I am at the Berlin Tegel airport.
I am very apprehensive. I jumped out of my cab the moment we got here.
I’m late for my flight.
Until about thirty minutes ago, I didn’t even know the flight was for today.
Fuck.
I left the apartment at Adalbertstrasse in a rush. There was no time at all to prepare myself mentally for this. I haven’t had the luxury of soaking in any sort of pre-flight nostalgia: I’ve spent the past like four months in Berlin. Leaving now, I’m not sure when I’ll be coming back.
There hasn’t been the time to get myself into an appropriate state of mind for leaving. An hour ago I was in the bathtub, lying down in warm water and soaking in some serious vibes as the bathroom resonated with poignant music from my bluetooth speakers. I was just chilling- singing along and staring up at the ceiling, watching drops of water condense from the steam that filled the room, and then drip back down to the white square tiles on the bathroom floor.
Fifteen minutes ago I was in the passenger’s seat of this Turkish guy’s cab, swearing and cursing and interrogating myself about how I could possibly have been oblivious to my flight being today.
I’m at a counter in the airport. I’m talking with this North African looking woman. I give her my flight details. I think she looks at her computer screen to check some stuff.
She looks back up at me.
“Oh the plane has already gone”.
Wow. Great. Just great. Wonderful. Nice one Mayowa, nice one.
“Is there anything that can possibly be done? Rescheduling? Some sort of partial refund?“
“No sorry, there’s nothing we can do about that.”
Wow. There goes the money someone paid on my behalf for the flight ticket. Dammit.
Aaaarrgghhhh!!
I’m at Barbara’s office.
Something’s up with her MacBook keyboard. I think a key is stuck or something.
She mentions it to me. I take a look at the computer. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. It doesn’t seem like something I can help with. She’ll probably have to get it looked at- I don’t think we plan to experiment on her computer while she’s at work and using it.
She’s in-between a number of things. She’s trying to figure out how she could possibly help me buy a flight ticket out of Berlin, she’s co-ordinating some other issue with another student, and she’s ironing out some other details of people moving out of their apartments for winter holidays.
It’s interesting for me, just watching and seeing how she’s thinking about all of these things at the same time- she recieves a call from the other student, then she sends an email to someone in San Francisco on my behalf, all the while planning where to put some incoming furniture and stuff. It’s like she’s in the middle of all of these things, and she’s kind of navigating through each of them a couple steps at a time, one by one. It’s interesting to watch.
Someone is at the door.
I go open.
It’s Jiamin. She’s the student Barbara was co-ordinating something with, on the phone. She’s heaving along this big framed picture of some sort of black-and-white Chinese calligraphy painting. It’s a bunch of characters written in black ink, in a vertical line. I have no idea what it means, but I think the calligraphy looks cool. It was probably hung up on her wall, and now that she’s leaving Berlin there’s nowhere to put it. We put it somewhere in the corridor of the apartment.
Barbara and I are outside. On the apartment balcony.
She’s having a cigarette.
There’s this class we had during the semester- Knowledge-based Decision Making or something like that. We had this interesting study about lung cancer and its possible causative factors. There was this interesting question of whether people who smoked cigarettes were more likely to develop lung cancer due to something in the cigarettes, or if people who tend to enjoy smoking cigarettes have some sort of genetic predisposition that makes them more likely to develop lung cancer anyway. Some sort of confounding variable. I thought that was a really interesting perspective on the lung cancer question.
I bring that up with Barbara on the balcony as she’s taking puffs from her cigarette. We talk about it for a bit.
Thinking about it now, I don’t know though. Smokers’ lungs are usually disturbingly black and stuff. And the blackness has something to do with the cancer doesn’t it? Non-smokers don’t usually have such black lungs.
Barbara has this really cool jacket hanging around. I’m wearing it while I move furniture out of the dorm apartments. It has a hood, and there’s this nice fuzzy fur on the inside of it. The lush fur feels very comforting- it’s warm, and it also provides me with some much needed emotional succour in the face of all of the uncertainty ahead of me. It makes me feel safe and insulated from the outside world.
In her office she gave me a book. It’s some sort of black-and-white photography compilation printed out on sheets of paper that have been bound together. She said it was a gift from a friend. I flipped through the book – it seems to be some sort of photography memoir. It’s got different snapshots from the person’s life- dinner with friends, outdoor scenes, etc.
In about a month I’ll be living on an island in Cape Verde, on a gap-year from college. I’ll be living in a studio apartment on the ground floor of a defunct beachfront hotel.
I’ll hate the curtain in the room. I’ll find it too musky and stifling. It’ll feel like it’s made of thick stiff jeans, blocking out all of the light and air in the room whenever it’s drawn.
I’ll take down the curtain and in its stead I’ll take out pieces of paper from Barbara’s photobook gift. I’ll paste these pages along the windows to form some sort of translucent screen. I won’t need a curtain after that- the paper screen will provide privacy, while still letting sunlight into the room.
My windows will be pasted with random moments of this person’s life.
But I don’t know all of that now. Right now it’s just a book filled with interesting-looking pictures of people I don’t know.
Barbara’s husband is around. We’re moving furniture together.
He’s a geologist. I make some sort of a joke about how his job rocks.
Haha.
At some point I’m standing on a sofa, taking down some curtains. I sneeze.
Someone says “Bless you”.
Barbara’s husband says something about how the phrase “Bless you” came about.
Something about the Black Death or the Plague, some epidemic that occurred in Europe sometime in history. He says the clergy used to bless people who had the disease, because it was pretty much certain they were going to die, something like that. So they were blessing them as a way to send them to heaven after they died.
And so today’s “Bless you” was some sort of continued emulation of the clergy’s blessings during that time.
Hm.
I thought it was an interesting story.
I’m heading out of the airport.
Now it’s clear I’m not leaving Berlin today.
I’m berating myself as I walk out with my hurriedly packed luggage.
I need to book another flight. Argh.
I need to find a U-Bahn station.
Image: Me in Barbara’s lush fur coat.
This post is one in a Series. You can access the other posts here: https://mayowaosibodu.wordpress.com/2000/01/19/december-2016-january-2017-series-index/
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