Es ist vorbei

Relationships end in reality, but in memories they keep running.

The parting happens once. Yet in the head it begins anew every day.

Once Berlin was only a backdrop, only a host: streets you walk through, U-Bahn noises, cafés, light in windows.

Now the city has settled in me together with you.

A Berlin made of images: a particular pavement, a particular shop window, a corner where you once laughed.

And each of these details hangs on me like weight.

Sometimes my head becomes so heavy, as if I were carrying too much.

As if my inside were a room in which too many things pile up: words that were never said, places that are no longer only places, but traces.

Then I get dressed.

Mechanically. Jacket, keys, headphones like a small suit of armor.

I go outside because I hope that movement will shift something in me.

Outside, the city is cold, alive, indifferent. People walk past me without knowing what is happening inside me. Traffic lights change. Cars draw streaks of light. And I walk as if I had a destination, although really I only want to disappear.

I lose myself on purpose.

I turn off without deciding. I follow streets until I no longer know where I am, because sometimes it is easier to lose yourself outside than inside.

At some point I stand in front of a bookshop.

The shop window is bright, warm, calm. Books lie stacked like promises.

I stop and see my reflection in the glass, overlaid by book spines and paper. For a moment it looks as if I were here and somewhere else at the same time.

And I think: Perhaps I can leave it here.

Not all of it.

Only a little.

I imagine that I place my memories into this shop window, very carefully, like objects one can no longer carry.

I turn around and walk on, as if I had handed something over.

And perhaps, when I later unlock the door to my apartment, the light in my room is on again.

Not because everything is good.

But because I can breathe again.