In this issue: I’m finally, finally making good on my promise to write about my New York trip. It’s going to take a lot of space though, so I’ve decided to really tempt fate to her utmost and call this the start of a series. Also, a visit, a squirrel, lost homes, and a fire.
New York City, 16th November, 2021.
Hey Lisa. It’s weird to say your name at the beginning of a message, but because I’m recording it in my voice notes instead of directly into WhatsApp I have to make sure up top that I know who I’m talking to. So I’m walking through Central Park, it’s about ten to nine in the morning, and the trees have not shed all their leaves yet here. Unlike in Germany, where it’s really like, winter.
My brain is still adjusting, I guess it’s jet lag brain, I’m just overwhelmed by input. Not that there’s so much to absorb, it’s a park, my brain just hasn’t adjusted. The lamps are just really pretty, I keep looking at them. I keep trying to get my bearings, a sense of space and distance; you look at the map, and that’s one thing, but like… it’s a different thing to walk and be like, okay this is how long it feels to walk from A to B. The park is maybe not as vast as I’d expected, which is good because I want to walk around it. It’s a big park, there’s no two ways about it, but not quite as sort of monumental as previously believed.
Ooh, there’s a subway – can you hear it? I don’t know how good the microphone is. I’m also having that thing of like… do you find when you travel that you kind of like try and figure out how you need to adjust yourself, or feel compelled to adjust yourself, in a new environment? Like, what are other people doing? Is it weird that I’m walking along holding a phone up to my mouth and talking to it? How observed or unobserved do I feel? I feel like my brain’s still doing all those processing things, which is why I’m talking less densely than usual. The buildings are very nice, just like the facades and stuff. There’s also so much steam coming from under the street. I just feel like I’m on a fuckin’ movie set. Every time I pass a grate and there’s a bunch of steam coming up from the subway or, there’s like big pipes, and the school buses! That’s a… like, what? We just don’t have them! And certainly not so perfectly yellow and tin-can-looking. We saw one this morning and I was like, “oh my god, they don’t actually look like that do they?” And Liz is like, “of course they look like that.”
Lisa came to visit me here in Berlin last week.
Her S Bahn train arrives on the platform at Treptower Park about thirty seconds before I do, so she’s already heading towards the stairs as I come up them, and begin sprinting towards her.
“Ah, this is really excellent,” she laughs as I get nearer, cinematically throwing my arms wide.
“It IS excellent,” I reply, finally scooping her into a hug and doing that thing where you topple side to side, from foot to foot, perilously close to tipping over because you’re hugging someone really hard.
The last time we’d seen each other in person was in January of 2020, also in Berlin. I wasn’t living here permanently at the time – I was still in the strange liminal space of having decided I was going to move, knowing deeply within myself that I had to move, but not yet knowing how to make that happen.
The feeling I remember having, as soon as I was with her again was: oh, right. There I am. As though I’d misplaced myself for a few months or years, and suddenly was reminded; as though I’d walked back into the house of my own mind and put down my suitcases. Prior to that point, we hadn’t seen each other for two and a half years, and in that time we’d fallen out of touch – our lives had started folding in on themselves in very specific ways, dragging our attention towards our more immediate surroundings. I’d been afraid she wouldn’t really recognise me anymore as the person I’d been when we first met, as undergrad students in Göttingen in 2011, or even the last time we’d seen each other, wandering around the Barbican with my brother on a rainy afternoon in the summer of 2017. In the intervening years, as my job began swallowing up more corners of my life and I became increasingly, impossibly heartbroken, I’d begun to transform in ways I thought were irreversible. Perhaps inevitable, in the same way as ageing. Joints harden and start creaking, eyelids loosen inwards, and maybe we just become sad and serious and small to greater degrees over time. Our scope for joy narrows. I was afraid of that, anyway.
But Lisa, too, arrived in Berlin on the precipice of change that January. Sure, I mean: we were all on the precipice of C H A N G E and catastrophically unable to see it gaping chasm-like before us, but more specifically she was also in the midst of realising that things were Not Okay. We spent the next two days talking and talking and coming to two conclusion: firstly, that we were still very much capable of rediscovering the versions of ourselves that had the capacity for joy and adventure and silliness of our early twenties, and secondly, that if we’d been talking all this time, we might not have ended up feeling quite as lost as we did. It was astonishing: we’d both had this idea that the other one’s life was really together and complete and that they hadn’t really needed us around, and that’s why we’d fallen out of touch.
