2024. 8. 20 Tue

To collect my passport and UK visa, I had to hand in a copy of my German residence permit. A solemn exchange of one life for another.

Matthias summed up my life in Berlin with a simple sentence, written in an architect’s handwriting; ‘It was nice to collaborate for a while and we will miss you,’ which I thought was rather unfair given the three and a half years I’d been working. Then I reconsidered this unfairness. The office was founded in 1989 and my time would only account for a tenth of its run so far. How many others must have come and gone, with each of whom M collaborated for a while? A while is therefore not reductive but general, all alliances lasting, inevitably, awhile.

This transient nature of the relationship is something I have to learn to accept, now that I think of F, as reluctant as I am to do it. Whatever we have between us, we would let it have its own life, as naturally as it began. No doubt time and space will affect it, we ourselves will grow to be different people. How do you cope with life? The only thing I can do is to write here little by little, the white brow, the sass, the dance, the burp, the sweetness, the Lidl socks, the boba, the integrity and everything else that makes up F. It is the deepest form of affection I know, and at the same time, through this peculiar art of keeping the subject at a distance, I shield my soul a little tougher every day.