Dear friend,

August hatched from a full moon, I bleed in lunar rhythm and the summer is ripe and round. It came to the city two months ago with cherries in a plastic bag.

It’s 22:22, I write on the balcony, watching people biking, walking, running, the late night shop across the street is the lighthouse, the harbour, the gods of the city are sweating, there is a concert in the neighbourhood, something acoustic, people talk in restaurants and I almost hear what they are saying, laughing, leaning towards each other, sitting outside of the Italian restaurant owned by the family from Kosovo, the kitchen is closed but they still serve tiramisu or limoncello, the air is warm, a summer night in Berlin. After 23:00 people with a ladder and a small cart show up and start hanging posters on the lamp poles. The new mayor will be elected in September.

In June a dead bird of prey appears on the hot asphalt in Rostock. A falcon with feathers still shiny and smooth, motionless. People stop around it in a tiny circle, watch its soul leave the body and continue with their errands, forgetting about it or thinking, was it an omen? I baked a rhubarb cake the night before and we eat it on the beach of the Baltic Sea. The waves washed up a bunch of red onions onto the sandy beach and their origin is unclear to us. As the sun comes closer to the horizon it hits the surface of the sea at a certain angle and transforms it into a mass of sparkling glitter.

You know, my father saw the sea for the first time here, I say. He was already a young man, hadn’t seen any sea until he was eighteen years old. Can you imagine? He agreed to meet a friend at the train station and waited for him three days and three nights, getting drunk with sailors, sleeping outside, having no plans, that’s what he told me. He hitchhiked on the island of Rügen and he said, the fields before the harvest were so ripe and yellow and the wind so strong. I haven’t seen any photo from that trip, perhaps there is none.

We return to the city by a crowded regional train and a blond barefoot child keeps poking its sticky face at us through a gap between the seats.

A heat wave hits the city together with Eichenprozessionsspinner, moth caterpillars infesting the trees in the parks and burning the skin of Berliners. Spiky caterpillars form processions around the tree trunks and the red and white tapes mark the infected areas across the city. People with skin rashes talk on television and we watch the reportage on the Instagram of the evening news. Be aware of venomous hair! Do not sit under the oak trees!

It’s my seventh summer in the city and the first one I’m here, not yearning for elsewhere. The Danube sometimes flows through my mind but its image is flickering and shaky, a memory of summer love long gone. Berlin is sharp and saturated. The land is breaking through it on the surface, and if you look carefully you may notice the wild grass growing in the cracks of concrete, the juice of linden flowers on the cobblestones, cherries not only in plastic bags but falling on the ground at unexpected corners. I wear miniskirts and tank tops and pair them with platform loafers, as I’ve learned over the years that the shit of the city can get under your toenails if you wear sandals. A piece of glass got into the tire of my newly acquired bike, which is burgundy red and cost 45 euros on eBay Kleinanzeigen, J. found it for me. I had to take the bus M29 on that warm day when a big piece of glass penetrated the tire and the tube. You know that in Slovak the tube, Schlauch, is called duša, and it also means the soul?

Summer rewrites itself, the stream of images grows every year and now it’s not only

mulberry trees, the harvest, biking around fishponds, the high grass of Carpathian meadows, throwing pebbles into the river, wearing cherries as earrings, faded red umbrellas by the swimming pool.

It’s also

the open-air cinema with the movie screen on a graffiti wall, crossing the Oberbaumbrücke just before sunset, people biking through the night with speakers playing 80s hits, the glittering surface of the lakes of Brandenburg, the Baltic Sea.

Many things turn themselves into stories, a myth, something even more distant than a memory. Sometimes I tell you about them, or to somebody else, at the dinner table, an event, in a park, or on the grass next to the swimming pool, trying to pinpoint the difference between the Sommerbad Kreuzberg and the swimming pool in my hometown. There is something somatic about it, hard to describe, as if my body would recognise that the chlorinated water here is slightly different than over there, has a different source. Also, I cannot get langoš by the pool in Berlin.

It’s my seventh summer in the city and for the first time it does not suffocate me.

One Sunday, when temperatures climb to over forty degrees, we drive out of town with friends and swim in a lake, splash, float, let the child put mud on our shoulders in the shallow water. We eat fries with ketchup and cherries from a plastic bag, and in the shade of pine trees play continental rummy, comparing the rules across our home countries.

The next day, on my way from work, I learn bad news from a friend. On metro line 5 my throat is tight and salty but I do not cry. Fear is a bird of prey and we are made of its eggshell. Later that week, I sit in an unexpectedly idyllic hospital garden, trying to be there. Whatever that means. I brought a postcard with flowers as I learned that real flowers are not allowed. A tumor is cut out of the body and the body will heal. The body will heal and become strong again, there is no other way. For a moment I think I should pray to God but I only think to myself: one gets used to the gallows. Fear is a bird of prey and it can be tamed and sit on your arm or it just flies away.

Summer keeps rewriting itself and the coexistence of heaviness and lightness is making me dizzy. On a hot evening we eat in a tapas bar, laughing, leaning towards each other, the kitchen is already closed but we get one crema catalana and three spoons and I think people on the balconies above may almost hear us, the story about the lover from Mexico City, the gossip, the bad news, the good news. It’s been a year, or something like that, since I smoked a cigarette, and sometimes it surprises me, that I don’t light up on a hot night like this one or when my throat gets tight and salty and life rewrites itself.

It’s my seventh summer in the city and we wait for the solar eclipse.

With love,
Barbora

Dear friend,

As spring slowly shifts into unsuspecting summer, the days feel slow, sluggish even, crawling through the not necessarily uncomfortable monotony of running, writing, and taking unsuccessful job interviews.

Deceptively, it feels like nothing is happening. As they say, day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different. Weekday by weekday nothing changes, but on weekends life leaps forward like a happy frog.

In March, I start attending a personal trainer course. A sudden change of direction, not yet fully internalised, but not entirely unexpected. Some 20 of us pack into a small gym for four weekends in a row, all from different backgrounds (a translator, an acrobatics instructor, a policeman, an arm-wrestling champion, …) but brought together by a shared love of sports and movement, learning so much new about it all.

In this shared struggle we became close, in a comfortable and not vulnerable way, like kids in a camp or tourists on a guided tour, crammed into a small bus with complete strangers for a week. It reminds me of the way we made friends in elementary school – on the first school day you’d randomly sit next to someone, and a week later you’d be best friends.

.

In April, we take our final exams. An hour before the exam I pace up and down in a sunlit courtyard, going through my cue cards and mumbling Latin names of muscles I barely knew existed a couple of weeks prior. I pass, receiving three handshakes from the committee and a diploma. I can now become a personal trainer, if I so decide.

I haven’t decided yet, scared of the leap into the unknown.

Still in April, I host J’s bachelor party at our family’s cottage in the middle of nowhere. While in the cities the spring is all but over, replaced by lush greenness, up here, in the hills and almost-mountains, it takes its sweet time, cherry trees still in full white bloom.

The sky is bright like curtains caught in the wind.

We behave like boys, in truly the most unproblematic sense of the phrase. We cut down a tree or three, build a huge bonfire against the night, stand petrified in its amazing glare, drink whisky straight from the bottle and sing old folk songs and burn an old armoire and jump over the fire and drink some more until the stars above turn into blurry shimmer.

The next day there is a small forest fire nearby. We follow the firemen and watch as they put out flames creeping through the undergrowth.

“Whatcha doing? Came to watch?” one of them asks.

“Of course,” we reply.

“Well, don’t just stand there, go grab a shovel and help,” he says.

We do, going around the fire and putting out small flames on its edge. I am fulfilling my childhood dream: I am a fireman. For a split second I consider becoming a real fireman, but then I decide that one almost career change a year is more than enough.

To say thanks, the firemen give us beer and in return we give them cigarettes. As we leave, they stand there, smoking in a smoking forest.