So we resolved that we wouldn’t do that again: we decided to keep each other updated on our lives through voice notes. Extremely long ones, in my case, and with a frequency that means that if you had to catalogue my life between the years 2020 and 2023, my WhatsApp history with Lisa would be the best way to do it (oh my god, what a nightmarish prospect, who knows what dumb things I said in all those hours of voice notes, I’m a fucking incorrigible gossip).
Oh my god, it’s a beautiful day. Perfectly blue sky, sun coming through the yellow leaves, just gorgeous. The rocky outcrop I was talking about is called Summit Rock, and it’s part of the park that used to be a place called Seneca Village, which was demolished to make the park in the mid-19th century. Which is kind of, I feel like I kind of knew that there had been something, that there had been housing and communities in the area, I don’t know, maybe I knew that there had been something here before. But I’ve been reading all of the, oh my god I can see a squirrel, that is the biggest squirrel I’ve ever seen, holy shit. I guess it’s almost winter so they’ve gotta be pretty chunky at this point anyway. Um, oh my god. That is simply the largest squirrel I’ve ever seen. It’s so round. It’s great. Um, okay, so, sorry, I’ve been reading all this signage around talking about what was here before, and so this village, Seneca Village, was predominantly a Black community, and a significant number of people in the village owned their homes. So according to the laws at the time, that was like, something could enable suffrage. Which is kind of incredible to think about.
So like, I’m looking at a timeline right now. Not long after emancipation in New York, there’s the law that in order to vote, African American men have to own property valued at $250 or more. So that kind of contextualises the significance of a village in which a lot of people owned their homes, that was demolished in order to make the park, but was framed as like, “Oh no, it’s just a wasteland, it’s a shanty town, and it’s very poor and needs to be cleared out so that we can have this public space.” Obviously a very deliberately framed piece of policy, but all happening in the years literally right before the Civil War starts. And this is all going on, the demolishing of the village is four years before that. Which is nuts.
God, there’s just so many things here. The fact that the population of New York tripled in 25 years between 1825 and 1850, and that was even though there was a massive cholera outbreak in 1832 in which half the population fled, is, it’s just crazy. I’m having a similar feeling about – I don’t know if you think about this, when I’ve been to like Greece or Croatia, just walking around the spaces and thinking of all of the millions of people who’ve lived there before and just walked along the same space and thought about that place and imagined it, it kind of overwhelms me to think of all the narrative kind of built into that particular geography. I’m feeling a similar kind of thing now, I think that’s also part of the overwhelming feeling.
“We don’t have to like, DO anything, I literally just came here to spend time with you,” Lisa tells me, for the third or fourth time.
“I know, I know, I’m just, you know, trying to figure out how to give that time a bit of shape or whatever,” I say, scrolling around Google Maps and trying to measure distances in my head. Does it make sense to spend an hour going to the lake, if it maybe looks like it might rain? How tired are we? Will we get hungry? How can I cover the most ground in the least time without making it exhausting?
I am, I realise, just eager to show her as much of my life in person as I do via voice note: I want to give her visual references, introduce her to the characters that populate my life, show her the rhythms and tempos of my days.
“I have no idea where we are,” she says, like clockwork, every time we get within about a block of my apartment. I keep bringing her back there by different routes, always deep in conversation, with no real chance to take note of landmarks or gain any sense of orientation. “It’s nice though, it’s a real holiday feeling, just following you around and not needing to figure out where we’re going.”
We walk along the canal, through parks and markets, we sit by the waterfall in Viktoriapark (which has mercifully started up again – rats ate through the wiring last spring, and it didn’t start running again until late May this year). I show her the emus in the tiny Hasenheide zoo.
“This is where I was when I sent you that voice note that was interrupted because I got the call offering me the job at Humboldt Uni.”
“I remember that!”
“And it’s also where I was when I got my second vaccine shot and was really woozy on the way home.”
“And those are the deer, the ones you were looking at! Wow, now I’m going to know where you are, whenever you send me messages.”
