I left work early one evening and the city began to fall into the sea. The sea rose up and swallowed whole buildings. They began to sell beach glass
on the shore and sandalwood candles. White walls and factories were far away with the cranes, steel necks ducking down and straightening in the moonlight.
They say there are cells in the mind that are aligned in a grid, that when we wish to understand how far something is from us we measure it by comparing
to a physical distance in the mind.
Justin,
I will find you
In the winter
I will find you
The cells cannnot measure emotional distance. and the grid cannot signal a specific place, for this they say we use patterned cells. A place we know is named
by the cells in the mind through unique timings and patterns. I have many special places, when I run I wish that I could show someone not only the special place but the
feeling that it gives me. I have always been the most excited by setting. Some say that when we are born we first develop grid and place cells,
we first make somewhere to put everything else.
When I came to this new city I had to grow new place cells and create new patterns within my inner grids, this was not easy. My places often don't connect, appearing
out of the fog more like colorful islands. My most special place then was an abandoned building near the highway, I ran out to it almost every day. Now that I've
moved I have no
idea how to find it.
As I was learning the new city I was also learning you. We know that places can remind us of someone, often painfully. There were two cities, the real streets and the
grid within my mind, when I couldn't stop thinking of you you became like a haze over everything I built, everywhere began to feel the same.
We can enter two things, the built environment and our bodies. It is possible I created my understanding of the city within my understanding of you? I was learning
your behavior at the same time I was learning the stations of the trains, you liked to meet along the U3, but never near where I lived.
I learned that the stations were a method of control and compromise, also like our bodies. On some days you felt like touching me, I could never find the pattern
in it though.
I lied, we also enter dreams and the ocean. I wonder sometimes if my place cells work differently, people don't often tell me about places in the same way I feel
them. I wonder if it could be some type of synesthesia, different places overlap very easily, making me feel like I'm dreaming.
I'm pulling Berlin apart, it's no longer a city made of you.
But the streets and highways I built when I knew you are still there.
Will I someday return to a place like you?