.

J’s wedding is in May. It’s beautiful, naturally, the bride and groom too. We’ve known each other for so long, our friends and families are one tangled ball of yarn, so I spend most of the day catching up with old classmates, distant family members and mutual friends over bryndzové halušky and vanilla slices.

When I finally get to bed sometime before sunrise, I feel full, in the best possible way. There is joy in people. I cherish every brief or lifelong connection that I get to be a part of. Connections that can spark and flourish while discussing the biochemistry of muscle contractions, while chopping down trees, while taking a break from work, while bumping into one another on a stairway or a tram, while celebrating birthdays or love, while savouring a slow weekend afternoon.

I’m happy to be your and your and your friend.

With love,
Šimon

Dear friend,

As every year on New Year’s Eve the city spills its guts out, burns and exposes its wounded core with deafening sounds of firecrackers. Berliners flocks at the bridges over Spree waiting for the future becoming now.

A dear friend invites us for a New Year’s dinner party and I bring krompiruša, a potato burek. I preorder it in a Balkan bakery. We found out that the owner of the shop knew a father of my friend from Albania, bless his soul, may he rest in power, the world is a tiny place. At the dinner party I pulled Ten of Cups from the tarot card deck, promise of domestic happiness.

As every year on New Year’s Eve, public transport is delayed and taxis are not stopping for anyone. We walk home across Warschauer Bridge. I fear firecracker explosions but the city is mad ecstasy.

On January 2nd the snow covers the streets and rooftops and muffles all the sounds. We walk in Wuhlheide and build a snow person who joins a group of other snow creatures in the park. They popped up in that peaceful silence from the ground all around.

Later that night we meet with a friend in a neighbourhood cinema to finally watch Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos. After the unsettling movie we drink beer in the cinema bar. Outside, there is a snow storm and snowflakes are swirling in the red, blue and warm yellow neon lights of the cinema entrance. Snow continues falling and causes many delays and cancellations of European flights and trains. On Saturday, January 3rd, the power outage starts in southwest Berlin. This was not related to snow. It was an arson attack. Electricity is cut off for several days.

The Snow Chaos in Europe! I read in bold red font on the covers of newspapers in front of kiosks on my way to work.

The snow holds the ground in its strong grip for weeks. Landwehrkanal, Rummelsburger Buch and Engelbecken turn into ice skating rinks. On one particularly sunny Saturday everyone gets excited to walk on frozen waters. But on the other days, the city covered by ice is hostile, air is sharp and roads slippery.

One Sunday we attend a movie night at a friends’ home. I bring the potato burek again. They are screening a beautiful short movie about a siren’s Sehnsucht that they filmed themselves. A siren is trapped at the stairs of Berlin parks, yearning to go home. Afterwards we watch The Amphibian Man (1961), shot in Baku, Azerbaijan.

As we are leaving home, the roads turn themselves into glass and an invisible thin surface of ice covers everything. We share a cab with friends and the taxi driver calls his wife to tell her, in Arabic, that the roads are as if somebody spilled soap water on them. A friend who also speaks Arabic also always loves to keep the taxi driver’s conversation going.

The coldest winter since 16 years! I read in bold red font on the front pages of newspapers at stands in front of kiosks.

The day falls into the year again and as the new lunar year starts, people say there is fire horse energy in the air, you can feel it. But perhaps it is just the winter’s last breath which smells like fresh starts. I see the first cherry blossom in London in front of a friend’s house in Brixton, just before midnight. We visit the Tracey Emin’s exhibition and the feminist archive, we eat well, walk and walk and walk and I reunite with a high school friend. We used to be roommates in Bratislava, living on the seventh or ninth floor, I do not remember, it feels like another life.

And while I dream on an inflatable mattress covered by many blankets and the Brixton apartment is guarded by a black cat who wandered in one day, something is shifting again. Despite the fire horse promises the world keeps galloping towards its own destruction, people keep dying, being displaced, destroyed.

When I return from London the ice finally melts and dog shit and fireworks packages reappear. I start propagating plants, hoping for new roots to sprout into glass jars, looking at lamps at the flea market, cooking spinach. But one of the things about living in a city like Berlin is that whatever catastrophe happens somewhere in the world, there is always somebody you know who is affected. A friend, a colleague, an old lover. Your favourite restaurant owner or your neighbour. The wars run through the city like the Ringbahn, and yet on the surface life continues to follow the regular order of things. So far.

On the second day of Eid al-Fitr, after a day spent strolling around, drinking coffee, eating fresh bread, watching a bridge being built, bumping into other friends and getting to know an insufferable grandson of a famous Czech actor in the late-night shop, we eat a festive dinner in a Turkish restaurant. While in a mostly joyful mood, later in the night a friend gets shaken by a tragic story I share, unaware of the intrusive thoughts it can set free. We hold hands and cry in the Turkish restaurant. We are the last guests to leave just before midnight. Crying in restaurants is a special life skill we have as a group, I think to myself, and yet more than the immense tragedy of life I feel blessed to love and be loved by many. On the way from the restaurant to the bar we take a photo strip in a street photo booth, five of us squeeze in, but we do not all fit in the image. We cut the strip and split the miniature images between us. They live in our wallets now, in good spirits.

The next week I attend one wedding and one funeral. Both occasions are about bringing people together despite all the odds, flying in, taking the train. Wearing a long black coat the day after the funeral a black cat almost crosses my road and then changes her mind. I say I don’t believe in higher forces and despite that, or perhaps because of that, I always keep my eyes and mind open when it comes to omens. If for nothing else they are good for stories.

Warm wishes,
Barbora

Dear friend,

I’ve spent all winter thinking about writing to you, and now, when I finally do, it’s almost spring. As I’m writing this, we’ve had three beautifully sunny days in a row after what felt like three months of fog. Though there was some beauty in that, too. The temperature dropped below zero and stayed there for weeks. Snow fell and covered the hills for more than just one brief afternoon. Lakes and ponds froze, kids and their parents dug out their old ice skates and rushed to enjoy this temporary winter miracle, me too, sliding about in a pair of old running shoes. We haven’t had a winter like that in about a decade, I think.

But now it’s spring, almost. There is a potent and earthy and hopeful smell in the air. Clothes fit lighter and my monstera sprouted a beautifully perforated leaf.

Since you’ve heard from me last, I managed to, through some fault of my own, I’m willing to admit, become unemployed.

If we omit the fact that I am slowly, drip-drip-drip, running out of money, even though I go out less often, cook all my meals, and try to avoid sweet & savoury little treats; the longer I am out of work, the less I know how I want to earn a living for the rest of my life, in fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, maybe, I don’t want to work at all (Ellen Kennedy sums it up perfectly here); applying for jobs is just as annoying as ever; I miss the comfortable routine of coming to work every day and talking with my great&beautiful ex-colleagues instead of getting any actual work done, then being unemployed is pretty sweet.

Sundays are the best. There is no dread creeping through the slowly darkening afternoon, no unfinished tasks to get to on Monday morning. There is a day and then there is a day and then there is a day. I fall asleep thinking about nothing and wake up thinking about even less. No more jolting awake at 4 am, ruminating on this or that unfinished task, not being able to fall back asleep. I am free.

I use this freedom to do what any unemployed and directionless 30-something-year-old man would do: get into anime and climbing.

I watch all 425 canon episodes of Naruto in a just a few weeks, cry a couple of times, and come to the conclusion that love is the only story there is. I will not elaborate on that.

I take a climbing & belaying course, manage to not kill or maim myself or anyone else, enjoy it thoroughly, buy a brand-new harness and other climbing equipment the next week, only to strain my shoulder a week after that, and be forced to take a break from climbing.

