By Kaitlin Roberts

SUMMER

He pushes me in the shopping cart and we hurtle down Wühlischstraße, blasting Morrissey on a speaker and swerving past old men collecting bottles and past Berghain kids, who suck on vapes. I’m twenty-seven and high on speed with a boyfriend who’s too young to rent a car but old enough to push me on four rickety wheels through a heat wave, going nowhere.

We blaze through crosswalks and thunk-thunk over sidewalk cracks, and I don’t make sure he’s looking both ways. I shut my eyes, cover my ears. I don’t want to find out what’s next.

We’ve been going fast all summer. We wear trash black clothes from Humana and drink Rotkäppchen straight from the bottle. We skip club lines and go to bathrooms that smell like three-day-old piss. With the student card of the university where I’m enrolled but never go, we cut fat lines of Calvin Klein on a cracked phone screen and make them disappear, and it’s magic on the dance floor, where we thrash under hot red lights and sweat with strangers, best friends we’ll never see again. Then we’re back in the bathrooms, where sometimes it’s a hahaha-amount of drugs and sometimes so much our brains hurt and we have to bum hand-rolled cigarettes, and hast du Feuer? And when we finally come down, teeth-grinding and mascara running, we leave wincing at the sunlight and shielding our ears to drown out the birds—because we hate the birds, black hooded crows that eat garbage and gossip on car hoods. They say it’s daytime, high noon, that we’ve been fooled, that nothing is magic, but mostly they say we’re fuck-ups. You hear them? Fuck-up, fuck-up, fuck-up, they call from the trees where they’re the high ones now.

We rush home to our fifth-floor walkup where all our dreams are nightmares and the fridge is empty and every day is Sunday all summer long. When we fall asleep on a bare mattress, the afternoon sun cooks us through painted-shut windows. So we wake up sticky and sweaty with cigarette smoke in our hair and stamp-smudged wrists, and we feel terrible, but we’ll do it next week and the week after. We’ll never die. We’re nihilists. We’re unstoppable.

I’m too old for this. Not just the shopping cart. But the boyfriend. And the drugs. And nights so late that it’s even nighttime in Brooklyn, where my friends have 401ks and Equinox memberships and West Elm couches, where everyone I’ve loved is in love with someone else.

My boyfriend and I only play like we’re in love. When we hold each other’s shaking jaws. When we go to parties and he flirts with girls who look like they know how to throw up. When I get drunk on Sekt auf Eis and run away from the party just so he’ll chase me down the street. When he cries in my arms in the Ikea model living room display, where we’re trying to buy a rug and make up so we can be a normal, loving couple. But we’re not good at loving. We’re good at getting lost and Berlin is the place for that. Here, everyone is lost. Even kids with trust funds and mullets who make sculptures and pretend to be poor. Especially them.

I met some when I first got here, last summer, to start art school. I had a thin portfolio of still lifes: flowers blossom-down in a vase, a comb missing some teeth, cell phones buttered on a plate, a lamp that committed suicide, a bible in the freezer. You know, family stuff.

“These aren’t bad,” my boyfriend said when we first met. That was before I stopped going to class, before he moved in, before those paintings moved themselves into the closet, where I hid my childhood teddy because I knew he’d make fun of it. That’s just the kind of guy he is. The kind that doesn’t ask why my dad doesn’t wish me happy birthday anymore, but I tell him anyway. That I’d rather be pushed away than smothered. That I won’t starve for anyone’s approval anymore. I’d be a good daughter if it didn’t kill me. My boyfriend isn’t listening—the same way he doesn’t listen when I talk about Brooklyn. He doesn’t want to hear about the night I woke up on somebody’s floor, or why I stopped showing up to work on time. Why I got fat. Why I moved to Berlin to lose the friends, the job, the weight, and live where nobody knows me, not even my boyfriend. He doesn’t want to know the real me, and that makes him perfect.

I came here to be a new person, and this boyfriend wants to change everything about me. He dyes my hair orange in the bathroom sink, a bleach job gone wrong. He burns my scalp and throws out my clothes. He turns me into a new girl every month because he hates getting bored. If we get bored, we might slow down. But we want to go faster than Saturn, so fast no one can see us. Faster until he lets go of the shopping cart, and the wheels veer off the curb and the whole thing crashes into a lightpost.

People shrink and whisper. I want to hide but I’m all lit up under street lamps. I know what’s next. We’ll go back to the apartment, where we’ll fight and I’ll cry. Because I’m so high. Because my hand hurts. Because this is one of those fights that’s too embarrassing to explain to anyone. All I can do is look at him, swaying and big-eyed, like he doesn’t even know me. And it’s not the end, but it’s an ending.

