Berlin after the fair

After Frankfurt I took the train to Berlin with the specific relief of someone exiting a machine. Friends in Prenzlauer Berg had a narrow spare room and a key under a pot, and the apartment smelled of coffee and old radiator heat when I arrived. For the first hour I sat on their kitchen stool without performing gratitude or itinerary, just letting the fair drain out through the soles of my feet. Berlin does not ask you to network at breakfast. That alone felt like medicine. Midweek I went to the Stasi museum, which was perhaps an odd choice for decompression and also, given what I write, not odd at all. It was a heavy afternoon. The rooms hold their bureaucratic chill even when full of visitors. I walked slowly, reading the ordinary cruelty of files and listening devices, and felt the familiar double pull of craft and conscience: this is material adjacent to the worlds I research, and it is also simply human damage arranged on shelves. I did not take cheerful notes. I left with a headache and bought a pastry I did not taste properly, then walked until the streets became ordinary again with bikes and bakery lights.

The small reading came later, a warm room, a modest circle of listeners, wine in plastic cups. I read a short process piece rather than fiction, partly out of tiredness and partly because my voice still wanted quieter work. Afterward the long nights began in the proper sense: kitchen tables, talk that stretched past sense into laughter, someone putting on a record low enough not to annoy the neighbors. I slept late, borrowed a heavier cardigan, and sent Aigerim a message that was mostly about bread. By the time I packed for the journey onward, the fair had become a loud story with softer edges. Berlin had done what I needed. It returned me to myself in a borrowed bed, with sore eyes, full notebooks, and no urgent wish to be impressive.