Switches · Kreuzberg, Berlin
Eleven years here, and I have watched the room empty out three times
Pinned as eleven_years_old_guard
- Wants
- somebody who is also staying, for once
- Rope so far
- Seventeen years, eleven of them here, and three complete changes of cast.
- Around
- Kreuzberg, Berlin
Three times now the room has emptied and refilled with people I did not know. Not all at once. It happens over about eighteen months, and then one evening you look around and realise you are the only person there who remembers what the place was like before, and you are forty five and being introduced to everybody as though you were a landmark.
Kreuzberg, seventeen years of rope, eleven of them here. I have stopped forming attachments quickly, which is a rational response and not an attractive one, and part of the reason for this post is to try to stop doing it.
What I want is somebody who is staying. That is a genuinely different ask here than it would be elsewhere, and everybody who has been here a while will know exactly what I mean by it.
I switch and always have, more or less evenly, which I mention because people ask. What I want is one long partnership rather than a series of good years.
Not looking for anybody in their first eighteen months in the city, which sounds harsh and is simply pattern recognition. Not looking for something intense over a short window. And not looking to be anybody's guide to how things used to be done, since I find that conversation depressing and it comes up constantly.