FALL

Another season in Berlin—over a year later—I’m twenty-nine and live in some other guy’s bedroom. His name is Reese, like the candy, and he’s a photographer. He takes pictures of buckle bunnies, boys skinning squirrels, toothless monks. I don’t know what Reese looks like because I’ve never met him. I’m just subletting his room for a few months until I find out what’s next. His friend gives me the keys, then closes the door and leaves me alone.

It’s a one-room Wohnung in Reuterkiez with high ceilings and a shag Moroccan rug. Long golden velvet curtains hang on the windows, which open five different ways and look out on a park where every tree has a number and the church bell rings on the hour. And I’ve done this all before, sublet other people’s bedrooms, slept on their jersey sheets, put my clothes in their bare closets and drawers. If I were renting out my room to someone, I would hide my things, but Reese doesn’t bother. His fisherman sweaters and wool pants are in the wardrobe. The candles are half-burned. His desk is cluttered with copies of Arts of the Working Class and sticky notes: buy milk, return easel to Mathias. A list of movie recommendations from someone named Lara: Somewhere; Stroszek; Je vous salue, Marie. Buddy Holly sits on the record player.

You’re so old-fashioned, my ex-boyfriend used to say when I asked for too much.

I moved into Reese’s apartment with almost nothing: no friends, no boyfriend, no job. Just some clothes and my thin portfolio, paintings that look like they belong to someone who hasn’t learned that nothing in life stands still. I get in the habit of hardly leaving the apartment. I don’t want to go outside, through the maze of hashish bars and broken bottles, lights and hollow faces. I might take a wrong turn and get mocked by streets where I used to get high with that boyfriend who I still see everywhere, even though he left me and the city months ago.

Maybe I should leave, too. My friends back home would like that, but I can’t tell them I’m lonely because loneliness is embarrassing. It’s contagious. And when you catch it, even your friends whisper about what’s wrong. I don’t tell them I quit school because that’s failure. I don’t tell them anything. I screen their lunch-break calls and say I’m out to dinner, then ignore their nighttime texts and pretend to be asleep. I lie awake with my stomach grumbling because I’ve eaten nothing but Tuc crackers and Späti wine, temporary foods for a temporary life.

I don’t speak for days and when I hear my own voice, it’s like a stranger in the room. I spend the days at Reese’s mahogany desk, applying for jobs I don’t even want. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to dream. I don’t want to do anything, except trace the spines in Reese’s milk crate bookshelf. There’s a worn copy of The Way of the Bodhisattva. The Codex Seraphinianus. Books on meditation and Tai Chi. Journal d’un curé de campagne.

Journal d’un curé de campagne is a novel about a young, pathetic priest living in the French countryside. He has stomach pains and lives on cheap wine and old bread. The congregation dislikes him. His health erodes. His faith erodes. He suffers and dies.

“How easy it is to hate oneself!” the priest said.

“Relatable,” Reese wrote beside that. He doodled a bear on a therapy couch. In the margins, Reese made notes in loopy cursive handwriting. He made big stars next to passages about prayer and drew smiling goats beside pastoral descriptions. Sometimes he just said “!!!” or penciled in a large check mark, like when the priest wrote in his journal, “Our habits are our friends, even the bad ones.”

I close the book and turn out the light.

I wake up in Reese’s room when sunlight creeps through the velvet curtains. On blue-sky mornings, I drink orange juice out of an old jam jar. It’s October but still warm enough to sit on the balcony, where I watch people carrying loaves of bread and fresh-cut flowers. Every afternoon, a tall woman plays fetch with her dog in the park. An old man tilts his head toward the sky like he’s being anointed by the sun. At dusk, people bike over the cobblestones. Windows glow, there’s the smell of cooked onions, and I’m hungry. I light candles at the kitchen table. I read the books on Reese’s shelf and watch the movies on his lists. The first time I see his picture is when I look through the drawer of his mahogany desk. I tell myself that if he didn’t want me to look, he would have locked it.

I find the pictures under postcards stamped in Athens, Beirut, Kathmandu. Beside birthday cards from papa and someone named Max: “Happy Jesus Year, Reese!” The pictures aren’t like the ones from his travels, framed and hung on the walls. They’re polaroids of Reese with long hair, green hair, no hair. Reese and some guys carving a pumpkin, building a tent. Reese kissing a toad. A day at the lake, magic tricks and playing chess. The photographs are silent but I can hear him, holding down a big chord on the piano, cooing at a bottle-fed baby goat. Everything about him, the way he bit into a peach and blew out his candles and cannonballed off a cliff, eyes wide open, was bursting with a hunger to be in the good part—as if, crook-smiled with a face grooved and mapped, he couldn’t quite believe he’d made it.