Some time ago, around the point where I was thinking a lot about the different versions of myself held in different people’s minds, I realised that the most “me” version of me is the one that Lisa knows. Which is beautiful, but also kind of dangerous, because I get anxious about there being at least one more “real” version of me out there, like a backup drive. Like if I disappeared, and someone wanted to know something about me, would there be someone who could answer that question? What kind of burden is that to put on anyone?
If I wanted to know something about me, and needed to ask, would there be someone who could answer?
Just thinking about how I’m walking along these paths, and how much time I think New York spends thinking about itself as a collective. It’s kind of incredible to try and absorb that. I think it’s one of the things I also love about Berlin, right, the way that it imagines itself. But to think about this park and what it would have meant to have the village here… A lot of the information boards say things like, it was a refuge from the overdeveloped section of Lower Manhattan that was extremely racist and full of diseases, and that this was a kind of refuge from that. And then, the significance of that then being demolished.
It’s not a new thing, it’s not even that rare, particularly when you’re looking at US history, but it’s still, I don’t know, affecting maybe is the word I’m looking for, I can’t find the right adjective, but there’s something about looking around this landscape - there’s a lot of rocky outcrops, and those weren’t put there, the developers would have had to work around them when they were making the park, so that would have been a big feature of the village, and it just looks like – I can imagine it being such a beautiful place, that people would have really felt something about living there. It’s beautiful and so you can imagine people would have felt that about the place that they lived, this place that they created in order to get away from oppressive forces. It’s emotional, you know? Man, god, it’s a beautiful day, it’s just a beautiful day, so it’s really surreal to be thinking about these really sad things.
I’m looking at information about a church, the African Union Church, which was the first church in the village, built in 1840. And then less than 20 years later it was demolished, it’s so sad. Or relocated – they relocated some of the buildings, and the people who were buried here and so on. What a story.
On the last evening she’s here, I take Lisa to Tempelhofer Feld for the sunset. We meet up with Ella, eat pizza in the gardens.
“I was thinking of going through Schillerkiez after this, and then getting the U8 back from Leinestraße. I thought we’d go via Horse,” I tell them.
Last December, the bar where I used to run the Unicorn Open Mic caught fire, and burned out. We’ve since relocated, and restarted the event. It feels very different now. Even more than it used to. The old bar, Horse, is still in ruins. Nobody got hurt, thank goodness. I wasn’t there when it burned.
“I used to spend so much time up in this area, you know? And now I… don’t, anymore.” I look at the sun going down over the old airport, across the Feld. So many things layered over so many places, so many events and people and histories, so many ways those stories are told, until the storytelling itself becomes ingrained in the map. Even just within my own life. How does it feel to return to somewhere that used to feel like home?
Ella looks at me carefully. “Well, I mean, I actually also wanted you to come back via my place, because I’ve got some homemade elderflower cordial I wanted to give you.”
I hesitate. Ella’s flat is in the other direction to the bar, and would be the more direct route home. Lisa is only here for a few more hours, and part of me wants the excuse of having her here to go back to this place, press on the bruise of it, in her company. But she’s tired, and she didn’t even get to see the current Unicorn, there’s no point of reference for the living thing in order to understand the thing that was destroyed.
“Next time?” I ask her.
“Next time,” Lisa replies.
(I go back to walk around Schillerkiez by myself the next day, and press my nose to the bar’s soot-covered window).
Hi there folks! There are so many of you now! I guess that’s what happens when you get name-dropped by one as illustrious as McKinley Valentine, just casually slid into a sentence as though Figs for Breakfast is a common cultural reference that everyone gets. Well congratulations new subscribers, you’re in on this hot commodity/hot mess of a newsletter! I think we’re now reaching the point where more people who don’t know me read this than people who do, so if you’re wondering what it would sound like to get a voice note from me like the one I transcribed for this issue, I have great news: I was on a podcast recently with my friend and fellow musician Cat Rickman, and you can listen to me talk words aloud through sound waves, instead of me placing them gently into your eyeballs via screens!
The episode is a bit like a less poetic and more conversational take on a lot of what I talk about in Figs, so maybe you’ll enjoy it! It’s also on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts and Podtail and other places.
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