I go places, not too far or for too long, but I enjoy the freedom to just take off without preparing any handovers for anyone, without setting up a Slack status, without letting anyone know. I slowly disappear. B and I go north, to walk in knee-deep snow, eat gummy worms, and drink beer. I go to Břeclav and back just to return a pair of ill-fitting shoes. I go to Prague for just 26 hours to catch a David Lynch exhibition (just like you should read Clarice Lispector, you should also watch David Lynch) and go bar hopping with L, whom I haven’t seen for a long time, we talk and talk and talk until 4 am, like old friends do, and when I go to sleep on the couch, her cat climbs on my legs and falls asleep too.

There is a comfortable unmooring taking place. The future doesn’t exist and yet it feels bright, like an endless horizon.

Of course, in writing this letter to you, I am reminded how good it feels to work / craft / create. It is an endless cycle. Soon, I will start to miss having a day filled with tasks. And when I finally get a job, I will start to miss this joyous freedom, days stretching like windswept branches.

When spring fully comes, I will replant all my plants. Myself too.

With love,
Šimon

Dear friend,

You haven’t heard from me for a while, but I always think about you. You in the world we share, shoulder to shoulder, morning commute, in the underground tunnels of the metropolis. Every city has its own type of wind on the train platforms and escalators, you feel the air stream, the smell of rails, hot steel, sweat, cologne, morning pretzel or perhaps croissant, coffee beans. You in the world we share, in motion, in the bus, in the tram, on a bike. In a small town, country roads, periphery. Periphery of the periphery. Walking to work you can see your breath. Sleeping in, if you are lucky. We read the same news, sometimes in different languages, we look at the same sky, sometimes from different angles. When does the sun set where you are? Is it winter where you are?

You haven’t heard from me for a while, but I always think about you.

On the day of the winter solstice I take the train home, towards the east. We survived the end of summer, we survived the darkness spreading itself bit by bit every day, world leaning further away from the sun. On the day of the winter solstice I take the train and I pass the Ferris wheels of Dresden, the Elbe, the border, volcanic rocks, hotels of past glory at the foot of the hills, facing the river. The hundreds of towers of Prague, it’s still daylight, sun sets 16:02. In Berlin the sun disappeared behind the horizon six minutes earlier.

The Fall (of the Berlin Wall Anniversary and other days)

Two of my close friends have an abrupt fight in a tapas bar. Another friend’s new girlfriend joins us for the first time that evening. The vibe is off. I bite into one more patata brava. I feel like I’m in a movie scene but not acting. My mind slips out of my body. It’s like watching the kind of movie we would want to go to on Sunday in the neighbourhood cinema, after the long brunch at home, after the Saturday night out, after the fight in the tapas bar. Is it an indie conversational rom-com? European cinema? Or something set in New York City? The scene is in a restaurant, all the characters at the table are some kind of misfits and academics, artists, writers, or manic pixie dream girls, and despite that, unlike us, they all display signs of extreme wealth. Perhaps generational. The soundtrack of this movie is lighthearted or maybe there is no music at all, the humour is sharp, and all the characters are annoying.

Two of my close friends have an abrupt fight in a tapas bar, I sip the Spanish red wine. My friend runs to the bathroom. I follow. The second friend follows me. They cry. We all hug. I put on lipstick. I love you, I love you, I love you. We return. We order dessert. Meanwhile, the new girlfriend of another friend talks about vegetarian food in China, she used to live there before the pandemic.

Next day we meet for brunch at home. We also want to go to the cinema to see the new Ethan Coen movie starring Aubrey Plaza, but the tickets are sold out so we opt for a living room screening.

Another day, Monday, I think, we meet for an after-work dinner in the Vietnamese restaurant on Rigaer Straße. It’s my favourite, I could say ours, but I’m always careful about speaking in plural when it comes to preferences. We come here often. It’s my favourite Vietnamese restaurant because there are no lanterns and no decorations, it’s just a room with white walls, five tables, the sweet owner and her employees, who are also her relatives, six mains on the menu, three starters, two types of beer (Tiger and a German one). The prices are low, the food is perfect. Chilli sauce and soy sauce as a centrepiece of the table. Guys, I can tell you this, a friend starts telling us a controversial story about her current lover. You won’t judge me. You’re like family. And we can’t choose family, right? We burst out laughing. I eat pho for the first time this season and listen to the stories of my friend, filled with a sense of belonging. The restaurant is better in summer, with tables outside, but now the air temperature drops too low after sunset.

The fall started abruptly and swept the patio chairs from the sidewalks.
The city is polished and shining like the chestnuts I slip into the pocket of my coat. Inside the pocket I spin it between my fingers.

The days of the dead

On the Day of Witches we drink fino, a small beer, under the lanterns and an umbrella on a square in Porto. Students in costumes are passing us in flocks. Undead, witches, thieves from the Louvre, devils, monsters, a nurse. It’s pouring rain. Next day we drive south via Autoestradas do Atlantico to visit friends for a couple of days. They moved into an apartment with narrow corridors and a wide terrace, the grey cat sleeps on the chests of the dreamers, all cosy. We peel vegetables together. In Caldas da Rainha, when the wind comes, you can smell the sulphur, mineral baths, established by the queen herself. After sunset you can hear the water flowing beneath the cobblestones. Listen carefully to the hidden water streams, coming to the surface through the mouths of gargoyle fountains. Later, the river meets the ocean and its stream runs against the tide, so strong it’s dangerous to come too close. The water takes everything with it.

When I return to Berlin I receive a call from my mother. Grandfather passed away. I never told you about him. He died alone, it was cold and dark around. We were not close. We haven’t talked in years. He would say blood is thicker than water but would not really care about us, his six grandchildren. I only have the anecdotes and a few memories from childhood. Watching Tom and Jerry on VHS in the apartment on the very high floor of a block of flats, my grandfather coming home from work, smell of cologne. My grandfather who had a small cross tattoo on his hand, loved the Rolling Stones and hated communists. My grandfather buying me pancakes in a highway restaurant. Blood may be thicker than water but the water takes everything with it in the end. I book the plane on the day of departure and attend the funeral.

The fall has fallen

The trees behind our kitchen window are bare and dark, silhouettes only. And despite the darkness spreading itself bit by bit, nights getting longer, cutting into our morning routines and afternoon coffees, the short Berlin days remain sunny and sharp like a glass marble.

The change of times

The last weeks of the year swallow me, I drown in work, my body is tense, stiff, I forget to breathe. I do not go to the pool, the water does not take anything away, I cumulate tension between my shoulder blades. I’m tired and sick and I pop vitamin D tablets.

You haven’t heard from me but I always think about you. You in the world we share. On the day of the winter solstice I take the train towards the east, it cuts through the landscape after sunset, the railways and water holding the world together, the locomotive whistle, the smell of rails and hot steel. A new cycle begins.

Love,
Barbora

Dear friend,

You should read Clarice Lispector and YOU should read Clarice Lispector and you! should read Clarice Lispector. Everyone should.

She is magic.

There are moments and then there are moments, a different kind, when something clicks, a bird catches the wind for the first time, hand brushes eagerly against a hand, you read something that shifts your life, a-ha!. The air stills in expectation.

I felt it when I first read Charles Bukowski, in the middle of a concrete sportsground, the summer sickly trudging through September. I felt it with Max Porter in the 4 am stillness of Aberdeen Airport. I felt it with Anna Kavana’s Ice, Ali Smith’s Autumn, Michaela Rosová’s Nepokojní spáči...

I felt it when I first read Clarice Lispector. It was my last semester abroad, the sun always shone in pleasing angles, I swam in the mornings and read books and drank coffee in the pleasant garden afternoons and occasionally worked on poems for my final dissertation, here’s one:

as I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty
land enclosing sea
sea enclosing land
in a bright cyclical confirmation of all negation
confrontation of soil and water
ever-ebbing and rotationally-rising

what a conundrum
bigger than you and/or me
standing on the shore of the sea of the land
wanting to touch every textured bark
and bark back at every dog
and swim in every ocean
and emerge with salt-painted hair

like two bright stars from up above
like moon like sun
both rotating yes
beautiful ever-winning marbles of crystal
played on this cosmic plane

Days stretched like clotheslines in the wind. That’s when I read Clarice Lispector for the first time.

