Adalbertstraße, 54-65.

I look for you in the clouds of smoke clogging my mind, but you're behind them.

In a city unfit for the hypersensitive, I lose my sight in the colors, I lose my hearing in the noise, and I lose you in the crowd and maybe I find you again. I hope I never have to find myself again.

Submerged by the Metropolis, in equilibrium; in the belly of the wave yet still quite in place, comes and goes the light. And between its flickers, you see us: the beautiful minds shining so bright for a moment or so until they burn out, on a second-floor balcony and nothing can stop us now—maybe later. No one can hurt us now—maybe never. Talks about emptiness and how fulfilling it is to be human. Talks about Heaven and how to escape Hell with minimal effort. Our hopes explode and we scatter then huddle under the rubble; like a First World War and rebuild, a Second World War and rebuild, a fall of a wall and the disintegration of all things red. And if Bowie thought we could be heroes, who are we to disagree?

So we stain the streets with our presence, like the outlanders we are. We leave our trace on every other building and I hope to God it resembles your smile. You give up pieces of yourself in us: from bare heads to pierced faces, from tatted arms to tattered steps and loud laughs and dreams that repeat like broken records, going on record to prove they should linger and they should prevail. From here to infinity, there will be a you in all of us.

Yet to describe you is to push faith unto the heathen. I would tire my tongue and leave the most bittersweet of tastes in my mouth trying to dress you in the perfect words yet I would remain a criminal without an ounce of justice in my system. I would work my brain around anything else but you, but you are omnipresent in my being; my heart and my soul.

But at your core, you are just a city welcoming all; picture, motion, sound. And as such, we will always reside; leaving residue of our geists in the stomach of the beast. In the middle of Berlin.

The wooden floor under my bed tremors. My pillow vibrates. I lie still in my place, try to sleep. Please don’t give me dreams. It might as well be the end of the world but I’m not getting up any time soon. I’m probably making it up. If it’s all for real, do you feel it too? It all leads back to you.

I haven’t left my bed in a week and an earthquake is not going to change that. Mother Nature gave no shit about my pain so why should I care about hers? Think of it as a migraine and you’re on a stop light. 30 seconds or you die. You don’t let it make you cry. You don’t even have a cry face; you just tear up, shut an eye and move on with your day. It all leads back to you. But I. Am. Not. Moving.

The neighbors start screaming. Why must they screech their throats in search for a prayer? I haven’t spoken a word all day. The sound of bare feet hitting the concrete, they’re running away for good. The streets are going to swallow them whole. I can’t take the roars of panic searing outside my door. Good thing I can block the noise. Where are you?

I turn to my other side. I see nothing but the fading white of a wall. It keeps me company. There’s a sense of comfort knowing only one of us will survive this break of routine. I almost laugh and it almost returns me the favor.

I think the electricity died first, no TV sound in the background. And then the waterlines. Are you thirsty? I can smell the dusk but it should be noon by now.

I love this; the most action I’ve had in twenty years and it’s destructive. Nature is a queen in her rage and she’s claiming back her land, pronouncing us nomads—again. And this time too we have no say in it. Are you wearing shoes? The world is in flames but this is my own tiny heaven. It even has the iridescence of the faithful and the damned. Are you still here?

I pull my head under the sheets; maybe this makeshift veil will keep you from slithering stealthily into my minute place of bliss. I want to enjoy the moment. The walls are closing in, literally. I am eaten. My body is a mess. My skull crushed. I don’t even get to finish my last thou…

Pitch black, over the clouds, smoke and life.

Are you still alive?

I have both dreams and nightmares of normalcy.
A nice husband who isn’t around for most of the life we’ve shared together, four kids whose ages he isn’t familiar with, but says he just can’t care to remember. A first-floor apartment overlooking a side street. Kids are playing and I make lunch on a quiet Friday afternoon. In my dreams, I am not half the bad cook I am.
I snap out of it at 3 in the morning, I’ve always been wondering why we insist on calling it “morning” when the sun hasn’t even risen yet. And when Momma asks me what’s wrong, I tell her tales of an international space station where strawberries have gone extinct a couple of years after the apocalypse.
I don’t know anything at all, and perhaps that is one of the two things that I know for sure. The other, is the fact that I was doomed to a life of consistent contradictions. No—not the head over heart kind of contradiction, but what if I was to rise with the notion that I’ve caved in to the monotone I used to despise a little bit too much? What if our parents too spoke with such urgency that it was hard for their friends to keep up? What if we found out that the spark in our eyes is genetic, only to discover later that every fire eventually dies out, no matter how persistent and frantic?
I spend my days hiding behind a mellow nothingness that drapes like curtains my mind, and my nights tiring the glaring sun screaming bloody murder in my resting ears till it swears not to rise any more.
One morning, I wake from some dreamless sleep, easy on the mind and heavy on the soul; ordinary in every way the lives we lead are. My mother does not bear to ask what the hell is wrong with me. Instead, she cradles my head in her lap. She prays for me as I nap for what feels like a minute but actually lasts a few hours. She thinks me someone whose idea of forever has been the temporary tattoo of the word “believe” fading on my arm. And God knows how she pities me. Only I know how I pity myself, and I hate that.

