goodbyes

I get it just before we say goodbye at a crossing where a left turn takes me to Caput (a lake, an apple, being held in the water by seaweed arms) and a right takes her to Valencia. Four weeks cycling, one year studying.

It’s the two new golden triangles sewn into the fabric at the back of her tricot to hold together the seams.

In my stairwell last week one morning — one spent drinking coffee alone and daydreaming glassily at two pigeons dancing in my tree, looking away when they mated — in this stairwell as I descended reluctantly into the tropical heat for some errand or other, the sun threw a triangle of light in through a wooden framed window.

(A good, old one like the bathroom windows in the UK, mottled to stop people catching their neighbours in vulnerable stripped still asleep states sitting yawning head on knees.)

The triangle of gold fell on the laminate flooring of the stairwell like an arrow that said, “go outside”.

Back inside, back home. Muscles tight, bikini damp and face burnt, I wait for reports of wild camping, broken bike bits fixed, adventures in small village orphanages, close shaves, water from wells. Photos of oversized watermelons. Coordinates.

I’m not good at goodbyes. I’ve done three in a row and perhaps I should summer hibernate, wait out the rest. (Nasty but great book about a human hibernating: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessha Moshfegh.)

The day after Potsdam, C, who has shared my flat for 14 months, moves into N’s for the year. I pack her toaster and milk frother into a box. We load everything into a borrowed car on this, the hottest day of the year, eat a last bolognese. Will I buy her bread and salt, I wonder. We take her things down the road and pile her boxes into a space that smells of N and reminds me of first coming to Berlin. I live alone again. I reclaim my bedroom and barricade with plants the steps to the loft bed in the living room where I’ve been sleeping too long. Airless and dusty, a tectonic gash between two mismatched mattresses, footprints on the ceiling and the space littered with spiders and half-read books.

I inherited the plants from H, who has left for New York to break into the publishing world, having already loosened the stiff jam jar lid of it here in Berlin. In New York she will twist with a tea towel and it will fly off. We sit over falafel and ayran at Maroush two days before she leaves. The sweat runs down the backs of my shins. Some tears. We met in class last year. No, before. Miss Read Fair, 2017. She said, manning her stand and I was on a break from manning mine, “I’m trying to get into the Freie Uni to do English Studies.” I said, “I’m at the Freie Uni doing English studies.” She sat usually by herself and said things that made the professor pick up her pen and write in the margins of her notes for class.

On her last night we go for Korean food and don’t cry but sweat a lot. “See you in New York,” I say as she descends into the bowels of the U Bahn system.

The more people leave — another goodbye tomorrow to emerge blinking into the light for —  the more I dig my claws into the blanket. Saying goodbye has made me obstinate and lazy this week, unwilling to move much further than work and back, C’s new and N’s old place down the road. I’ve become homebirdy and broody for plants. At a dinner last week someone threw Brexit onto the table and I didn’t care in a childish, too loud way because I don’t plan on ever going back, I said. I’ll still be here in fifty years, probably, holding the fort and keeping the chairs warm and the plants alive, I went on to say, and someone wondered aloud if I’d be the only one left in Berlin I know.