I read the small collection of three short stories called Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady. In all of them, the main characters emerge from the slumber of their everyday lives and suddenly, for one reason or another, they experience them fully. They peer behind the curtain, glimpse the beautifully intense secret of it all, and their lives are forever transformed.

Or not. Often, they shirk the magic, forgo the revelation, scared of what it might mean, and return to their lives, husbands, the ordinary. They feel and then choose not to feel. Like here (and in many many other places):

FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN (EXCERPT)

So that was happiness. At first, she felt empty. Then her eyes filled with tears: this was happiness, but ah, how very mortal I am, how love for this world transcends me! Love for this mortal life was killing her softly, little by little. And what do you do when you’re happy? What do I make of happiness? What do I make of this strange, penetrating peace that is already beginning to hurt me like an anguish and like a great silence? To whom do I give this happiness that is already beginning to wound me a little and which frightens me? No, she did not want to be happy. Out of fear of entering unknown territory. She preferred the mediocrity of a life she knew. Then she tried to laugh to hide this fatal, terrifying choice. And she thought, with a falsely jocular air: “Being happy? God gives nuts to people who have no teeth.” But she didn’t find it funny. She was sad, thoughtful. She would return to her daily death.

You might know this feeling, too. The awakening of all senses, the acute noticing of the world around and inside, the joyous weight of existence and the melancholy of each passing breath. The absolute experience.

Clarice manages to capture these fleeting and effervescent moments so masterfully, lay them to page after page, stretch them like ornamental rugs and examine their every strand… I feel that she really noticed the world and spoke it.

It’s as beautiful as it is painful. The sharp acuteness of it all. The fierceness of emotion. The assault on the senses. It’s a revelation.

Sometimes, I too am blessed with the sharp realisation of the inherent muchness of life. I feel this is it! this is the presence of mind and body that should be preserved and honed and life should pass through its prism in all its multicoloured beauty and I should savour it like a ripe mango and live LIVE live!.

But then, just like many of Clarice’s characters, I awake from the trance and am faced with the everyday mundane. My sight slowly narrows. The clean knowledge that if you and I and we were more attuned to the joyous rhythm of existence, sang it boldly, then the world would be a better place, is replaced. There are bills to pay, dinners to cook, apps to scroll, responsibilities to uphold. Or at least that’s what the forever scared part of myself whispers in the mirror.

That’s why I return to Clarice again and again, to remind myself that there is always more to each moment than seems possible, and it’s only up to me and you to seize it and experience and live truthfully, whatever that might mean.

That’s why you should read Clarice Lispector.

With love,
Šimon

Dear friend,

It’s September and in Berlin, the sun sets at 19:47 today.

The Year Without Summer, a must-see, boundary-pushing and provocative theatre play by Florentina Holzinger, hit the stage of the Berlin Volksbühne and attracted theatre critics and crowds of creative professionals, journalists, performative males, contemporary art lovers and cultural workers. For some weeks The Year Without Summer has been discussed at gallery openings and studio parties, around the tables of brunch cafés, natural wine bars and smoky pubs of Neukölln at 3 a.m. I haven’t seen the play, though it scared me that it might have predicted the cold fronts and unreliable weather changes in central Europe. The year without summer, somebody whispers, as we walk huddled under umbrellas wearing blazers and bomber jackets in mid July.

But after all, thankfully, notes of the year with summer.

I celebrated my birthday in a country house in Brandenburg so shabby that one friend of mine decided to sleep in the car. Mattresses, for sure older than united Germany, perhaps still produced in the Reich, obscure objects, a horse saddle and harnesses, furniture antique, vintage, retro and some just old crap, a barn with Persian carpets and an old hospital bed, a hot water boiler heated by firewood, after dragging 15 friends and two toddlers to this environment I thought it was going to be a disaster. The storm and strong rain of the absent summer spell.

Later, filled with love, we brunch scrambled tofu, salad, sourdough bread, grapes, plums, cherries, strawberry marmalade. We cut papers, play cards, paint nails, walk the country roads. We chop vegetables and herbs, we cook on fire (the oven is broken). We dine in candlelight in the garden, wax dripping in white tablecloth. I get a sunflower, a rose, a plant in a pot, two books, blue earrings, a surprise trip. We dance trough the night in the barn on the carpets, my friends are the party starters. Do you love 2000’s Sean Paul?

I enter the future surrounded by love in all its forms, thankful.

Neither of us smoked, and perhaps that was the first sign we were already in the future.

After the second beer in the evening sun on the rooftop terrace, Bratislava bathing in maple syrup, I said I would bum a cig. But I only like rollies and nobody had tobacco around. I really hate Marlboros. Neither of us smoked, and I told you that a friend mentioned to me that an ex of mine had gotten married and was expecting a child. You asked how I felt about it. I said nothing special. It’s been a decade since we broke up. It was a great love, head over heels indeed. You know how it makes me feel? It makes me feel like we’re already in the future. Do you know what I mean?

The future is now. The future in which all my exes are married and only lovers left alive started gardening or perhaps running marathons. The future caught me off guard, unprepared. Without a driving license, still taking the trains, landscape behind the train window in high summer, just before the harvest, mourning July.

Craving the road, craving the distance, I’ve never been to Sarajevo before, but I always wanted to go.

I speak Slavic Esperanto (I speak Slovak, people answer in Bosnian, we will never know if we meant the same thing in the end). We take a train along the mountains and a river and arrive to Mostar before lunchtime. I read Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić and find out that the start of the story is also set in Mostar. Life is full of beautiful coincidences.

Do you believe in fate?

We take a bus to the Croatian coast. At the border, we have to open our backpacks. My palms are sweaty.

Before the sunset, the narrow streets of coastal villages in Dalmatia smell like garlic, tomato sauce, spaghetti Bolognese, onion in the pan, Vegeta spice mix, boiling water, fish. Restaurants are half empty, and it’s not clear if it’s because of the steep rise of prices, the mediocre quality of meals they serve, or the simple fact that tourists here, same as us, prefer to cook their own food. Camping fridges filled with beer cans, sometimes imported here all the way from home, Pilsner.

Later that week we attempt to hitchhike to the wedding of a friend in Zagreb, but after an hour in the direct sun, we make it only to Makarska, and a young Bosnian man in a Porsche with German license plates plays sentimental Yugoslavian songs. We end up taking a bus.

It’s September and in Berlin, the sun sets at 19:47 today. While for many years I struggled to recognise the last day of summer without the first day of school, this year the edges of summer feel sharp and precise. The day after the return from holiday it rains and it does not smell like petrichor. I don’t smoke and I wear black loafers and a denim skirt. I cook butter beans with lemon peels.

Tenderly yours,
Barbora

Dear friend,

It’s all about all the people, after all.

30,000 of them standing in a field, as Pulp almost sings.

I first came here in 2011 and never stopped. Summers and music festivals and friends go together like swallows and telephone lines. That first year, there were a couple of us, so so close back then, so in love. The love remained, but the group swelled, evolved, shifted and shrank as the years went by.

I remember seeing FM Belfast and wearing V-neck t-shirts.

Pohoda Festival became synonymous with summer and vice versa. It became a place to enjoy music already loved and fall in love with fresh bands. To meet old friends, unexpectedly emerging from crowds or waving you down from beer queues. To hug so tight, dance together under epileptic lights, talk in hushed voices among quiet tents. To unmoor from the everyday and enjoy this kind madness.

