M&M Letter #8
The final one! Berlin and coming home
It feels a bit surreal writing this newsletter. It’s the final one many weeks late, and while our lives have moved on, our last month adjusting back have been just that: an adjustment.
Mark and I left Cagliari on a somewhat down note: Mark with a sinus infection, me calling around for a doctor’s appointment in Berlin (our impromptu final destination based off of cheap flights), and we weren’t even really sure what we were doing in Berlin. I had signed up for a freediving certification weekend near Cottbus, Germany, a 2-hour drive south of Berlin, and we had neither a place to stay nor a car booked for the voyage. Everything felt a bit up in the air, but at this point, our winging it had become our way of life. A haphazard bungee jump into the unknown with the outline of uncertainty that had us both surrendering and clenching our fists.
Upon landing in Berlin, we made our way to our AirBnb, which was situated on the famous Soviet architecture-laden street of Karl-Marx-Allee. It was midnight by the time we arrived, and we were exhausted. Mark was barely on the mend and feverish. The next day was rainy and cold, which was a huge wake-up call for the Mediterranean wardrobe I had brought to Europe. Up until this point we had experienced rain only twice the entire summer. Freezing and wet, we trudged our way through the upscale neighborhood of Mitte to the ENT doctor. Mark got his medication, and we slowly called our way through a dozen fully booked hotels near Cottbus until we finally found 1 room available.
We had only been in Berlin for 2 days when we packed everything back up into our rental car and drove down to the Grabendorfer See. I met up with 3 other students and the instructor, and we 5 dove into the depths of a freezing cold German lake the entire weekend. I spent almost 12 hours in the 56F degree lake, but every moment was enjoyable. Mark brought a book and read by the lake, slept in the car, and relaxed with the rest of the Germans we were with. By the end of the weekend, our little dive group felt like family. There was Volker, a Berliner radio host and “a B-list celebrity”, Melanie, Volker’s girlfriend and a seasoned surfer who spent some number of years in California, and Nico, my dive buddy who I got to converse with in Spanish and English because he emigrated from Ecuador to Berlin as a teenager. Rounding out the group was our sweet and humble instructor, Daniel, who is a current freediving German record holder.
Freediving is an interesting sport where you take one breath and dive without any oxygen tanks. It forces you to face one of mankind’s biggest fears: drowning. Daniel taught us how to freedive safely down to 15 meters (roughly 50 feet) and maintain our sense of calm. The way to do it: surrender your mind. Lose all thoughts. Deep inhale, and trust yourself. As I descended into the murky unknown of the freezing lake, I thought about the parallels between freediving and long travel. Long travel teaches you that control is a mirage we maintain to feel secure. There is no reality where we have constant perfect knowledge of risk. It’s a leap into the unknown to trust yourself and your instincts. Eventually in the midst of chaos, the ability to surrender and just go with the flow becomes the means in which you embrace presence in every moment. All in all, we suffered a handful of unexpected moments: phones being stolen, illness, food poisoning, last minute cancelations on flights and hotels, wildfires, and even a black eye. We lost a few hundred dollars here and there, and we lost half of our trip to Sicily due to Covid. But in the grand scheme of things, these are not the things that will define this trip as a whole. We will remember how we lived despite these inconveniences: the feeling of the sun, and the sea, and the taste of good food, and the Google translate mishaps that ended in laughter.
We drove back to Berlin, and spent the next couple of days resting in whatever way we wanted. For Mark, it was literal rest. He slept a lot and ventured out in the mornings and evenings for food and views. For me, it was exploring the city by foot with no general direction. We were both extremely sad to be leaving, but we were starting to feel tired of moving. Packing up, traveling, settling down, and repeating the cycle was starting to wear down on us. Having a home resonated deep within us. How precious it is to have a home! A family and friends to come back to! A familiar and lovely apartment with all its old quirks awaited us.
Berlin is a beautiful but complex city. A melting pot of many ethnicities struggling with gentrification the same way any growing metropolitan city does. We of course visited remnants of the Berlin Wall, but as we walked along it, it mostly dawned on me how much things haven’t changed much on a humanity scale. Regular people on both sides of the wall were drawn into arbitrary factions. They were regular people that lived through political chess games hoping to eventually see the loved ones they left on the other side. We are not all that different at all. On the last day of our trip I purchased some coffee spoons from a vintage shop that specialized in Soviet made relics from the time of the wall. I imagined the spoons were used by families entertaining guests, or gifted to a newly wedded couple, or made by a factory worker pondering potential nuclear war. It made me smile to think this is all this is: history is the interwoven story of us.
We left Berlin on September 6. It was a long day, and it was a beautiful evening when we arrived back in Atlanta. It was a cacophony of movement from the moment we landed until this moment I write to you. So many things have happened: I went to Nashville to visit my family right when we returned, Mark hosted our friend Kyle’s bachelor weekend, I prepared for my best friend Jessie’s surprise engagement party, we attended Kyle and Ting’s wedding as dual participants in the bridal party, and now, we are finally sitting down for our first week of ‘normal’ life.
When our friends and family ask us ‘How was Europe?’ we aren’t entirely sure what to say. “It was amazing!” (Does it sound cliche and boring? Are they just asking to be polite? No one really wants to hear about a summer abroad, right?), “It was, busy!” (Are we evading an answer?) “It was what you think it was” (It wasn’t, really). Mostly, Mark and I just stare at each other unsure of how to begin. We went through so many layers of self revelation that were possible because we gave ourselves space to explore and dream. We achieved something that had been on our bucket list for 5 years. We grew closer, and learned so much about each other. We had hard times too and learned to give each other space. It was a summer of being. Of detaching and enjoying the present. Of wondering how to bring back that presence into our daily lives upon returning, and how to maintain that sense of wonder and open-ness with our daily moments. It was a summer of being.
Thank you all for accompanying us on this mini newsletter series. It was a fun project for Mark and myself, and most of the time, I really didn’t expect anyone to read these. I wrote these primarily for my older self, so I could look back and re-live the moments (written and unwritten). Most importantly, thank you all for always welcoming us with open arms. You are all our homes.
<3 Mel & Mark
This trip will live forever in your beautiful prose.