Couples · the western districts, Berlin
We left the city for five years and came back to strangers
Pinned as we_left_and_came_back
- Wants
- people who will take two returning nobodies at face value
- Rope so far
- Seventeen years each, five of them somewhere else entirely.
- Around
- the western districts, Berlin
We left in two thousand and twenty for work, spent five years in a much smaller place, and came back last year expecting to pick up where we had left off. Not one person we knew is still involved. Some moved, some stopped, and a couple are still in the city and no longer do any of this. It was a genuinely disorienting autumn.
What we had not appreciated is how completely the room here replaces itself. In the small place we came from, the same people had been doing the same thing for a decade and would still be doing it in another. Here five years is enough to make you new.
We are forty two and forty five, out in the western districts, together thirteen years and about seventeen years of rope each. I tie, she gets tied.
What we would like is to know some people again. We have no standing, no references and nobody to introduce us, and we have decided that at our age the answer is simply to turn up and be ordinary for a year.
Not looking for a third. Not looking to be treated as returning veterans, which happened twice in the spring and was excruciating. And not looking for anybody who wants to hear how much better it used to be, since we do not think it was.