I remember waiting out the summer storms huddled in tents, reading books or drinking wine. I remember pushing through the crowd to get closer to the action, getting crushed by the mass of bodies. I remember singing Hey Jude holding hands with hundreds of strangers just before sunrise. I remember eagerly waiting for Lykke Li, only for her show to get cancelled two years in a row. I remember having quiet candid conversations with old loves while great music roared in the background. I remember slow afternoons when we lounged in any available shade, mute with exhaustion, waiting for the night to come.

Year after year, I remember feeling at home.

Then something changed, as things tend to, unfortunately.

Fewer friends came each year, some moved away, others became parents, and others grew old. It still remained a kind and beautiful and communal place, just not for me, I felt.

I decided that 2024 will be my last year. Giving it one last go. A nice farewell.

Losing my old festival friend group, I ended up tagging along with an old classmate and her friend, N., with whom I had only talked once before, or rather, argued with, in Instagram comments. I was apprehensive, obviously. And yet.

We hung out, drank beers, talked openly and honestly, went to concerts together (meeting on the right side of the sound booth), I met their friends and friends of friends, who were all kind and nice, I recognised some old faces in the group, joy was in the air.

Then the storm came.

I just saw the cutest concert of the festival (God and Eve), N. and I were getting fries and it was suddenly so cloudy and windy and cold and we were joking that the storm will surely just skirt us and we were running under increasingly heavy and dense raindrops and I was sitting in the darkness of my tent, bracing against the tent poles so they wouldn’t break under the barrage of wind and rain, trying to eat my fries without spilling sauce everywhere.

Then it was over. The sky was clear and ominous. First responders walked among tents, checking if everyone was alive. There was a gap on the horizon. One of the stages fell. Some people were hurt. The festival ended a day early.

Of course, that’s not how I wanted to remember my last time.

So I went again this year, already sure that it won’t be the last time. Something has shifted again, in a new and kinder way.

I went with the same people as last year, gorgeous and smiling, refreshing each other’s names, drinking grepovička from plastic bottles in the early afternoon, waiting for each other on the left side of the sound booth this time, friend of a friend of an old friend, emerging from the dark night, sharing drinks and lighters and bubble blowers, quickly catching up in the quiet moments between songs, vibing into the night.

When the final morning finally came, the sun hidden behind a wall of clouds crowning the surrounding hills, it found us still dancing, singing, laughing, concocting telenovelas in our minds, enjoying the place, the moment, the presence of each other, so close.

Just like it used to be. 30,000 people. Dancing in the field. Like a bunch of sunflowers.

With love,
Šimon

Dear friend,

Between wakefulness and sleep, in a blue light of an early morning, a summer storm enters my dreams. Bojím sa búrky a meškajúcich vlakov, I fear storms and delayed trains, I think in Slovak. Thunder echoes in the backyards, sound of rain feels like home, summer nights of past, small town paths washed by rainwater. My mother grows fuchsias on the kitchen window pane, purple and red like bruises on my knees in the peak of a summer long gone.

As you write letters to spring, I always have been writing them to summer.

Eight years ago I wrote: Summer brings hot concrete, bare knees, and mulberry sorrow. In the studio, a fan blows on my neck, I pull down the blinds, slip off my sneakers under the table. In the evening, I sink into chlorinated water, melt into the sunset, rub sunscreen onto my shoulders. In metro, my hair is still wet and my face, lit by the screen, resembles the colour of pale skin underwater. Inhale, exhale, and the screams of children from the next pool bounce off the tiles like a ping-pong ball, underwater the sound is hollow and deep, in the screen's glow the skin loses its colour. Our street burns white-hot, and the Ukrainian workers between the traffic cones wear no shirts under their reflective vests. I think of the rivers. Váh and the Danube. This year I’ll miss elderflower syrup, the solstice, and the ripening of cherries.

Back then, I did not know yet that I will miss the ripening of cherries again and again and again, that I will stop writing in my mother tongue. I did not know that I will spend years growing the love I was just slowly falling into, at the time fearing attachments and predictable story lines in the blossom of youth. I did not know I will grow and become an urban woman. That I will soften inside out, stop fearing vulnerability, that gods of the city, harsh and brutal to many, will treat me with gentle love after accepting my sacrifice of ripening cherries and fuchsias on my mother’s window pane. You remember, last time I was not sure what was my offering to gods of Berlin, I thought it was 7 years of youth and storylines I did not choose, but in the end, now I know, it’s the ripening of cherries.

My spring was interrupted by a series of colds and sore throats to later find out that I have low vitamin D levels. The sacrifice of the sunshine, in the screen's glow the skin loses its colour and skies of long Berlin’s winter take its last warm undertone.

I travel to Slovakia to celebrate the birthday of my best friend. The Eurocity Express is weaving itself alongside the Elbe, the rocks, the forest, the hundred towers of Prague, the forest again. I arrive in Bratislava before midnight, the air is fresh, maybe too fresh for an early summer night. I sleep on an inflatable mattress and wake up into the sunshine. Before bringing the long table outside and placing glass vases with soft pink peonies on a white table cloth, we go for a wedding dress fit check. It feels surreal, as we agreed on being each others’ maids of honour when we were thirteen, I look at my friend in white soft fabrics and getting just taste of Slovak summer I return back to Berlin.

I’m applying for a German passport, in the simple written part of the language exam I write an email to a fictional friend who asked me to take care of their cat during summer holiday. I need to find out more details, exact dates, find out if I can do it, does fictional me have cat allergy or am I going to be out of town for a whole month of August? Will I take care of the fictional cat? Am I a good friend with the fictional cat’s fictional owner? I decide to leave it open but hint that I might be traveling and I need to know more about the cat’s needs, how many times a day I should feed her? I neither agreed, nor disagreed with this fictional favour. I made sure to include sentence structures complicated enough to grand me a success, neither/nor, even though, if/then, despite that.

Despite everything, days are still leaning closer to the sun.

I spend time with my non-fictional friends, the true gifts of the gods of the city.

The last friends leave our living room after 3 am, we start the dishwasher, it hums silently trough the night, we collect empty bottles in the kitchen corner, pack leftovers in glass containers, stacked them in the fridge. Quiches, hummus, and a rhubarb cake, I bake once a year, always on June 7th.

At some point the joy of late nights, once an unspectacular, perhaps unhealthy habit, turned into something we have to keep alive and nourish. To protect in the days of early morning commutes, careers, meetings, second shifts, daycare pickups, fluffs of dusts illuminated on the floor.

I protect the late nights and the dust fluffs, I keep them alive. I nourish the aimless days. The city is heating up, as every year, I wish I could take a delayed train on the verge of summer storm, to go cherrypicking.

As a young girl walking the dusty paths on the outskirts of the town alongside sunflower fields, in the dusk of slow and sticky summer days, being in euphoric love or love sick, sometimes both, when my first love gave me The Beatles CD I already had, and then we broke up crying in a park, when two months of summer break could fit two lifetimes, at that time, I used to plot plans how to travel the world, how to move, to move to some city, abroad. I was dreaming of becoming an artist, or maybe a writer, maybe a painter, maybe a journalist.

I did not know that longing will always persist, that it will change its form, might switch around, that the boredom of dusty paths and outskirts could become something to desire. Cherries, fuchsias, summer itself or summer somewhere else, chapters we wish to began, the one with a new passport or with old friends, storylines we did not, or could not, choose. Despite that, longing does not exclude round days pierced with moments of joy, the fullness.

June 8th, between night and day, in a blue light of an early morning a summer storm enters my dreams. Home still smells like a rhubarb cake.

With Love,
Barbora

lovingly, autumn arrives,
on the inverse wings of birds,
whispering its quiet credo to the wind:
do it with love!

drink fizzy drinks with love,
hold babies with love,
gather colourful leaves with love,
get lost in familiar streets with love,
make love with love,
order rounds for the whole table with love,
hug old friends with love,
meet new ones with just as much love,
climb trees with love,
watch the sky change into its evening gown with love,
remember with love,
love with love!

