17. A Personal Cartography II

How does it feel to return to somewhere that used to be home?

Jul 11, 2023

In this edition: more tales from the trip to New York – we made it to a whole entire sequel within the span of weeks, not months! Also, returnings, and writing utensils, and anchors.

My phone is blowing up. Colorado, Berlin, Nuremberg, Stockholm.

> flens????!?
Flens dude <

> OMG
> What must my eyes see
She’s made some choices <
> She has indeed.

> Hey girl just checking on you. Are you alright after your visit to Flensburg?

Gosh I have good friends, who put up with a lot of nonsense from me. It’s not a decision I made with, let’s say, a lot of forethought. It’s more like, a month ago I said something along the lines of “the thing you’ve suggested is as wild as if I was like, maybe I should just go to Flensburg and see what happens,” and then a few days later I was staring at the wall as the words maybe I should just go to Flensburg and see what happens went pinging around my brain.

> That’s
> Some main character shit
Ya girl doesn’t know how to live any other way my friend <

I didn’t really intend to leave Flensburg in the first place. Not properly, not so completely. When I moved to Berlin I’d thought I’d be back there all the time, I thought I was still going to have a job there, and even after I lost the job I thought, well. I’ll still go back.

And then I did go back, and it hurt a lot, and so I didn’t anymore, and that was more than two years ago.

17^th November 2021, Manhattan

Union Square smells like burning sage and rosemary, and I can’t tell if the half-constructed market stalls are in the process of being put up or taken down. I spotted the girl when she was still several benches away – white, early to mid-twenties, disaffected but friendly in that very particular way New Yorkers are – and now she’s walking up to me.

“Hey, hi, do you happen to have any cash?”

“No – well, I do, but it’s the wrong currency,” I tell her. “But if you’re hungry, I’m going to get some lunch, I can buy yours too if you like.”

“Oh great, thank you.” She looks at me. “Why do you have the wrong currency?”

“I just got in from Berlin,” I say, shouldering my bag as we head off together through the markets.

“Oh honey, go back,” she tells me. “This is a bad city. It’s not cute here.”

I look around. There are assorted men sitting in front of chessboards, waiting for opponents. The squirrels here are even rounder than the ones I saw in Central Park, and have been coming right up to me and nosing inquisitively at my fingers. A fight broke out amidst a swarm of teenagers twenty minutes earlier, but dissipated as quickly as it had started once a siren started blaring nearby.

“It’s all still really new to me, so I guess I just find it all interesting,” I say. “Pity we’ve caught the markets at the wrong time.”

She snorts. “It’s all just rich white people coming over from Astoria to pay too much money for things. You don’t want anything from here, trust me.”

We head out of the park, and walk around its edge. I tell her I’m from Australia, though I live in Germany now. She tells me her name is Scarlet, that she’s a model, and that she can’t understand why I’d be here when I could be literally anywhere else.

“Seriously! I mean, take me with you! This city’s so fuckin’ racist, and girl, you should be careful, it’s really dangerous. You need to be so safe. I mean don’t get a gun or anything, and you’re not allowed to have a taser, but you can get pepper spray. Two trans girls got attacked on the Upper East Side on the weekend. It’s bad.”

“God, that’s awful. I’m sorry.”

“I was born in Russia, you know, and I’m really thinking of going back,” Scarlet says thoughtfully. I’m surprised - her accent sounds American, and when I ask where she was born she stumbles over the city name, telling me it’s somewhere north of Ukraine. She says she hasn’t been back, she doesn’t know it. “But it’s got to be better than here.”

My mouth twists in consternation. The idea that a trans girl living in New York City is dreaming of a kinder life in small-town Russia really gets to me. The inversion of the queer immigrant dream I’m familiar with, the idea of the place we were born representing something we resist having to return to, something we’ve decidedly left behind. But I also know the feeling of yearning for somewhere that feels small and quiet and stable. Somewhere that could be home. But oh, god, oh god, you know? Doesn’t she know?

“I’m really sorry,” I say, clasping my hands to my elbows and digging my fingers in.

28th June 2023, Flensburg

“This is fuckin’ weird dude. This is so weird,” I mutter as I throw my arms around Stani. There’s a stream of people coming through the entrance hall of Flensburg’s train station, and he’s been waiting for me off to the side, right where I knew he’d be.

