Call me Maria
A friend once told me about a man she found so ugly, that she wanted to make love to him.
The others are on Ketamine but for me it´s MDMA tonight, washed down with beer and depression. Moments later I´m moving through the city carrying a beat that rarely enters, in a hasty search for something to fill the useless hours that stretch between morning and night. I enter the first bar and
Tonight he will do, I rationalise.
The story is always the same, who you, who me, he slids his hand around my backless dress drows circles between my shoulderblades and whispers sentences that will make sense when told afterwards, in the depths of my cornered diary, written down carefully as notions and facts;
Israeli,
artist,
(a bit) older.
And tonight, me? German, call me Maria, I work in film, no no, you´re too kind, no, as a directors assistant, ain´t it bad about the Middle East, did you serve in the army then, oh you all do, how come, and how do you profit from liberation, do you want to make out.
We leave the bar in silent agreement, moving fast, urgency replacing caution. I push the regret away with philosophical balderdash; what is the meaning of these dark streets and the matrix where a guy passes by, kicking the curb and painting the houses with lungs half-full screaming I hate Berlin. I steal a look and feel revolted by my partner´s appearance.
A friend once told me about a man she found so ugly, that she wanted to make love to him. Obsessed, she circled around his balding presence, yearning for a hidden kiss, seducing him in the office bathroom.
We lie on his living room couch and all I can come up with is you know what, what if we just talked tonight. He proceeds to lather hand soap on his dick when he stares at me while using the toilet. I stare back, disgusted by the sheer simplicity and mundanity of the ritual we call making love.
He wants to let me in on a secret. An artistic one, this is. Inside the cupboard there is a carcass of a dead rabbit, I find. Metaphor for the chase, he laughs through his stubbly beard. I search his eyes for the signs of an illness. He proceeds to show me a video where the rabbit is covered in semen. More scenes blur inside my mind likening a comedic horror story, shaken head, slowly, side to side. Yearning for morning. No. Better. Yearning for a yes.
This is the same moment when the MDMA begins to drop down on each level in my body, the numb, throbbing horror replaces the earlier euphoria with a pain and anxiousness with an antidote that is much darker. Unable to move. Glued to the living room couch, he fills me with words like in some twisted prison guard feeding me my daily poison, me, the drugged-out Sultan, him, the bearded, greyed out Shererazade.
The broken sound of the doorbell functions as a green card—a silent permission slip for me to flee. A man in a navy uniform stands in the doorway, indifferent, clipboard in hand. Efficiency of a German saviour. The electricity meter needs to be checked.
I stumble out, past the living room, past the corpse of a conversation still lingering in the air, through the stale kitchen that smells of last week’s coffee and something slightly rotten. I push through the doorway like an afterthought.
The city is still asleep but already hostile. Neon-lit kebab shops, half-dead streetlights, a homeless man spitting onto the sidewalk. The remnants of last night sag over everything. Berlin, in all its bleak, bleached-out glory. Weimarer Republik war gestern, I think.
At the coffee shop, the waitress eyes me with suspicion, a quiet judgment hanging in the air. My pupils too large;
One latte.
She pauses for a second too long before turning away, clattering cups, steam hissing in the silence between us.
I search the pavement under my feet and which each step the ugliness of the city forces itself inside me. I lay my head against the dirty headrest of the morning commute; surrendering to my indifference.
Monday morning arrives with the weight of centuries, sweeping away the night with an indifferent certainty.