II.

the night falls
from its electric scooter
spills all over

air rigid with blackness feeble 
streetlights cannot penetrate

the city belongs to couriers now
kids who spill out onto streets squinting through warning lights and signs on bikes and scooters crisscrossing people and cars alike in a mad dash from resto to customer to resto to customer all evening long for a chance to earn some little money to blow on overpriced cocktails or puff bars

how weird
to hold yourself in the palm of a shopwindow reflection
changed in ways that drift through time
same like concrete blocks of empty parking lots
working mindless jobs into weird hours of night watching lights flicker at far ends of aisles nursing fresh after-breakup holes between ribs making small talk with frail pensioners scanning their groceries to earn some little money to buy stale beer and cigarettes

III.

Read more

Dear friend,

Spring! Yes! Again and again and again. Even though by the time this letter finds you, it feels like the summer has already arrived.

I failed to observe the official start of spring because it was the first day of my trip to Madeira, and I was too preoccupied to keep track of the days. It was in the air for weeks by then, anyway. Spring is a state of mind.

I went there to clear my head, be alone, read and write and hike. Being alone on an island is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you are alone on a beautiful island. On the other hand, you are alone on a beautiful island. Elation can be washed away by sadness at any moment. It was an adventure.

.

A friend of a friend picks me up after a bumpy and delayed flight in his almost 30-year-old Jeep, nicknamed Pablo, its trunk filled with beer bottles and surfing equipment. He hands me a beer, grabs one for himself, and we drive into the sunset.

I want to be alone, I want to wallow in my sadness, but that is denied. I meet what feels like dozens of temporary locals who uprooted their whole lives to experience the island lifestyle. They are all beautiful. Full of possibility and adventure. Naively optimistic. Invigorating and inspiring. There are other worlds than these. Just do it, man!

I get dragged out to street parties full of light and music, altruistic beach clean-ups, remote villages, steep ridges, intimate dinners.

There are always people there.

I meet someone who comes from the same village as the cocktail called Hugo. I meet someone who takes me on “one of the most dangerous hikes in Madeira”, up up up through thick bushes and barely traceable trails, one wrong step spells death. I meet someone who tells me about the melancholy of the sea & art & love. I meet someone who tries to teach me how to surf. I meet a beautiful Frenchman, an Italian with a magical accent, a reserved Icelandic guy, a Portuguese teenage surfer, a Spanish photographer, a travelling Ukrainian…

I meet my sister, whom I like very much, although for the longest time you’d think the exact opposite. Each year, we grow older, closer.

I meet myself, in those rare quiet moments when I actually manage to be alone, hiking up deserted levadas or on top of a mountain where I look for myself in the clouds. I test the aloneness with the tip of my tongue. A foreign feeling, forgotten.

I pose questions without answers, answer without being asked, trails disappear into clouds.

.

Sometime later, I write this letter in the middle of the Slovak forests. There is no one around. Finally, I find myself truly alone. I savour the feeling: peer into empty cottages, shout in the forest, bathe in the cold stream.

I sit in a lawn chair, reading, then looking up at clouds, fluffy and swirling at the edges like fractals or precious stones. I look for silver linings.

I begin to see myself more clearly in this quiet afternoon light. I return to nature, in more ways than one, searching for balance between the lonely stillness of dusk and the erupting cries of morning birds.

I hope this letter finds you full of love,
Šimon

Empty empty empty – repeated in step –

McWatt in the cockpit of blood-splattered plane aiming for the cliff.

Summer shows its coquettish hues of sepia sweat & sun,
Kaleidoscope of photons painted through swaying leaves,
Here is a star, here is a well, here is a medal – given or taken.

The head is gone, minced or – Happy happy happy – 
carefully laid at the shore, wreathed in small stones:
Leaving is necessary but strongly discouraged.

Escape escape escape – the sweltering day
to shadows that play the one where you disappear – 
never to be seen again, only talked of 
in conspiratorial smiles, full of knowing

II.

Metronome drowned in sweat
Sticking to the beats like ice-cream to concrete

Dust covers sun, sun blinds the light
River ebbs into the porous bed of smoothly polished rocks

A rhythm ch-ch-ch-changed
Languid in its dizzy impreciseness

Trees fit wrongly into the sky
Swaying blocks of waning breath 

III.

each step forward
	tough, like an empty mirror of sky,
movement dulls
	to a disused bus stop, devoid of people,
a bird couldn’t break the stillness
	awaiting infertility of returns,
a wisp of clouds
	offers vain promises of rain.

IV.

Something sags heavy, drained of sap,
Empty words filling its toothless mouth,
Wind tosses dust in haphazard formations

The end is near

Knees buckle
Ankles give
Toes splinter

Blink – surprised – mutely
Into the encroaching haze

V.

dusk comes early, on the hoofs of startled deer
breathing, of damp ferns and strange lights among trees

it feels, like an ending, and a beginning
two sides of the same coin
spinning, in the thinning light

this, is a small repose
painted with droplets, of rain mist and sweat -
soon to be given back,

VI.

Read more

Dear Friend,

After the rain, the city smells like spring. For the first time this year, that earthy scent of petrichor fills the air, the promise of a beginning.

Siamo tutti antifascisti! Siamo tutti antifascisti! Siamo tutti antifascisti! we chant on Saturday afternoon. The sky is a bright blue, the first magnolias are starting to bloom on street corners, and purple crocuses carpet backyards and public lawns. My friends post them on Insta stories. We eat croissants in the park for a late breakfast. I left my winter coat at home and wore an old denim jacket. The heavily armoured cops must be sweating. And against the backdrop of the cloudless sky, flags of the German empire wave above the heads of the crowd opposing us. Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus! echoes through the train station, later circulating as short videos on social media, in between pictures of purple flowers.

That Saturday, after dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, we found ourselves at a friend of a friend’s flat party, hanging out at 4 a.m. in a smoky kitchen, shoulder to shoulder with friends and strangers. It was a beautiful day. A beautiful life. In Berlin, I found the joy of being myself, first, years ago, in its anonymity, knowing I wouldn't run into a high school classmate on the street. Later, as the city became my village, I found the joy of running into people at the market, exchanging greetings and hugs. Every day, the baker at the metro station waves at me. I let the late-night shop owner call me Schatz and tell me what happened overnight. A home was established. While the yearning of the heart can catch me off guard, imagining the scenarios of life not (yet) chosen, we are Berliners, allowed to stay young, while our hair has been greying since the day we met, silver linings.

Days lean closer toward the sun. Against the backdrop of the cloudless sky, somebody performs a Nazi salute. Another day in another city, the sky is azul, and the oranges are ripe, bold, and round. Silver lining.

You asked, Where do you begin an end? People say times are changing. The beginning, you wrote, is almost always light. People say life goes on, and they are not wrong. Tomorrow, they'll arrest our friends, but we'll still go to work to hustle, Fvck_kvlt moans in Slovak on his new album. I listen to it on my way to work.

Since I can remember, I’ve feared oppressive regimes. There are fears we inherit, we are born with them. Fear, like a wounded animal, it runs in our veins, in circles, hides in our cells, builds a den in our subconscious, bites us from inside. Fear of heights, darkness, closed spaces, disease. Hypochondriac tendencies, anxiety, fear of oppressive regimes.

I put my hands up, clap, hands up, clap, my palms get sweaty, my heart beats faster, I look for an escape route. My body carries the movements of those before me, a continuation of their traces.