I burn my lungs for fun. I tell myself there is nothing for me in rebirth, only in decay. When I was a kid, I would build airplanes out of Lego bricks, I would stand up on top of a chair, a thud and a clatter later, my plane's shattered and pieces are flowing on the floor. I knew it wouldn’t fly, I could calculate the gravity force on any mass when I was five, but still I hoped physics would make just this one exception, just for me. We all lie to ourselves, but only a truly desperate person starts to believe those lies.
I wake up the following morning and I’m no longer five; suddenly I’m seventeen. I’ve somehow been able to convince myself that time was something I could take, borrow and give. I tell you I’ll give you all the time that I have, like that’s actually mine. You politely decline, telling me that yes, we are two good people, but yes, we only ever manage to bring the bad out of each other. The look on your face, it is as if space-time exists only in a universe we declared our own and now it is doomsday but nobody cares because nobody’s alive to tell.
When the person that keeps you grounded decides to let go or alternatively loses anything resembling balance, you don’t launch like a rocket ship into space, instead you freefall into a destiny we all know, an end we’re all familiar with: the sequel for life—or so I’d hope, the stillness and the solitude that grace death. So what if you lose your breath and no one’s there to catch it? You recollect yourself, rearrange untruths until they become facts that boom and bloom sanctity in sanctuary for a livelihood or a few.
The only two feelings that can possess a being are loneliness and hope. I’m helpless and I'm plagued by them both. I pray that either one is strong enough to end the other. Prayer can’t help the infidel. So I stand on my tiptoes, on the padded seat of a chair; my glare to the loneliness, my back to the hope, thinking to myself, this is no way to go live. There is no way I’m living what’s left of my life like this: lost and losing it, and losing big chunks of myself with every step I take, with every mistake I make. I’m hiding when I just want to be found, be it by you or by my own. I have stopped caring a long time ago, back when I learned that it was too late for me to find a flaw in Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

IV.

I love the fresh rush of rebirth in my veins when I pour water down my throat and it rains into the open sea that is my stomach. Maybe the butterflies can swim, but I’ve learnt that they also migrate to the brain and give migraines that spread and pulse and barely touch the insides of the ribcage, that spread and throb and eventually clot all within the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.

And I’ve learnt that the most violent of thoughts is that that starts in the head like a cell and descends slowly and smoothly to the heart. Lethally cancerously and quietly, a thought reaches way farther than its destination.

Sometimes I am so disconnected from the world. It feels like life is a boring movie I’m only watching out of curiosity of what is going to happen next. Some other times I am one with Earth: air, ground, trees. I can hear the roots digging through soil. And I coil into myself and swear to God I love it so much. Even if always faltering between two opposite emotions leaves me exhausted and begging for silence and the mere bliss of rest.

And I love my body. I love how in control I am of my body even if my fingers linger to move to their own accord when I’m nervous and I can’t afford to be nervous above the surface of my clothes.

I control my body the way I would want to command my thoughts to retreat to their base in the back of my mind. This war isn’t theirs to fight. This war is mine. And it won’t stop until a truce is conducted to lay down the tension between the head and the heart. It won’t stop until my head and my heart decide to condense the area of condescension between them to null.

I have waited for (almost) everyone to share their opinion/rage/joke over the Leila situation, and now, because I like to imagine that 1/7,000,000,000 is not that close to zero, I would like to share my thoughts:
1. A couple of weeks ago I found one of my old poems. The poem was written on September 15th 2013, the day after Leila’s concert, but just like a great portion of what I write about—what I am all about, it was about this city. I love and care about my country and my city way more than they do about me.
2. In my life, I have purchased three tickets for three different concerts of Leila's, and I have been counting my teenage years in respect to the only one that I used.
3. One of my favorite things about my generation is how hopefully angry it is. But there exists a deep ideological gap within my generation. There are the internet slacktivists and the still ones; only moving a little backwards thinking they’re swimming against the tide. The problem is that we have never learnt to think for ourselves.
4. The thing is, the entire deal only managed to make Leila more (in)famous. And while I don’t know whether that’s a bad thing or good, the band has now gained martyr status: congratulations.
5. It was never about the concert, but rather about what is going to come next. I can only wait with cautious anticipation.
6. There is a conspiracy theory that basically states that when something major is about to hit the news, a less significant event happens to avert the public’s attention.
7. Thank you, Leila, for being the soundtrack for some of my existential crises.
8. I pray that my generation gets its own voice some time soon. 

0.
I wear Venus around my neck, so I am blessed by the strength of seven women and the pride of seven more:
I.
She’s kneeling down, kneading the earth under her feet, begging for light, trying to stare straight into the sun on the hottest day of the year and not once blink. (This is how you make her feel)
Moonshine is a bloodbath by the time it reaches the shoreline.
IV.
She’s asleep as if the only way out is to close your eyes and pretend you’re out. Pretend it’s over. Like there isn’t a baby crying on your lap, no world sipping down your shoulders, and heaven is not under your feet.
The sky is a deathbed for all her dreams, yet still, she peaks above her head.
II.
She went to the place where the city is a sea of lights and the mountains are waves and seven waves are not enough to swipe her off her feet. She was swept off her feet without even trying.
Stole a pocketful of love from contraband, a fast car that doesn’t get out of town
Bringing truth back to this dead town
Putting on the night like a gown
And dancing to the lightning.
V.
Model daughter and later model citizen. Nothing interesting.
VI.
A mother. She has a way of dealing with trouble: she doesn’t deal with trouble.
But mother, here I am; child, daughter, trouble,
please don’t deal with me
I do not exist.
I do not exist.
I do not exist.
Mother's drowning in the fountain of youth.
III.
She knew better than to miss with someone with Spring in their heart, so she brought Winter back to hers. It weighs her down, yes, but that’s better than sinking in a sea of fear and responsibility.
No but really, he had an electric smile
She had an iron heart
Built with one too many walls
And no fire escape.
Arson, darling.
VII.
“Is this how you honor the living?”
“ No, this is how you honor your honor.”
A bullet planted in her head
Growing like the tree of death
A crimson sunset lingering before the full moon
Finally
The devil ascended announcing truce.