Just looking in this drawer, I can tell Reese is nothing like anyone I’ve met. While his friends lazed in hammocks and held half-lit cigarettes between their lips, Reese had something brooding and urgent behind his fun, and that was familiar. I knew what it was like to be desperate for something, but Reese didn’t dwell in his melancholy, like the priest, like me. His quick eyes seemed determined to overcome something. To seek out the best parts of life and exist in those moments. I’d never lived like that. I’d dulled my aches in boy after boy, haunted ones who made me believe I’d gone somewhere, when all I’d done was turn off the lights.

Don’t you know, my ex-boyfriend said, if you leave me, you’ll be alone all over again.

I’m alone all fall. I spread a picnic blanket out at Tempelhof and watch wind surfers soar over the old tarmac. I eat baklava, careful not to let my fingertips honey-stain a page where Reese made a big star when the priest said, “It’s the small joys that release me.” At dusk, I feed ducks and watch couples dangle their legs above the Spree. I buy one euro books from the Flohmarkt and watch matinees at Wolf Kino—An Affair to Remember, Chungking Express—and in the soft glow, I’m becoming someone new.

After sunset, I walk the canal under trees that have turned bright yellow all the way back to Reese’s apartment, where I’m alone but don’t feel alone. Back here, the floors creak and the radiator zizzes and, at any moment, it’s like someone is about to turn the doorknob, about to say hello. The room is alive, and I feel that way, too, just being here, excited and buzzy and a little bit crazy. So of course, I don’t tell anyone. Because who would understand?

One night, I dream about Reese. He waves to me on a beach and then says something I can’t hear, so I run toward him as the gulls cry and the waves rush up to grab my feet. And when I reach him, he’s writing something in the sand, but I wake up before I can read it.

“True grace is to forget,” the priest wrote.

“To forget is to rest,” Reese penciled in the margin.

“I’m coming back to Berlin,” my ex-boyfriend texts. “I would love to see you.”

I wish I believed in anything enough to write it down.

I don’t reply to the email. I watch gold threads of light on the Moroccan rug grow softer every day. I drink teas on the balcony, even in the cold. I buy paints, oranges and golds. Out the window, the last glowing leaves hang onto the bare black trees, and I don’t want them to let go.

WINTER

I’m thirty-one when I move into my own apartment. My furniture, my decorations. My mattress. I thrift a record player and a valentine-red shag rug. I put flowers in a wooden vase. I set up an easel and buy long, yellow silk curtains to cover the windows at night. During the day I keep them open for a few hours of sunlight and to paint the skeleton trees.

It’s a good place to work but it isn’t a companion.

It’s been over a year since I moved out of Reese’s apartment. And I miss him, if it’s possible to miss someone you’ve never met. The week Reese was supposed to come to Berlin, the week I was going to give him back the keys, he told me his father died and he went back to his hometown. I left the keys in his mailbox.

I keep tabs, the way everyone does, even if they lie and say they don’t. It’s just because they’re afraid to have hope. Because hope makes you pathetic. But I hope I’ll meet Reese someday. I even emailed to ask if I could pick up a book I’d left at his place, but he told me he’d just left the city. He was traveling again. At a monastery. On a farm. I couldn’t keep up.

It’s a cold January when Christmas trees get discarded in ashen sleet, and my breath is clipped when I run laps around the park before I start my day at a remote job where everyone has a work voice. On the weekends, I wear overalls to painting classes at the Volkshochschule. I don’t make any friends. Isn’t this the part where things are supposed to get better? Isn’t the sad time over? But all day, it’s loop after loop of what-ifs. What if I’d never moved here? What if I hadn’t met that boyfriend? What if my dad didn’t keep me small? What if I’d stayed in school? What if I hadn’t moved into Reese’s room? What if his papa hadn’t died? And what if Reese and I really had met each other? Then what would I be doing right now?

I don’t know why I still live in Berlin, but I’m afraid to go home. Afraid that everyone will find out I came here to go nowhere. That I wasted good years without much to show except a line between my eyes that one friend back home says a little botox would fix right up. I get mad at my old friends. Because they’ve never been alone. Because they’re firmly in the bathroom-tiling phase of their lives. Because they take staged engagement photos in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. Pictures that scream We’re married, we’re safe, our love is so great. When they invite me to weddings and baby showers, I say it’s too expensive, too far. But really, I don’t go because each one is a mini-death. A notice that time doesn’t stop and once it’s gone, I can’t get it back.