Since I can remember, I've been an alarmist when it comes to politics. Imagining the worst scenarios after the 2013 local elections far-right victory while baking chocolate cake for my friend’s birthday. In 2014, after the Russian occupation of Crimea, we sat on the floor, drinking chamomile tea with my roommates in Bratislava, wondering if the war would grow bigger, a decade later knowing the answer. I was heartbroken and lovesick that spring, gasping for air under the blooming trees, unable to breathe, eat or sleep. I was alarmed in 2016, cooking dhal with my dear friend in her tiny kitchen, before going to a rave, just a few days after the election in the USA, Brexit already rolling out. We danced until sunrise that night. I cried in a post office queue the morning after Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine, grew a friendship under orange trees that year in Lisbon.

But where does the beginning of the end begin? When the far-right looser with interest in SS uniforms wins the local election? When another one becomes a president? Prime minister? Overseas? In a neighbouring country? What is the election threshold worth of alarm? Seven per cent? Twenty-five? Fifty? When your friends get spit on? When you get spit on?

Cooking dinner, sharing meals, making out, making love, going to the swimming pool. Long train rides. Jumping on bed with a toddler, befriending strangers, leaning close to each other in bars with dim lights, eating Sichuan noodles, walking in the neighbourhood, breathing in the spring air. Briefly feeling alive, glimpses of joy, despite the odds, feeling home again. Silver linings.

I put my hands up, clap, hands up, clap, my palms get sweaty, my heart beats faster. My body carries the movements of those before me, a continuation of their traces.

With love,
Barbora

Dear friend,

Where do you begin an end?

To begin a beginning is much easier. The beginning is almost always light. Unsure but light on its feet like a not-yet-skilled ballet dancer or a fawn running through a sunlit meadow.

To begin from a beginning is only natural: It was a day before Friday the thirteenth, a day before that Friday when everything stopped and changed and there was already some apprehension and uneasiness in the air. We sat at the opposite ends of a table, drank wine and beer, and worked on getting to know each other. Initially, I wrote “worked hard” but there was nothing hard about it.

Then the lights went out and were replaced by the red-blue flashing of police cruisers and fire trucks outside. Something has happened just next door, but it did not matter. Not to us. We were already sitting much closer to each other, knees touching, conversing over the commotion. It was the beginning of spring.

Then, there was a day spent walking in a forest by the Danube.

Then there was an overgrown outdoor pool, Strmá street, wine in plastic cups from Pod lampou pub, the kiss in a park.

That was the beginning.

.

Then there is always a middle. A fruit jam filling, slightly sour, but in the best of ways. A middle filled with increased closeness, new flats jobs furniture books vacations experiences haircuts friends illnesses memories, life shared.

A middle made of moments so small and so insignificant that you barely remember them, but they spell out love or something akin to it. Pancakes on the weekends. Aimless walks around the city. Making each other tea or coffee or sandwiches. Touching each other in unexpected ways, moments and places. Making up and forgetting dozens of nonsensical nicknames. Reading books next to each other on the balcony, at the beach, by the fireplace. Life, shared.

.

Then there was an end. It’s impossible to see when the momentum of the middle shifted towards it. Was it the first big argument that ended unresolved? Or has it planted its seeds in every small moment of discontent, soon forgotten, but quietly growing, slowly filling silences with sickly stillness instead of a quiet understanding? Or was it imperceptibly woven into the very beginning; all things predestined to end?

Some questions will not get an answer.

Then came its peak, a quiet crescendo culminating in an (un)expected conversation on the couch, a place of comfort now transformed. There were tears, of course. “So, that’s it?” “I guess so.” More tears. An uneasy, but relieved, laughter.

Unceremonious, but moments like these often are. You fret about them, try hard to avoid them, mull them over and over and over in your head as the moonlight traces its slow progression across the quiet room. Like turning 30. Or leaving a job. Or moving cities, countries. They seem overwhelming and impossible to survive in advance, but then they come, wash over you, and you find yourself still alive.

Life will go on. The end will go on for a while longer too, linger, the love will be transformed, pushed underground like a stream. I like to think it will never dry out, but remain, like a scar or a tattoo or a memory, holding only that which was dear.

.

Then, so much later and despite all odds, the end will give birth to a new beginning. Where one thing ends, a new thing begins. Something that at first is unsure but light on its feet like a not-yet-skilled ballet dancer or a fawn…

With love,
Šimon

heat – like heavy beads – hangs from the barren sky,
rises with sick fumes from the ground,
sizzling sweat, sticks to tar of noon

a sprinkle truck drives by, brilliant in its glory,
paints the streets with rapids of water -
lap-lap-lap lap it up like a starving dog

the sun falls towards an unsure horizon
with poison-blood screech of broken days
– the unrelenting summer rages on

II. (reunion)

as if nothing had changed – 
forgetting all those years lived heavy
we greet fragments of us in each other

here is closeness: warm and unexpected
here is understanding: shared in laughter
(no one knows us better than we know each other best)
here is love:

next days are lighter
smiling full

III.

Read more

Dear friend,

I hope you are doing well, whether you’re looking back, looking into the future, or just being present, with no grand emotions, simply staying alive.

We survived the change of summer time, darker days, the winter solstice, the shortest day, another year.

On New Year’s Eve, a pipe on Seestraße broke, flooding the street and causing a water outage in four districts of the city. People in late-night shops fought over bottled water. Berlin, in flames and sparkles, deafeningly loud, firecrackers, madness, explosions. Vomit and piss and trash and humanity in its rawest despair or ecstasy or everything in between. Trams not operating, metro lines delayed, taxis not stopping. At 7 a.m. on the 1st of January, I returned home.

I picked the Strength card from the tarot deck.
We might all need it.

When the Strength card appears in a reading, it speaks of inner strength, personal power, strong will, and determination. Your strength gives you the confidence to overcome growing fears, challenges, or doubts. Courage and resilience.

In autumn, I started playing with the idea of leaving the city. Not for the countryside, obviously, but for another city. Which one, this I don’t know.

Perhaps it’s just the end of a cycle, life moving in circles. Every seven years, all our cells renew, and now I walk these streets that smell like piss, as a different person than I was when I arrived here by Flixbus in early January, seven years ago. Falling in love carefully, envisioning a life I could, maybe, hopefully, have here one day. A beautiful life.

Perhaps it’s the German politics, which started to scare me and many of my loved ones in the past year, and the elections on the horizon are not promising a brighter future. Many people moved out of Berlin, away from Germany, friends and friends of friends, Ausländer, leaving their carefully grown social circles, homes, and careers behind, writing breakup letters to the city, the former capital of misfits, anarchists, ravers, artists, and dreamers. As one might move to another place only to realise they cannot escape themselves, in current times, one might not escape the ideologies and crises spreading across the globe, like walnut moths ravaging all the nut trees in a village.

Perhaps it’s just the yearning heart, lust for life which can take so many different forms. Privileged enough, we can always imagine other scenarios. While all my are cells renewed, the longing of the heart remains unchanged. My dear friend told me, while eating takeaway pizza soaked in olive oil made by her family, that it’s a precious treat to be a dreamer. I’m once again, in my mind, breathlessly flipping through the pages of a big atlas that still includes the Soviet Union, sitting on the red ornamental carpet in my grandmother’s living room.

Moving always seemed easy to me. Natural. A few practicalities, obstacles with paperwork, insurance, tax numbers, new jobs, new apartments – following the flow.

Now, just the idea of departure made my heart ache, thinking about the love in all its forms I found and grew here, relationships so precious that it’s hard to describe with words. I’m looking at the sideboard I bought at the flea market on the day of my arrival, on a rarely sunny winter Sunday. The sideboard later moved to four different apartments. It was a bargain from the local Bosnian vendors who, over the years, equipped our cupboards with glassware and mismatched plates, spoons and forks, and candle holders. When I purchased it, probably my first ever real piece of furniture, I thought, now I’ve made a deal with the gods of the city. Maybe this is where I belong. The gods of the city were always kind to me, and sometimes I wonder what it is, in the end, that I had to sacrifice to them in return. An offering of my own youth, the lives I did not choose, the yearning of the heart?

