home, inevitably.

april, 2023

Nothing is ever written at once.

On leaving Melbourne for Newcastle, then Sydney for Berlin, then finally out on my Berlin balcony in a home with no history, I wrote a poem about the experience of leaving home. It's not very good so I won't share it, but it reminded me that I have to power to define what 'home' is and means, and I've decided that the home I have is invincible and infinite and it doesn't need to be squeezed into a suitcase.

Waking up on a first morning in a strange but comfortable bed at a strange but comfortable 4am, I faced a place with which I have no somatic or emotional history. I’m sure there are studies of and maybe even a word for the experience of complete displacement, but my comprehension boils down to this: I don’t speak German, I do mean the language, but I also mean the social rules (official and unofficial), the transport, the weather, the light quality.

Everything I knew about my eating, sleeping, exercise, and recreation habits fell away and suddenly I felt tasked with learning from scratch the language of my body in this new place as well as the actual language of the new place.

Here are some of my thoughts from the first week:

⌁ I am in a second hand/vintage store and regret bringing any clothes at all.

⌁ Germans are not chatty, but they are polite.

⌁ I am torn between the sense of invisibility/invincibility of being spoken to in German and the anxiety of not understanding what they are saying.

⌁ Germans speak so quickly it makes me blink in slow motion.

⌁ I do not think I will ever be able to comprehend what is being said, no matter how many words Duolingo tells me I know.

⌁ This city has not been waiting for me and I need to match pace to have any hope of joining the traffic.

⌁ The water tastes funny and I hope tea hasn't been ruined for me forever.

❂

I am reading Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files. I don’t consider myself a Nick Cave fan, musically. I am a music-listener for personal validation and so my taste better responds to female-led, mystical, angry indie/pop/rock. But TRHF feeds a different part of me and though maybe anyone who has lived the stories and walked the valleys for as long as Nick Cave gets to inherit genius as a right, I am grateful for the platform that he has given himself and the expertise that he allows himself to claim.

I am reading Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook. She is 36, in France, and freaking out. Samesies.

I am reading Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings.

I am reading Kae Tempest On Connection. “In order to regain our balance, we need to remaster the ability to go deep, to ‘turn away from outer things’. To face what is it ourselves. This starts with connection and creativity.” I am reading Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse.

I haven’t finished any of them.

❂

I have seen good theatre and bad theatre; the good inspired me in that all-consuming way that makes your vision blurry, and hits harder than any other instant dopamine does, the bad made me want to throw my belongings out a window and stage a protest – also a good dopamine hit but a harder comedown.

Ultimately, it’s been hard, and I’ve been lonely. I’ve had discouraging emails from and meetings with every English working theatre company I’ve found and it sucks. I often feel like I’ve engaged with my Netflix account more than with the city or the people.

I am going to a drawing café, every Sunday morning for 2.5 hours. Almost no one there is German, but everyone is interesting and facing an adulthood where making friends is hard. Every week I leave the café convinced that I should move to Italy and become a portrait artist.

I am going to a poetry night every Thursday with in infinitely fuller room of young talented poets than I could have imagined. This week I met some people who added me on instagram, friends-to-be. I also read some poems for the first time and the lights and the words were warm and comforting.

I prefer Helles to Pilsner, and yes apparently it matters.

Sometimes I need to go to the local café in my pj top with a book and without a bra and get a latte and a croissant and feel a little bit cold on the outside and warm on the inside. Sometimes I need to watch The Americans for 6 hours, sandwiched between two cats.

❂

Notebook entries

February 28, somewhere

Hannah Arendt solves my problems by traveling through time to lecture me on my choices

I am grateful that you not only distinguish between labour and work but do so in the way I begged you to from the first sentence. I frequently remark that I have work to do when what I mean is that I have thinking to do. Sometimes I think by writing or researching, sometimes by knitting or crocheting or playing with a cat, but always with my hands. It is when I have worked first that I am comfortable in that service mode of bill-paying whole-bodied labour. I like the separation of the two, my work serves no one but me

February 28, somewhere, later

By changing the time on my watch as soon as I got on the plane and then immediately forgetting how to calculate the time differences between home (Australia), not home (Singapore), and new home (Berlin), I successfully tricked my brain into ignoring the excessive consecutive waking hours of a 34-hour day. I rode the high of a collegiate-level all-nighter without the assistance of any caffeine or even heavily sugared substance – sunrise euphoria.

Bodies, in general, are miraculous, wondrous, beautifully flawed things. They are responsible for all of our action and contemplation. They take us from every literal and metaphorical point A to an illogical range of alphabetic counter-points. But shit, sometimes they really drop the literal and metaphorical ball. As I fell asleep on the floor at Changi, as I fell asleep before the lights went out on the second flight, as I fell asleep at 1pm, again at 8pm, and again at 5am, many balls were dropped. It’s now 3pm, and I write this after just having lost a battle with a light switch. Maybe tomorrow will be more ball-friendly.

February 28, somewhere, later again

Fever dream

During the day, Mary pipes wool and faces onto the chocolate lambs for the counter display in the town’s small department store. She is good at it and the lambs are popular, so, for 6 hours a day, it is her only task. She never asks to decorate the strawberry pralines or pour moulds or initiate counter-serves. She likes the lambs, and the customers like to watch her. Through the glass and the reflected mall lights, the families, couples, and especially the single browsers smile as Mary delicately rolls white chocolate curls expertly from her piping bag. That a girl so young and soft has such a tender touch is a testament to her upbringing. Her audience imagine Mary at home, a father reading to her by the fire, a mother humming from an armchair and stroking Mary’s hair. Each night they teach her secrets of the gentle and kind. (then I fell asleep again)

The first note I wrote after landing, despite carrying my purpose-bought notebook with me to every café, park, and train station, wasn’t for two weeks:

March 12, Berlin, Starbucks

This city is like spiders

March 21, Berlin, Mur Végétal

“I am stronger than my fear”, but I am not stronger than my hunger.

March 30, Berlin, lounge room

Nowhere has thunderstorms like Melbourne. Nowhere has rain like Berlin. In this way, they are the same.