I feel shitty for feeling shitty. So I read a story about a swan that freezes to death in the canal. About kids getting their legs blown off. About people who can’t afford ventilators and die never saying goodbye to their families. And it makes me wonder how anyone can be stupid enough to believe in God. If God is real, he’s just another middle-aged guy having a mental breakdown.

In the dead, endless part of winter, I read a story about an old man whose dog nipped a lady’s heels. The man lives alone, and this Jack Russell is his soulmate but the lady who got nipped wants the dog killed, and there’s nothing the guy can do about it. I get sick thinking about how cruel people are to each other. How no one is allowed to make mistakes, not even dogs. I sleep badly. When I dream, I dream I’m the dog, the kind that nips. I nip my dad for ignoring me. I nip the boyfriend who crashed the cart. And when I see Reese on the beach, I run to him on my little dog legs and nip him for never know ing me. For not caring about the person who lived in his room, slept in his bed. I decide I need to get out more.

So I go on dates. I see the insides of a lot of apartments. That’s pretty much the highlight of these dates. I admire their plants and pet their dogs. I look at their books. Most people don’t make notes in books. Most people don’t even bother reading them.

One night I’m in this guy’s apartment, and even though his profile says he’s an architect with a passion for design, his house is sad. There’s a peanut butter jar with a sticky spoon on the nightstand and laundry on the desk. He says it’s a little messy because he works a lot, but I’m pretty sure it’s that way because he’s the kind of person who eats peanut butter in bed. There are towels on the windows instead of curtains and his blue couch is all lumpy and sun-spotted.

The guy sits down on the couch and pats the cushion like a person does when he wants a dog to jump up.

So I go home, where I’m relieved to be alone. I light candles and draw the curtains and paint the peanut butter guy’s bedroom, using dark brown for the spoon and oatmeal gray for the shaggy rug. I give the blue couch blue hands and blue fingers, so it can take a turn pawing at the guy.

The next day, I go to the store and buy more paints and canvases.

I paint my childhood bedroom. All the furniture is white and the walls are dinosaur purple, painted by my dad who wanted me to stay in that room for ever. Who said we had to hide in our bedrooms when the neighbors rang the bell. Who told me to cut my hair short like a boy’s so no one would want me. And when someone finally did and I brought that boy home, Dad wouldn’t meet him. He made us both stand outside, and he shut the door, tight as a grudge. And that boy never saw my room with the books I was allowed to read. Or the heavy chest of drawers not safe for secrets. I paint the room cramped and tame and holding its breath, but I leave the windows open.

I paint my first bedroom in Berlin. The studio with the mattress on the floor. The sink is stained orange. And the carpet is yellow. And the drugs are on a plate next to the unmade bed. There are empty vodka bottles. Syringes and Plan B and piles of scraped-together coins. Props for a devil-dance time of life when a guy I hardly knew told me to crack a beer and play dead. And since I listened, obeyed, I could never erase him, which is all I wanted until now when I paint the canvas in full color. It’s a still life, so he’s absent, but I see him for the first time. He’s not a king but a kid, not a ghost but haunted, hiding, dying to be anyone else.

I paint the new bedroom he sleeps in with a girl who’s not me. I paint my friends’ bedrooms, the ones they share with spouses and babies who scream all night. I paint the bedroom of the lady who got nipped by the dog and wanted him put down. I make long shadows and cracks in the ceiling that keep her awake all night.

I couldn’t forgive them in real life, but in paintings I could see their hurts.

One day it’s Reese’s room. The flickering candles. The fisherman sweater. The windows that open five different ways. The ceramic tea mugs and mahogany desk. The flannel duvet. All his books, worn and read, and marked up with Reese’s jokes and sad faces and “!!!”s. I miss his room, and this is the closest I can get. I keep thinking of one more thing to add. A jam jar of orange juice. A smiling Jack-o’-lantern. There’s always something more.

Winter loosens its grip. The days get lighter. Cherry blossoms open on the trees. Then a rainstorm throws them against the black asphalt in a flurry of pink confetti. Another spring.

SPRING

Everything happens quickly the year I turn thirty-three. I make a few friends. I have my first exhibition. And in the spring, I find out Reese has died.

I see it, while keeping tabs. The obituary called him a top student, an accomplished artist. It mentions the university he went to and the town where he grew up. It said he spoke eight languages and made countless friends in his travels. He was a loving brother, son, child of God.

His life is all laid-out in neat, careful paragraphs. No, no it can’t be true. The practicalities are there but none of the real life, which makes it hard to believe. Where were the kissing frogs? The long hair, green hair, no hair? Where were the cannonballs and chords, the doodles and “!!!”s.

