… a rhythm for the hopeless a
drugstore for our toothache a

rebound for the heartbreak a
lonely singer in the crowded bar a

debt to be paid, New Year’s hurrah. Those plants
that grow by the reservoirs …

My memory often fails to adequately recall exact moments and their attached feelings, which is why I take to writing. I know that I wrote these lines of poetry still a Berlin new-born, perhaps two or three months into my stay, not yet wholly climatized to the ceaseless murmur of U-Bahn’s sliding into the station near the apartment I was then living in, and the never-stopping people tottering around the labyrinthian web of Straßen below.
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In one of the meetings before going abroad we were shown a graph of a line resembling that of a mountain. Its rise and fall was meant to illustrate the initial honeymoon phase and a reflective home-sick phase that can for some mutate out of the initial excitement, but that this transformation is a perfectly natural. This time for me, by the ambivalence that I describe Berlin as a drugstore yet a lonely singer, might’ve been around the descending phase; the streets had lost the glossiness my infantile eyes had eagerly painted upon them in the first few weeks, and what had taken its place was the grey murkiness that Berlin is ironically renowned for.
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I hope this isn’t coming across to depressing; I do promise there’s a happy ending – but before this, perhaps the biggest event to come out of my stay (and no, not COVID just yet): I managed to break both my arms on a scooter at 7am coming back from a club. I won’t dawdle too profusely on this incident because I have had to tell the story to just about everybody I know, but to briefly summarise, I managed to get to hospital, and they’re both working perfectly fine now. It did mean that I needed to prematurely come home in November, but I was back in January, better than ever.
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Remember when 2020 looked so promising? When we were all going to party our way into the roaring 20’s, Gatsby style? Well for the first two or three months I was living that fantasy; the six-week old casts I had to wear were taken off the day before I flew back and for two sweet months life in Berlin was it. The grey streets were still grey, but hey, at least I was walking on them again. Seeing my friends again, at this point past the initial introductory phase that friendships have to follow, was revitalising and inspiring. We’d created a creative writing group that convened every Tuesday night, where we’d drink Berliners and experiment with different practises and exercises. Free time was spent playing open mics, exploring the nooks and crannies of the city and going to its infamous clubs. Alles in Ordnung.

For those of us who have read Gatsby, we should’ve been sceptical about the illusion we’d set up for the new year from the get-go. I think what follows next in the timeline needs no introduction. The big question for me then was whether I was to quarantine in Berlin or in Manchester. I chose the latter.
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Returning back to Berlin for my third and final lap between May-June I felt like I was revisiting somewhere I now knew, like seeing an old friend of many years. Around this time the bubbling anger that had been brewing concerning my discontent with the UK had reached its boiling point, and on my arrival back to Berlin I wrote the poem I will end this post with. This past year has been extremely formative and incredibly eye-opening, however cliché it sounds, and whilst this synopsis leaves huge parts of it unwritten, I hope to revisit this written documentation in the future, perhaps even back in that big city … in a punk café with a Sterni … at Mauerpark, Kottbusser, Nollendorf …

… struggling to translate a mumbling shopkeepers’ words … the rapidity at which they’re speaking … faulty, inadequate knowledge of the language … falling in and out of love and lust … the metros pulling in and out of the stations … one miniscule fingerprint … the constantly transitioning and metamorphosizing walls … being a part of a city … submerging your entirety within it … like a feeble nestling … learning … this is the only way.
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Berlin, I’m back
Better – surviving
The reckoning,
Hungry again – like the savage
Of killed kin
For a fortress.

England, a slasher
– you walk out the cinema
In awe. Magnitude roars
Your plushed seat
& over-priced popcorn
To the core.
You’re in England
On a screen

& I’m in Ostkreuz
Walking on speakers –
Graffitied bodies; the
Accepted syllables,
Everyone itching to f—
& f—— to itch.

Prissy England –
Whose tremor is a dietary
Recommendation,
A vitamin. Berlin rolls,
Laughing, boisterous,
The ink of poems –
Of staves, clefs –

England, smug, in its Sunday Dress
Flicks the bottle lid, sets it
A boomerang. England loves
Her interludes, loves to lace
The corset, climaxing on choking.

By Dany Bowen-Metcalfe – Freie Universität Berlin

*Entry to the 2019/20 Study Abroad Blog Competition*