Gods of the city, I can’t stop thinking about them. After receiving an unexpected lawyer’s letter terminating our rental contract, we sit at the kitchen table in silence. This was our home, the first one after a decade of life in motion. A place of growing roots and love. After five years, we will follow the flow, root again, life moving in circles.

I survived the change of summer time, the darker days, the winter solstice, the shortest day, and another year in Berlin with grace and joy. I’m staying, for another while.

With Strength,
Barbora

clouds race across the sky
turbulent waves push the air down
like a piston
working overtime on the slushy ground
of forest gifted with rain

hills stretch upwards
meeting the storm
in a passionate kiss

rain bonds with sweat
mud splatters
spit darts through the air
the sky grows closer

II.

a kiss
with salt on its breath,
pines, swaying in the wind

lazy cats rolling down the hill
towards the not-yet-warm sea
swatting careless cicadas along the way

this a moment frozen in time,
a break
from reality

III.

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Dear friend,

At 6:30, the warden of Téry’s Cabin walked into the large common room where we all slept, turned on the too-bright lights and said, “Good morning, time to get up”. We tried to blink away the exhaustion of yesterday, now even more pronounced by the restless sleep, put on layers and layers of clothes and went out to watch the sunrise.

It was beautiful, naturally. First, there was only a thin sliver of pure pink above the horizon, then it stretched its rosy fingers, climbed up the steep granite slopes and finally nestled comfortably on the western peaks, painting them the deepest shade of orange, like a ripe fruit.

I could almost reach out my hand and touch the sunrise, caress the rough rocks, dip my fingers into the near-frozen alpine lake. It felt real, it felt perfect, it felt earned. It was here and full of itself. The morning filling its own contours perfectly.

.

Some weeks earlier, basking in the still-warm early-autumn sun, leafing through a beautiful magazine, I had a sudden, and quite simple really, realisation: I want, need, to deal with more things that are real, tangible, palpable, physical, here.

To touch them. To smell them. To experience them with as many senses as possible in as many dimensions as possible. To escape the illusory flatness of screens, where everything eventually blends into a mass of fleeting content.

To open a book or a magazine and feel the coarseness of paper, read the words, smell the fresh pages, feel its weight.

To feel the breeze on my skin, taste the coffee, look beyond the horizon.

.

Some other time, I went to the Slovak National Gallery, while it still stands and while there’s still art on its walls, to look at some paintings by Čordák, Erdélyi, Fulla, and others. They were beautiful, filling their frames with unexpected colours, inviting textures, and possibilities of meaning. I was moved, almost to tears, waving my hands through the air in strange patterns to ward them off. It felt like rain, and I felt like saying, “We needed this”.

Much later, in that same gallery, I listened to a talk about the need for something sweet – objects and ideas and stories and art and experiences that are full and rich and good, like a ripe pear on a late summer’s day. That have meaning, that exist as a counterpoint to meaningless slop and cynicism and pretty installations devoid of creativity and bitter hopelessness.

And I got it. I got it all.

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That is all to say: I’m turning 30 next week. It shouldn’t mean much, but it does. I’m analysing and then overanalysing my life. Judging what it’s made of and dreaming of what it could be made of. I’m filled with questions, and I know very little. But I know this: The world out there can offer so so much, and I want, need, to savour it even more.

With love,
Šimon

Dear friend,

I hope you are doing well. I hope you returned safely home from your summer roads. I hope you left behind what you had to, in the summer heat, unbearable for many. I hope all the things you had to leave behind melted on the burning concrete of the city squares, vaporized like a drop of sweat. I hope you found what you searched for, or perhaps something completely different. Unexpected, glittering on the surface of a body of water. Hidden in the dry grass of a field path or in the shadows of that town you visited for the first time. Shadows in the shapes of statues, trees, fire hydrants. Unfamiliar shapes. Something emerging in the night when the tide is high.

What were you searching for?

Palermo smells like bleach, washing detergent, hot piss, frying oil, and moulding fruit. At noon, the heat clears the streets of all signs of life. There is no wind. I shower with lukewarm water, walk barefoot on the cold green tiles. I wear white satin shorts and the beasts on the ceiling fresco are perhaps lions. We left behind the tourist ambitions for today, we are free. We do not go inside the Teatro Massimo. We do not take a train to a nearby picturesque town. I wear satin shorts and spray my face with rose water. We are just lounging around.

We arrive at the coastal town of Castellammare del Golfo a few days later together with Holy Mary. I found something I was not searching for.

After the sunset, we sit in the port, silently observing the glittering surface of the body of water, reflecting the moonlight when suddenly the wind brings a chorus song to us.

The choir is standing on the pier, wind raising and blowing into the colourful skirts of ankle length. An effigy of Maria Madonna, floating above the heads of the crowd. She is glittering, decorated with flowers and Christmas string lights forming a gloriole around her head, a crown of light rays. She is beautiful and nine men in light blue robes carrying her on their shoulders are sweating. In a way, it is weirdly satisfying to look at all those men suffering under the weight of the Mother. But perhaps, women are not allowed to take on this honourable role. I don’t know, I don’t google, I just wonder. A marching band stops marching and the drums are becoming faster and faster. A choir singing prayers is playing from small speakers on the town’s street lamps. God is everywhere. It’s surreal.

Later that night, the storm hit the coast of Sicily and a luxurious superyacht belonging to a British millionaire sank in the Mediterranean waters close to Palermo. We befriend a couple from New York and drink Aperol spritz on the terrace of a bar with plastic tables and very, very drunk bartenders. Vamos a la Playa plays from the speakers, drowning out the omnipresent prayers. Did you know this song is about a nuclear disaster?

Madonna’s effigy returned to the town two days later, and she is even more beautiful. After the procession, she raises the anchors and sails away. I imagine.

I haven’t thought about God for a while. Baptized Lutheran, a minority religion in Catholic Slovakia, I officially left the church last year at the county court of Berlin-Kreuzberg. Fast and painless, just like that, I left behind my religious heritage. Baptized Lutheran, I was never really exposed to Catholic theatrical performances, gold and flowers, and statues of Madonna who cry blood in the night when the tide is high. Once, a colleague of my father brought us water from the miraculous springs of Fatima in a Madonna-shaped plastic bottle with a blue cap. I had this bottle on a shelf in my room for some years as a kid. I think I tried to drink it once when I had tonsillitis for many weeks, thinking the miraculous water might help. It did not help.

While Catholics pray their way to heaven, paved with gold and flowers, sprinkled with holy water, Lutherans build the road with their own blood and sweat, and afterwards, they pray in a humble church without stained glass windows or a golden altar. There are no records of eucharistic miracles in Protestant churches. Praising labour and humbleness, there is no time for opulent celebrations.

I work hard (what a paradox) to leave behind the moralist aspects of Protestantism. With no interest in tears and sweat watering the fruits of my labour, I wear white satin shorts, sleep until noon, spray my face with rose water. No guilt. Not this time.

Sipping my lemon granita, I think about God after many years.

We take the bus to the east of the island. Catania is covered in ashes and I see a volcano for the first time in my life. Etna is releasing smoke circles, eruptions ended a few days ago. If there is a God, she shows herself through lava. Always searching for stones, I take a small volcanic rock and put it into my pocket but later I feel bad about taking what does not belong to me and I leave it on the window pane of a hotel room. I bring home a postcard with Holy Mary instead.

Warmest wishes,
Barbora

an evening marked by heaviness
heavy scents, heavy sky, heavy legs
a forest weighed down by the green newness of spring
dense with fresh leaves
				         sprouting
		everywhere

the cherry tree grows at its rightful place
on the border of real and magic
pregnant with the scent of
				               memories
		electricity
			          promise of rain

it will bear cherries this summer

II.

a friend is coming
his pockets full of warmth
pickled carefully for these spring evenings
to be handed out and
shared together

III.

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