Something more

This will probably sound crazy, but do you ever have those moments of nostalgia that transcend normal memories? You're not just thinking back on a trip you took, or something that someone said that made you laugh, but you can almost be there, you can smell or taste or feel it. It's thick and almost tangible. It's the nostalgia for something more than the memory.

My friend Brandon and I were talking about this today. He's currently studying abroad for five weeks in Europe, and talking to him made me realize how much I want to be there, especially at this time of year. I've been feeling this way for the past several days. I think my dad triggered it. I mentioned something about Berlin, and he asked me if I missed it, and I really thought about the question. Oh yes, I said, I miss it. And I haven't been able to stop living in this kind of nostalgia since.

I told Brandon about this strange sensation, and he said he knew what I was talking about. I couldn't tell if he really did, or if he was just being kind to his poor, crazy friend.

I miss my entire trip, but I've been having this--sensation, I suppose you could call it--for the time when I first arrived, for the last golden days of summer and my first days and weeks in Berlin. I was still getting used to everything, but it felt so right. Living in my little shoebox of an apartment in Berlin (my friend Jordan called it, semi-affectionately, his cellblock). The indescribable, indelible smell of the apartment building, something slightly sour, something like cooking, but not entirely.

We were told that we were lucky, that it almost never stays that warm and sunny through the north German fall. I knew it on my afternoon runs through my neighborhood.

Negotiating awkward trips to the grocery store, where my biggest challenge was figuring out that mysterious phrase the cashiers said to me before they rung me up. (I figured it out, months later, when my German was better: they were asking me if I had a store card.) Much easier, and friendlier, was the farmer's market, where the Turkish vendors would often throw in some free cheese dip or hummus when I bought couscous and olives and other good things that were easy to throw together after class.

 The sun set just early enough and the breeze held just the right amount of crisp to make it feel like school weather, so I had no trouble packing off to class, trading insults with Clint on one side and letting Christina rest her head on my shoulder on the other. Sometimes I didn't even mind the 9 AM start time for German. We mixed just the right amount of work and play, almost effortlessly.

Then there were the nights, my first tastes of nightclubs and legal alcohol, finding new sections of the city, pubs and bars. Staying out until 5 AM with people that were my almost-instant friends because we were all young, it was the last days of summer, and we were all new to this city and blundered our German until the exasperated locals spoke English to us. We had a favorite bar--Hannibal--and I think of that now just as much like home as my apartment. It was right off the S-Bahn stop, and though I almost got run over crossing the street there once, it was worth it for their epic liquored milkshakes and gin fizzes.

And the full slices of watermelon they'd perch on your drink. And Jordan's epic hand bandage.

The smell of my apartment building, and the cool of my pillow when I finally did lay my head down, my school building and my morning walk to the bus stop, the taste of verboten Cuban rum with sweet Coke and the sweeter attentions and tensions of boys. That lightness in my life, like I was riding up, up, in an expanding soap bubble, logical and wonderful. I can almost be there, and then it's gone. And it's not a fix I can cure with pictures. That cheapens it somehow.

 I'm longing for it.