This story is a part of the Stories She Told series. It has been modified from its original version. View the original version on Instagram.
It wasn’t love at first sight. At 16, Berlin confused me. It was just a big city full of shops and restaurants. But when I moved there 2 years later for my gap year, that was it. I quickly fell deeply in love with the culture, cuisine, and movement of the city. In my desperation to be loved back, not good enough as is, I tried to reinvent myself as a young Berliner. I loved playing dress-up, putting on that costume all year and on every visit.
But a year ago, I stood in a club feeling so utterly out of place that the only thing I could do was wait outside for my friends.
Fresh off the plane from South Africa, I wasn’t in my Berlin costume. I wore a shweshwe headband to the club. Surrounded by black leather and combat boots, both it and I were out of place. Maybe it was the jetlag, but I didn’t want to be there. I sat outside, embarrassed and confused. Had we fallen out of love?
My usual habit of hopping on a train without a destination felt like a painful metaphor. This relationship was aimless. These fears were intensified by my degrading German skills (a relationship lacking communication… well, you get the point). On the sixth day, I strolled through the Tiergarten until I got to the Brandenburger Tor, bustling with tourists and hawkers. I headed for the U-Bahn, but noticed a door in the side of the monument labeled Room of Silence.
The room was small with low lighting and a quilted tapestry on one wall. I sat there, just sad. “In silence is embedded the marvelous power of clarification, purification, and concentration on essentials,” said a pamphlet on the floor.
I needed to have difficult conversations if this love was to survive. In the silence, I tried.
Of course this city would mean something different to me than it did when I was 18, drunk off sekt and independence. I loved that time in my life, but it was over. I wanted more, and that role had become an exhausting lie. It was not who I wanted to be anymore. Besides, the fake fashion, the arrogance, I had assumed who the city was and what it wanted from me. Berlin, my kind lover, had never asked me to be anything but myself.
In the silence, I let go of who I thought I had to be and let myself be loved for who I was.
//www.instagram.com/embed.js
