through. I breathe here. I walk here. I see. I feel. And still I often stand beside it all, as if between me and everything were a pane, clear enough to show everything, too hard to touch. These words I did not draw from a thought, but from the depth of a memory, from a place that was feeling rather than story. They simply fell like light, like dust, like stars. I do not know which image you see over this text. But whatever stands there: it was born in my eye. And I… I am neither wholly in the text nor wholly in the image. Perhaps I must first learn to be outside. And until then I take refuge in my inner self not in order to disappear, but in order to find myself somewhere.

When I sit across from you, whom do I look at? You? Or the you that has long dwelt within me? Perhaps I do not know you. But I know you within me. You are like the sea: deep. And when outside the wind moves through the waves of your hair, restlessness rises in me. Your pupils have a gravity like a black hole. Again and again I resist being drawn in. Sometimes it torments me to be so close to you. You bear no blame. It is the images that my head builds out of you. The spoon clinks softly against the cup. The pane breathes cold. And while I pretend this is only a coffee, my whole nervous system feeds on this closeness and I, almost ashamed, am happy, because it becomes art. Sometimes art is the scream of a person trapped within himself: between the images of his body and the thinking that wants to explain them. Perhaps it is time, like the last sip of bitter coffee, to rise from the table, to leave you behind in this café and to go. I do not know… perhaps somewhere there is a salt lake, white and still, that allows me to forget you.

Your image hangs in my head, like your earrings, which begin to dance as they float and hold me for a moment. A moment that, at its very birth, takes root deep into my memories. How long do your earrings dance without my gaze? How deep does your gaze go into the eyes of another. Sometimes I see you, like your earrings, dancing on within my inner self. Tell me: which dances more, you, or the image of you?

I do not know whether the winter was already over or whether spring had already begun. A place where the sun shone while the trees still carried no leaves. The sunlight fell on your face, and the glow of your eyes stood against the sun. The lake behind you made you, as in a painting, the center of the image. Neither I knew it, nor you, nor this alley itself, that we would meet there for the last time. The End.