Berlin – A restaurant in Kreuzberg. The blue of the day is already giving way to the scrubbing of the evening. A woman has sat down at the next table and ordered a beer. She is always looking at her smartphone. I think of a sentence from a book: “A cell phone being watched does not ring.” But hers apparently vibrated because she lifts it to her ear. Lights a cigarette. A glow walks across her face. Love calls you or one of its siblings.
I turn to my book because love, and also its brothers and sisters, like being watched even less than a telephone. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to listen, because the woman speaks with the clarity of those who are alone in a crystal ball with themselves and the other person. The glass can be blown out of enchantment, longing, or sorrow. In this case, everything seems to be in it. The glow gave way to serious words at first, a few tight laughs, and now she is crying. Again and again I hear “It doesn’t work” and “How is that supposed to work?” She smokes incessantly, orders a beer again and my heart is thrown back and forth in my chest like a locked animal. I can hear enough to know that the two of you can’t see a way together here. “There is always one” I want to shout and I know that this is not true.
Sometimes life makes two of them fall in falling stars and they dance around and forget everything, including their wishes, and then the rain stops, like every rain at some point, and they stand there, freezing and everything is wrong. Holding on to each other and parting, the “come here” and “go away”, staying and running away. Then they sit lost in front of bars and smoke and drink too much and cry and laugh and at some point put their phones down. It gets quiet at the next table.
I peek carefully at my book. The woman stares into nothing. Then she looks at her phone as if to say: “What was that now?” The cigarette dies away in the ashtray. Then the little glow returns, surrounded by smudged mascara. The woman starts typing. I suddenly find my book boring. Think about the lack of alternatives, hidden paths and the unfathomable nature of love. When I leave half an hour later, the woman is still typing. And reads and types and reads. Maybe there is a way after all. In the morning, in the blue of the day.