Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

This is spring as they know it here. It's high time to shed the cloak of darkness, in order to see clearly. To not think sullen thoughts. I am sitting in a café called St.Oberholtz in Mitte, Berlin. Twenty years ago this was part of the GDR. Now it's filled with hipsters and Spanish tourists. And Americans like me, disenchanted and disconnected. Accident prone and curious. Love-sick and occupied with various substitutes for God.

A caravan of sirens just blew through the sunshine on the street below the big panoramic windows.

My love interest has been hitting the crack-pipe. She moved out of her home and into a squat-like, crumbling apartment with vomit-looking murals painted on the walls where black mold grows like a cancer.

She was writing me, she said, when she was high and lonely and confused. She was typing in a trance in between hits on the pipe.
She wrote that she couldn't stop thinking about me, and that she longed to trace the lines criss-crossing my palms. She wrote that she wanted to hold me all day and night. She wrote about my eyes; green like pools in tropical forests. (That's when someone should have slapped me hard. Because my eyes are blue.)
All these sappy love-emails, asking me to come back to Berlin and to be her star-crossed lover.
And I imagined us walking hand in hand through this city, where people don't seem to smile out of courtesy, and where psychic echos of past atrocities can come out of nowhere – like tumbleweeds on a lonesome Texas highway – at any point in time. 


And now she's high all the time. Her skin is ravaged by pimples and weird scratch marks. She smells worse than teenage boy foot sweat. She doesn't want to fuck. I don't want to fuck. I don't even think I like her. I think I just wanted to do something crazy, something that would mythologize me and sound good in my memoirs. Her voice is shrill and she talks with food in her mouth. She owns several Alanis Morrisette CDs, and that is cause enough to end this 'thing' before it even started.
So why is she smoking crack?

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

Is it all about the substitute for god? The hole that can't be filled?

I am filling it now with work, with the apartment I rented and that I will have to furnish. With my new friend, Michael. He works with me at Sandy's place. He's a really good waiter. He's from Georgia via San Francisco and London. He has a really interesting story I will tell you soon.

P.S A lot of my pix come from here: http://ghostwerld.wordpress.com/ awesome photo blog!!!