Zuruck Bleiben Bitte

Alex Harvey-Gurr

It will start in Berlin.
You will set your bag down on the stoop after stepping out of the cab where you will have just spent the last thirty minutes driving from the Tegel airport listening to the Turkish driver chatter in a language you’d never heard before while trying to muffle scared sobs with your scarf. You will have spent most of the flight looking at the picture of Damian and you on your laptop. You will try your damnedest to not think of him, of when you said goodbye to him. You should not remember how disgustingly beautiful the moment was two days ago when you grabbed his face and kissed him on the street after he put your bag in the cab to say goodbye, just like they do in those damn cliché romances you hate so much. It will only make you cry into your scarf more.
You will wait for a while in the landlord’s purple living room for the others in your program to arrive for the welcome meeting. You will wait for a while and think. You will think unhappy thoughts that make your brows furrow unattractively and peel thin slivers of skin from your lips with your teeth until they bleed and look diseased. Things will have not been going well for you at this point, not for a long time. Damian will have been passive aggressive with you during the weeks leading up to Berlin. You will tell yourself it is because he is feeling abandoned and doesn’t like that he won’t be able to see or talk to or smell you for five weeks. You will buy a fifteen dollar Skype subscription and a sixty Euro three gigabyte Vodafone Internet stick just so you can talk to Damian while you are gone. You will be ripped off by the German salesman and overpay by forty Euros, but you will think it is worth it at the time. Your apartment in Berlin will not have Internet. This will be a problem later, but you have bigger things to worry about now, sitting alone in that grotesque purple room. You will have had a nagging suspicion for a while now that something bad is headed your way and that you will have no way of stopping it. You will have felt this feeling many times before. You will know at this point that this is the feeling you will get when you are about to be hurt by Damian. You will wish that Damian would have finally let you make love to him before you left.
You will notice him right away as the other group members and the professor start coming in. His face will remind you just a bit of Damian’s, though his skin will be a few shades darker and his nose just a bit larger. You will finger your evil eye bracelet, the one you bought before leaving and plan on giving to Damian for his birthday because Damian loves evil eye trinkets, and you wonder if this boy is Arab too, if he’s Catholic too. Your bracelet will not attract his eyes. You will find out his name is Ravi. Ravi will not look at you much that night, no more so than he will look at the others in the group, and you will force yourself not to look at Ravi and miss Damian. You will not sit with Ravi at dinner later that night.
You will Skype with Damian that night to let him know that you made it to Berlin and are alright. You will make small talk for a while, because you will be very good at small talking with Damian. You will tell Damian about buying your first bottle of Berliner Pilsner, the first drink you’ve ever bought on your own and for only eighty euro cents, cheaper than water; how you can’t decide if you like schnitzel more than Turkish döner kebab and falafel; how there is an accordion player at your subway U-Bahn stop who you are pretty sure is a real gypsy because you can see gold in his teeth when he smiles and looks exactly like Mario, mustache and cap and all. You will ask Damian how his day was. You will know that he went to the beach his friends, because he told you about the trip the week before in a similar meaningless conversation. Damian will be evasive, not saying much about how the trip was or who he was with; you should know that Damian will be like this a lot. He will then ask you why you are talking to him when you could be making new friends. You will want to tell Damian that you miss him, but you don’t. The two of you will never talk much about things like that, not unless you are crying. You will tell yourself that you don’t care, not now that you are five thousand miles away. You will go out to bars with the group and Ravi that night.
It will become obvious over the next week that Ravi has a crush on you. You and your roommate in the program will notice Ravi following you around on the fieldtrips to the Wall and the Reichstag, walking down Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg by your apartments to get burgers at Kreuzburger when you are homesick for American food, always asking to share your umbrella during the flash summer showers and pointing out all the dogs on the street because he will know that you are homesick for your dog. You and everyone else will know about his crush without a doubt during your weekend trip outside of the city when Ravi tells you over half liters of pilsner and hefeweizen that you look like the Russian spy they caught that summer, the gorgeous one who looks nothing like you at all. You will blush and laugh and deny it, secretly agreeing because you are a girl and will want to feel pretty every once in a while.
You will Skype with Damian the next day and ask him if you look like the Russian spy. Damian will tell you, “Not even a little bit. Can I go now?” You will laugh at him and tell him that he’s in trouble. Damian will mumble something about not caring and then hang up. You will stay in that night, taking a shower while Ravi and the others go to a club down the street.
You will go out to the bars with the group the next night and order Jack and Cokes because they are Damian’s favorite drink. You will complain to the girls in your group that night about how your fake boyfriend is being a dick. You will smile at Ravi from across the table as they tell you that you can do better. Ravi will sit next to you at the next bar and will tell you again that you can do better, that Damian sounds like a douchebag and that you are awesome. You will agree because you shouldn’t have ordered that third Jack and Coke but you ordered it anyway to keep from crying in front of your new friends and Ravi.
You will start spending more time with Ravi after you almost go over your Internet stick’s data cap and have to start using the Internet café down the street to Facebook Damian; you will think it is too rude to Skype with him in a public place. Ravi will take you to get food at three in the morning after a night of dancing on broken glass in pink heels. Ravi will go on the swings in the park with you when you are drunk, even though he will confess later that they made him feel nauseous sometimes. Your new friends will laugh and tell you how much Ravi loves you, and you will laugh back and say that you know and giggle about his most recent show of old fashioned chivalry and courtship. You will spend your nights watching MTV in Ravi’s room, pretending that your TV is broken. You will feel guilty when you notice the tell tale ache in your belly, the one you will not have felt in over a year, and yet you will relish the feeling because you will have been missing it.
You will Skype Damian in the café on his birthday. He will be turning twenty-one and you will be worried that he didn’t have a good weekend because of work. You will be dead wrong. Damian will tell you about her, how close he had been getting with her the last few months, not weeks, how he felt guilty kissing her but how he decided it was okay because you weren’t technically together and hadn’t been for a long time. You will grit your teeth and bare you teeth pretending to smile, because you will not want to cry in front of Damian’s pixilated face on a computer screen, and say that you expected this, that he’d been saying her name a lot recently and you weren’t as hurt as he thought you were, and that you hope he has a happy birthday. You will think that this kiss was the bad thing you’d felt coming. It will be your last week in Berlin.
You will spend that night with Ravi, and the night after that, and the night after that.
You will kiss Ravi on the street after he puts your bag in the cab to say goodbye on your last night.
You will look at Ravi’s pictures on your camera on the plane.
You will tell Damian when you get back. Eventually.
You will tell yourself that you don’t care when Damian tells you you’re gross when he finds out about your nights with Ravi in Berlin. You will tell yourself that that is to be expected, that he has every right to feel that way about you. Then you will tell yourself no, no he does not have that right, that this was caused by him, that he is the one that wouldn’t commit to you, that he was the one who never told you that he loved you even though you both will know that he did, that he did it first. But deep, deep down you will know that that’s a lie, that you were the one that fucked up, that you threw everything you’d spent so much time and energy caring about and loving in the unhealthiest of ways for the last two years away on some guy who told you you were pretty when you’d spent so long feeling repulsive.
And yet you will miss Ravi while he’s in Berlin and you are home, and you will not know what to do because you learn that sometimes the clichéd stories are true, that you can and do love two men at once. And this realization will literally tear you in two.
But you don’t know any of this right now, do you? You are just a silly little girl who is picking her new crush named Damian up to go to dinner the day after Halloween. You’re giddy because he’s taking you to your favorite restaurant and you think that maybe, just maybe, tonight you and Damian will finally kiss while you’re watching TV together. You don’t know about Berlin.
Yet.