August 7, 2025 :: 11:24:48 :: Me and my bus friends
When you go to the public library every day, you see the same people. You get a different drink from the vending machine but the same people are sitting around studying together. Sometimes at the exact same tables, too. I feel a sense of solidarity in these situations.
Nowadays I just take whichever bus I manage to catch, but in Bonn I took the exact same bus almost every morning. It was either the 610 or 611, the lines colored blue on the public transport maps, which drove [and still drive] north through the ornate neighborhoods of Bad Godesberg (the borough where my host family lived), past the big park on the Rhine and to the central station. I saw many of the same people in the same bus: a mom with red hair and a stroller, a guy with big hair reading from a book, an older chubby man with a mustache and polo shirt. We would all get off the bus together at the main station, and I would start my speedwalk over the cobblestone and parks of downtown Bonn. If it were a Monday, I would hop over the patties of puke which were still drying, and hurry to the campus of my language school.
But then we changed campuses, because the dastardly exchange students from Virginia needed to take over our half-timbered house. The new building was a little more north in downtown Bonn, and I got there a different way. In the mornings I would walk to the subway and take it all the way to the city hall. To go home, I would take the line to Robert-Schumann Platz, a weird, concrete, bureaucratic nothing-space where a lonely and empty bus would stop to pick me up and bring me home.
The only time we were at the old campus again was the last day we were in Bonn, for our goodbye party. We all met in the morning to get the old house we used as a school ready for that same evening, and I jumped into a 610 again. Everyone was still there: the mom with the red hair and stroller, the guy with the big hair and the book, the old man with a polo shirt. We all made eye contact and I had the feeling that I was very recognized in that moment.
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August 6, 2025 :: 23:57:03 :: One very important thought
I worry about so much all the time and actually it’s all going to turn out okay. I put in a lot of effort into life and things almost always go well, or at the very least find their place in my life.
~~~ :: 10:40:13 :: A cocoa-based drink
She stares at me with a smile, cup placed directly under the lips, not yet drinking. The glint in her unnaturally blue eyes draws me further into her world. Tantalized, I reach out my hand and hit the button labeled “HOT CHOCOLATE.”
The drink machine starts to hum and liquid shoots into my cup. Let’s be accurate here: It’s not a hot chocolate, it’s a “CHOCOCREME.” The other option was a “COCOA-BASED DRINK.” I wasn’t sure what the difference was, but now, as I see a second stream of mysterious white juice squirt into my cup, I realize that the “CHOCOCREME” has milk and the “COCOA-BASED DRINK” probably doesn’t. Alas: I have broken my record of a grand total of twenty-four hours without cow milk. Tomorrow the struggle will go on.
I came to the public library to work on my final papers, instead I’m sitting here writing something completely different. Many friends’ messages are waiting for an answer in my WhatsApp inbox, and I’ll have to attend to them before actually reading what I need to. That’s frustrating!
At least the central library is calm, and by “calm” I mean “full of the sounds of construction and kids crying.” I mean that positively and sincerely, though. I like the background noise. In the main university library I feel painfully separated from the world, I get lost in my own thoughts (something I should probably get over). In the main public library there’s not just students, there’s also really old people and little kids. And you can get yourself a “CHOCOCREME” or a “COCOA-BASED DRINK.” I have the thought and feeling that in the public library everyone is more “normal,” a word I need to investigate and define. In the uni library everyone is perfumed and shiny, they wear baggy jeans and dangly earrings and fun knit sweaters. Right next to the grocery store in my street is a private dormitory, and on occasional journeys to grab another knob of garlic I’ve found myself surrounded by a bunch of people wearing black leather and lots of gold rings like if this were an Instagram reel or a B-list club in Berlin. I’ll see them again when I go shopping for dinner tonight.
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August 5, 2025 :: 10:05:58 :: You can do amazing, wonderful things
When I got home last night I fell down to the floor again and started crying. I stifled my sobs into my blanket, because my window was open and the whole courtyard would hear me otherwise, and the voice in my head started crying in my place. It said: Help! Please help me! Please don’t let me lose it all. I don’t know who I was asking for help from. Sometimes I can see the road I’m going down and I get flashbulb visions of me hitting rock bottom, losing family, friends, and loved ones, getting stuck in a dark and dusty room again and never having the courage to come out. It feels sometimes as if not everything is up to me and that’s when I start asking for help.
This time I got sick of lying there pretty quickly and I propped myself up on one arm. I took as deep breaths in as I could so I would stop sobbing. My glasses were lying on the floor and the world had turned into one large multicolored smudge. I looked deep deep deep into that smudge, as if I were on a mountain looking down at the world, and started to talk with the voice in my head, very clearly and deliberately. I said: People like you and they want to spend time with you. They came up to you at the film festival and introduced themselves, and made it a point to say goodbye when they had to leave suddenly. Your friends in the USA miss you and think about you a lot and hope you’re doing well. You can do amazing, wonderful things: You have traveled the world, you write research papers in foreign languages, you make people laugh and want to live and you hold them when they’re crying on the floor. And so on.
When I had recovered, I went into the kitchen and quickly made the weirdest falafel wrap in world history. Mere seconds after I had wrapped up my nutritional abomination, I saw Thing 1 smiling at me from the hallway. I was a bit surprised, since I thought I had been home alone. We chatted about our weekends, the respective festivals we visited, and the joy of German dialects. He only ate a peach and drank some tea. It began to dawn on me that he hadn’t come to cook. He might very well have heard me enter the kitchen and joined me just to say hi and chat.