Liebe Maria,
The Sunday Morning light acts like a spotlight in a city where the sun makes its obligatory departure at the first sense of a cold breeze. Its center stage bright light rays exposes you. And it’s my stare, now more piercing than your nipples, that makes you feel as though you are completely barren and naked awaiting evaluation like a Christian at those infamous pearly gates. However, what those believers await is entirely different than what you expect to find behind this flesh threshold. My name isn’t Peter but this is your Sunday Mass.
You wore nothing to cover up everything. The mass, fast-produced see-through fishnet was there to veil your lack of a bourgeois upbringing. No, you were not Conneticut born and New York suckled. You came from a city where the temperamental weather builds unwavering grit; you’re resistant, not refined. You came from the second city but didn’t play second fiddle to anyone. Where they saw the greatest city in the world you saw a suffocating investment banker whose face looked like a melted candle on the brink of a coke overdose. How depressing. You were the embodiment of the last great American city, but this statement is only understood by some and believed by less, much like your appearance that day. As my stare moved down, you hoped that my eyes would hover around the body-clenching suede and that the fringe would act like a toy in front of cat, stealing my attention from anything else while it moved. No, you didn’t have a studio space in Kreuzberg. You hadn’t moved here and consequently spent your days covered in paint as you perfectly fit into the niche vision of an American expat in Berlin. You thought in words and it’s hard to wear these words in the same way that they wear their artistic vision on their bodies. You likened their avant-garde art to dirty dish rags entirely devoid of any intellectualism, but somehow they have always found that more appealing. You spend your days buried in books, wreaking of smoke and coffee. A vision which is frankly more depressing than your actual depression. You disappeared in these words and only thought of yourself as authentically mad while inside the constraints of these bounded worlds.
But if I could just let you say something I would see that perhaps you didn't have a tattoo of your preferred Baudelaire quote permanently screaming to the world that you partook in the high-brow art of sitting and thinking about your own existence, but you did and you did it in French.
Your mouth was still while your hands did the talking. You positioned and embellished them with silver rings in hopes that they would catch the light and blind me from noticing that your hands were brown not from the sun because you had just returned from a vacation in Bali. Your brown hands, much like your parents, signaled a labouring class. Your parents’ calloused hands which at this point have gone limp from work did not pass down their college-educated taste for the higher arts or certain sociological phenomena, they gave you perseverance and a questioning take on rules and walls. Their hands were tired and rough so that yours could be pristine while you climbed the social ladder, a ladder which you were only able to grasp because you had stepped on their backs which they proudly sacrificed in hopes that you could reach the top and see the view.
The view in front of you was not what your parents had imagined it would be, it wasn’t clad in a suit or busying itself with numbers and graphs. Instead you stared at a brutalist concrete monstrosity; a mecca for hedonistic post-modern libertines who filled their ears with shrill techno beats, filled their noses with a white chemical powdered replica of happiness, and filled their eyes with images of collared men progressively bent over each other like dogs as they bridged day into night. They thrusted to the unces and aahs of a city collectively orgasming in ecstasy. They bared their bodies to the hallucinations produced by the modern Berlin myth, a myth that oscillated between a waking nightmare and a dormant dream.
You just wanted to be under the cover of darkness, under the shadow cast by this modern religious institution that preached acceptance for those that constantly live in pitched obscurity. You wanted to be another naked angel with brilliant eyes that you couldn’t see but feel in the dark. Naked angels who plunged themselves into repetitive prayer, whose feet seemed to instinctively vibrate to the lows and highs of the techno-sermon. Your feet were too busy bending over to the wills of others to even take into account their own instinct. Your body was contorting not to the music, but to what you thought I wanted to see.Why is it that you think that you are never good enough, enough for them, enough for him, enough for me, for yourself? My nod signaled an absence. You lacked an authenticity. That was the only prerequisite.
Berliner Küsse,
The Berghain Bouncer at 9am on the 17th of September