cherry tree, wait for me

Today I would give anything to run outside into this suddenly warm sunshine. I woke to birdsong and discovered I had left my window open all night. This is the first night since October that’s even been possible. I don’t feel the icy breezes snaking round my feet in the chilly living room, I can’t hear the ticking of the heaters. When I stood in front of the glass and gazed out I could feel the sun’s mighty warmth on my face. My eyes sting with tears thinking about it. It’s reached us.

This winter staining gradually into pink blue yellow spring is now extended indefinitely, perhaps eighteen months, perhaps twelve, perhaps three, as if by a bad council order. Such a long winter under such low grey sunless skies.I miss cafes, I miss walking past people and feeling the foreign-communal energy of their own brisk, or vague preoccupations. The feeling of their thoughts and breathing fringing and wrinkling my air. I just miss them being there. I miss the little coughs and the unconscious throat clearings and sighs and the faint breeze as my neighbour in some plinking humming bistro turns a large page in his sagging newspaper. 

That’s how we sit, that’s how I spend time with people. Cafes are my communion. I love the delicacy of their shared but parceled space. All along the old wall strip, the dead zone through Berlin that divided families like a terrible quarantine, the decades of no mans land that now is all overgrown with trees and nested with sweet birds, torn down one by one for new apartments as the city swells, one Japanese cherry tree after another will be touched by the sun and burst into its perfect ineffable colour, its blossoms fluttering and the sky a web of blue trapped in its branches. I want to lie there dazedly noticing the comings and workings of ants for whom springtime is an unending toil. I want to hear the punks on their houseboat creaking and clinking at beers in their foldout chairs. I want to feel a fast bicycle zip past me. Lie under the trees and feel their placid embrace, like two hands turned slowly outward to show me something.