“Maj-Britt left with the car already, we’ll have to walk, if that’s okay,” he says, after hugging me back, very tightly.

“The train was ten minutes late!” I protest. “I mean, walking is good, I want to walk, but she couldn’t wait? I just wanted to see her.” There’d been a mix-up with dates, with everything so last minute, and I might not see her at all this trip. And I’d missed her, a lot.

I briefly transform into a tantrum-throwing toddler as we walk. “I’m so going to steal some pens from her,” I pout. I feel like being petty in both energy and theft. I was here, I was here, I was here, scrawled huge on the walls of the town.

Walls which are so familiar it’s almost dizzying. It’s only now, heading into the main pedestrian thoroughfare again, that I realise how much time I spend mentally walking around these streets, such that it seems like I’ve been away for a matter of weeks, not years. Physically, my body knows how to move around this space, knows the distance from one point to another without even thinking about it. The map lives inside my head whether I consciously know it or not. I experience a strong pang of longing for my bike, now chained up and rusting gently outside my old apartment in Neukölln, totally unused among the hectic traffic and hazardous cobblestones of the city. I should have given it away, given it to someone here, I shouldn’t have brought it to Berlin.

“I really don’t live here anymore, huh,” I say to Stani.

22^nd November 2021, Manhattan

I bundle myself and my bags into the elevator in Liz’s building, which is already occupied by an older couple. They smile at me, wheeling my suitcase into the tight space.

“Heading home for Thanksgiving?” they ask me.

I feel a pang. Not about the holiday, it’s not even my holiday, it’s just a brief moment of seeing myself through these strangers’ eyes as someone headed home, to a familiar (familial) gathering.

“Just to Brooklyn,” I reply sheepishly. Liz has gone home to Michigan, so I’m staying with another friend for a few days.

“Where’s home?” the woman asks me.

“Berlin,” I answer automatically.

Liz only moved to NYC a couple of months ago, to start her job as a lawyer. A law-yer, living in an apartment on the Upper East Side! Liz, who I recruited as an intern in my first year working properly in Flensburg, who then somehow brought me into new circles of friends there, who spent the whole summer of 2016 regaling me with stories about her friends and family, her dramas and woes and loves. I hadn’t seen her since those sunny, heady three months, until she came to visit me in Berlin in August of 2021. Sprawled on the futon in my Neukölln apartment, she tells me she feels nervous about the impending move.

“I’ll come see you,” I say. And so I do.

We get to explore the city together – she shows me the spots she’s already discovered, I tell her about the recommendations other people have given me. She writes with a felt-tipped pen on a coffee filter in a café near her apartment, sticks it on a wall under the sign “Things We’re Thankful For”. When I get back to Berlin, she’ll send me a postcard from one of her favourite bars, which I will put up on my wardrobe door:

Miss you – even as a tourist, you were my intro to NYC!

I wish I’d gone with her to Michigan, like she’d asked, but when she comes back to the city she makes a whole second Thanksgiving meal just for me. We sit in her half-furnished apartment, which I have grown immensely fond of, and she video calls her college friends to have a cocktail-making party. I recognise their names and faces from her stories and social media, from the intervening years.

We go to a bar to watch a football game, that Saturday – Michigan versus Ohio State, “which, I personally don’t care much for football obviously, but it’s very fun to be at like a big busy sports bar, I feel like that’ll be a good classic American experience for you,” she tells me. Even in a city this big, even in the short time I’ve been there, we’ve already had multiple encounters in the street with people Liz recognises from college, or from home. There’s something about running into people you know that really makes it seem like you belong in a place. I’m impressed. But Liz always seems like she belongs, wherever she is. I remember her habit of yelling “Go Blue!” to strangers wearing Michigan insignia – incredibly, improbably, she even found some in Flensburg.

But also, in that bar full of what I presume are relocated Michiganders, I am yelling along happily about a game I had no prior feelings about, looking into the faces of strangers grinning back at me, and so I suppose that they probably think I must belong there too.

29th June 2023, Flensburg

Stani and I sit in the kitchen of the building I used to work in, making coffee.

