Conformist

There is a bar on every corner. Where there isn’t a bar, there’s a späti, and you can pull your own beer from the fluorescent-lit refrigerators, pay for it, and drink outside on the ground, on the curb, or at the picnic tables the convenient stores here set up outside for just this purpose.

By the canal, groups of people sit on the sidewalk, their bicycles leaning against the bridge railing and their beer growing warm in their hot laps. The canal is full of bicycles. The streets are paved in bottle tops. The picnic tables are plastered with stickers. The walls are covered in graffiti, colorful and layered and meaningful. Everything is meaningful, or seems to be. People here are meaningful. They dress in somber blacks, faded denim, utilitarian pants gathered at the ankles so that they won’t be caught up in the bicycle gears, hair hacked short on one side of the head and left in long, tangled locks on the other. They wear burkas. They wear tracksuits. I catch snippets of a conversation, because English is commonly spoken here. So is Spanish.

“I was destined to end up here.”

“It’s a place for people to come together in meaningful conversation.”

“…e increíblemente, agarró la cabeza del otro y la cortó.”

[wait…what was he talking about?]

I do not understand a word of German, and it embarrasses me. I do, however, understand German crying. I witnessed this at a café. A man looked at his phone and a sob visibly rose in his throat. His face gathered towards its center, and he covered his eyes with his sleeve. When his friend arrived, they hugged, and the friend laughed. The crying man smiled, and the sob escaped his agonized mouth. Maybe I don’t understand this kind of crying.

At the cafe, wasps crawl in and out of the sugar bowls. They investigate my espresso, they fly around my head and with my eyes closed I can feel their wings tickling my eyebrow. At the cafe, men cry, men yell and yelp. Women smoke. Bottles fall and break. Everyone talks. The tables are sticky with sugar and spilt milk. The wasps are everywhere. I cannot fit in, because I don’t know how to communicate. One the other hand, I’ve heard that many Americans who live in Berlin don’t bother to learn German.

I could be a nonconforming American. But I am a conformist, in this nonconforming city.