forever leaving home

So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never grew light and it never grew dark. Having parked my tiny cat with my parents we went into West Germany by train to pick up his dog from his. Dog was hysterical. Family were loud. A New Year ensued and we came back to Berlin to begin 2015, moving both into his one-room studio apartment, with the dog, until a bare four weeks later a sensational four a.m. barney – involving all three of us – saw me move into an elderly pension over in another, more genteel part of town, and stay away.

I lived in that desiccated hotel for three months. After a month they gave me a kettle and a mug so that I could make cups of tea in my room. The room I’d started out in is their biggest and grandest and has a great desk, so it’s popular – we made a cosy arrangement where I could stay at a reduced rate but had to move rooms every time they had a new booking. I could hear the conversations at the front desk and the sense of stringently absent privacy was wearing, after a while.

Meanwhile outside my window on the golden street with its slicked-umbrella trees the winter melted into Spring. I went to Spain and came back to find all the street had bloomed, you could walk very slowly from one end to the other between one glossy scintillating treespan and the next; under one, one day, a man huddled by his shopping cart of rescued bottles was sleeping, on another bench a young man rocked his bored child back and forth, staring intently past the trees and the spattered sunlight into the embrace of his gleaming dark phone. I felt I was always alone there. I sank into myself, in the old town, in Europe, and Germany.

We went again to Spain, this time I took my beloved, with whom things were better the moment we stopped trying so hard to share the one long desk, the one room, the one window. Madrid became my favourite place, I felt childhood reawaken in me like a scent, like palm trees and cinnamon, and when it came time to leave I was sad and did not want to face Berlin at all. It feels like we’ve been away for months. It is three weeks I think. We went back down to the small town to fetch the hysteric dog and then at last yesterday, late in the evening, I met the woman who had advertised a large white apartment for sublet and I gave her some money and she gave me some keys, and I loaded all my suitcases thankfully, exhaustedly into the back of a cab and woke up here this morning, all alone, alone in Germany, not far from my sweetheart and his morning walk and for the first time in six months – to the day – I have my own place, my own home, a place I can write in and read when I want and where no one engages with me and I need not move, if I can gather the money to stay on and if the German government are willing to have me, for as long as I need to… I counted up all the times I’d moved down the hall from one hotel room to another and the travelling we had both done since we left our little cottage in the middle of screeching Brisbane, where I barely left home at all, and after I got to thirty removals I gave up the count, and I hope to resume it again only after some long, restful interval has passed, and my soul has repaired itself from all the tumult, and I have been blessed with many months of languor and dishevelled, resting solitude, and never packed my case or had to remember my notebook and toothbrush, Australia seems another lifetime and I cannot reach the beaches, the desert, the dense greenery, I am here in this stony iron country with its brass plaques outside the doorways where people were stolen from their everyday lives and its much browner birds and whiter sky, its tyranny.