I re-read his obituary while waiting for the bus. While waiting for the water to boil. While wide-awake under the glow of my screen. I type the letter R and my phone knows exactly which page I’m looking for. I tell friends, but they don’t get it. So how did you know him? It’s hard to explain, missing someone you never met.

I get angry at myself. I could have tried to reach him. I should have told him what he meant to me. I never heard him laugh, but people said it was contagious. I never called, but he answered every time. I didn’t know how he died, but his death was unexpected. And that’s the worst line, the one that keeps me stuck, stunned. All I know is the margins. The therapy bears and “relatables,” the meditation books and magic tricks. His brooding brow and crooked-smile. It can’t be true. I scroll through newspapers, search for his name. But I don’t find anything more.

A gallerist finds me and I sell my first painting—the one with the orange-stained sink. I use the money to go away for a few weeks and rent my apartment to someone from the internet. She waves a freckled arm from the landing.

Up in the mountains, everything is clearer, but grief still carves itself into me on walks by the river, past fallen barns and old headstones hidden by lilacs. And when the ashen clouds rain down on the hour every afternoon, I go back to the cabin with the big fireplace. Quilts. Moths. Thuds in the night when the stars stretch out over endless, inky darkness. Looking up at the sky is just looking into the past, at stars that died ages ago. Still, I wish on them for a sign, an ending.

That night, I dream about Reese writing my name in the sand. I dream about that boyfriend who crashed the shopping cart. About my father as a little boy. About myself as an old woman.

On the next purple-cloud morning, I wake up to a thud at the window. It’s different from the other house sounds, and outside, on the ground in the dewy morning grass there’s a fist-sized brown bird flat on its back. Its eyelids tremble and it has a small, suffering beak. It’s beautiful and quivering. Its soft eyes beg me not to hurt it.

Online I read that the bird has a broken back. The best thing is to put it out of its misery. I go inside and come back out with a salad strainer, a plate, and a kitchen towel. With tentative hands, I reach for the bird. I cover the plate with the salad strainer to make a small cage. The closest vet is twenty minutes away.

On the drive there, I tell the bird that he’ll be okay, he’ll fly again. Lies, all lies. Through the salad strainer slats, his beady eyes look back at me. “Just hang in there,” my voice cracks. Even if he never flies again, I could take him home with me. At least then he would be safe from the world. I could put him in a real cage. I could name him. He would be mine. There’s no line at the vet. Through the window, I see three women wrestling a Saint Bernard to the floor. They’re country people, not soft about fixing things. When the dog leaves, it’s our turn.

The vet is tall and wiry with calloused hands. She eyes the salad strainer and plate.

“Did you give it a push?” she asks.

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” I say, and the vet doesn’t hide her sigh.

She snaps on a glove, takes the salad strainer and plate from me. Then she opens the window and holds the bird up to the light. The bird stays still, back flat on the plate. But once the vet pinches its belly, like that, he flips over, and flies out the window, over the mountains. Light and weightless and gone forever.

These birds get stunned, the vet explains. They hit a closed window and forget how to move, but they recover. “It doesn’t last forever,” she tells me. Nothing does.

She hands me the salad strainer and plate, and she says she won’t charge me for doing nothing. There’s a tsk-tsk in her voice that’s supposed to make me feel ridiculous, but I’m too relieved to be embarrassed. Moments ago I had a bird on my hands that was dying or a bird that would stay with me forever. And now it’s just me—birdless and open-handed—and for the first time I feel that fully. There’s nothing more to hold, no bird to curse or feed, bury or keep.

The sun is high now, stretched out over a mountain range that unfolds into blossoming hills and endless blue sky. The kind of morning that makes you believe grace is everywhere. I don’t know if I believe that. But I believe the blossoms will fade and the leaves will turn. That the headstones will show their faces again. I believe in snow that settles in the valleys until it melts and makes the rivers rise, flooded and muddy.
I believe in nights when stars fall low in the sky and mornings when lilacs return in full bloom, waving pink and violet on the hilltops until the first frost takes them. I believe there’s still life on soft dark nights when the ice etches patterns on fogged-up glass. That when you think your sadness is endless, a bird will fly into your window and wake you from a nightmare. That it’s impossible not to love the person who brings you back to life.

Up here, today, the air is clean and clear. Bees bumble in the garden and the linden trees are bearing fruit. Cowbells sing up the mountain, and tomorrow I’ll drive back down. There’s the trip back to Berlin, painting to do, and days after that. And none of it is still. There’s always something more.

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Kaitlin Roberts is a writer and journalist based in Berlin. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Narrative Magazine, Atticus Review, and Necessary Fiction, among others. She also shares weekly fiction and essays on her Substack, 52 Stories.