> Wow I am impressed. I was very sure going there would be the last thing you would do during your stay,
texts Katharina. But this building just feels familiar. It just feels like a known space. I celebrated several birthdays here, had movie nights and treasure hunts and and emotional breakdowns and wrote a lot of music and danced around the empty halls. It always felt like a space that was, in some strange and shared and semi-public way, mine.

“What would you think about going to Australia early next year?” I ask him. We’ve been planning this for years now. I find it hard, going back to Australia – I feel disoriented within myself, a precarious present-self slamming into a host of past-selves. It’s easier when I get to show friends around, when I can borrow them as anchors to the life I live now. I really want to show Stani around – I’ve seen every city or town he’s ever lived in, but I haven’t had the chance to show him any of my history yet. I’m excited to find out how it will look different, when I see it through his eyes, what new geography we’ll uncover.

“Yes! Yes yes yes,” he says, and immediately we start researching travel options. We both badly want to take the four-day-long train journey from Perth to Sydney, but it is eye-wateringly expensive. It might be worth it, though.

2^nd December 2021, The Bronx

There is a phenomenal, elaborate model train display made largely out of plants and housed in the greenhouses at the Botanical Gardens, which is such an irresistible combination of things that I feel I am dragged by my very soul towards the Bronx, rather than simply boarding the 5 train heading north.

Filled with the delight that has poured through my eyes and camera lens for the last few hours, after walking around and around the glass halls, I sit in the Pine Tree Café near the Gardens’ entrance and read a book.

A couple approaches my table, a man and a woman. She asks if they can join me – the café is filling up.

“Please, yes,” I say, drawing out a chair next to me.

They tell me their names are Delia and Felix. Their accents are soft, curved-edged, and I ask where they’re from.

“Cuba, we were born in Cuba, but we’ve been here fifty years,” they say, replying together, supplying words for one another.

Delia used to work in Manhattan, in insurance. There’s a pause after she tells me that, as I wait to see if there’s more information. She waves her hand and shrugs. “I’ve forgotten everything about it.”

They’ve since moved to New Jersey. “We live right on the Hudson River, so I can see the city – but now I never go in. Except to see shows,” says Delia, and her eyes light up. Felix smiles, watching her. “You should go to Radio City to see the Rockettes before you go,” Delia tells me. I won’t have time.

She wonders about my accent – she says I don’t sound Australian. I tell her I’ve been gone too long. I tell them how I used to get mistaken as a Dane in Flensburg when I spoke German. I tell them about Flensburg, and how I miss it.

Felix says, “It’s good to be able to go around the world and meet so many people. It’s good you make friends like that.”

“You’re nice to talk to,” Delia adds.

I tell them how I didn’t think I’d feel this way about New York, and yet somehow it got to me.

“We don’t like the city anymore,” they say.

“Do you like New Jersey?” I ask.

“We’re used to it,” Delia says, resigned, as Felix smiles ruefully and nods.

30th June 2023, Flensburg

I’d thought that when I came back to Flensburg, I’d do the same thing as I planned with Australia – bring someone with me, an anchor from my Berlin life, to help steady me. I thought I’d show them around, retrace the map onto new paper. Maybe one day I still will.

Maj-Britt is there, that last morning, so I do get to talk to her, leaning against the radiator by the window as I always did. It’s been three long, long years since I’ve seen her. I still steal a few pens.

Before I leave, I head down into The Dungeon, the affectionately-named office I used to share with Aziz and Sonja. She doesn’t work there anymore, but he does, and his desk still looks the same, the wall next to it still covered in the same decorations we all put up five years ago.

As I round the stairs, my hand swings out to grab the bannister, a movement so practiced it feels like dancing. Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud, thud, letting gravity do the work. Aziz looks up from his computer as I enter the room.

“My body still knows the exact shape of that staircase,” I tell him. “It’s all still in there.”

Hey there friends. Well I’m back in Berlin, and I almost immediately sprained my ankle, which I guess has been helpful for giving me time to write (just kidding, I spent the first days of my recuperation doing truly anything but writing). No links in this issue! First issue with no links! I never really know how helpful it is to have links, whether people ever click through to get the extra information or context. Substack has stats for all of that of course, and if I trust those, then something like one to six people ever click a single link in any given issue. Anyway no links! But still pictures, because I like having the pictures in there. What do you like? How are things going? How do you feel about going back to past homes?

Figs for Breakfast

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