I left work early and the city began to fall into the sea. The sea came up and swallowed whole buildings.
White walls and factories were far away with the cranes, steel necks ducking down and straightening in the moonlight.
There are cells in the mind built in a grid, to understand how far something is from us we measure using the real distance between cells in the mind.
The cells cannnot measure emotional distance. and the grid cannot signal a specific place, places are named through
patterns of cells. I have many special places, I wish that I could show someone not only the place but the
feeling that it gives me. Some say that when we are born we first build 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 make new patterns within the 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 old building near the highway, I went 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 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 the built environment and our bodies. Is it possible I created my understanding of the city within my understanding of you? I was learning
your behavior 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. Some days you felt like touching me, I could never find the pattern
in it though.
We also enter dreams and the ocean. People don't often tell me about places the same way I feel
them. I wonder if it could be a kind 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?
