This is the year your father dies. Though the saddest days were filled with joy, now you hear his belly laughter everywhere and can feel the joyful release from earthly chains vicariously. A good kind of sad penetrates the months leading up to his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you learn your vocation and realize you can walk away at any moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Give me a reason to return to my books and letters, and I will gladly exchange my laptop for a pen, you tell yourself. Almost begging for a reason to appear. But money talks, and feeling needed plays a role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you get your permanent residency in your adopted land. A multi-year project full of frantic administrative tasks and endless waiting ends unceremoniously in a bland but guarded office with a wall calendar off by a day on the banks of the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal. While waiting humbly for your designated gatekeeper to process your papers, you overhear an employee in the next office exemplifying the worst of German traits: rejecting an applicant for not using proper formal language and not playing properly by the rules and lecturing the hapless, impotent man all the while. What club have I joined? You wonder, mixed emotions swirling within you as you walk home along the water, underwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you enter peri-menopause. What felt like a given for so long is no more, and the clarity gives strength. Grey hairs spread, and options fall away. Distractions have a way of multiplying, nonetheless, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you apply for German citizenship. Something you never considered for so long\u2014until you did\u2014because they changed the law. Nothing is written in stone\u2014more givens that are not so. Some givens reveal themselves as gifts; others become obsolete in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you said no. Also yes. And sometimes maybe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you start to feel more yourself\u2014though that self changes in unforeseen ways. You never thought you\u2019d become German. Or father-less. Or old. Or still feel incompetent despite finding your vocation, but know you are more resilient. So many things can be true at once. Like wanting to be loved, loving the idea of something, but not loving the one you\u2019re with. Painful truths are made clearer with each new strand of grey or the deepening of a wrinkle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the year you write\u2014in your head and on your phone\u2014in between stops and transfers on a sometimes broken, semi-functional public transport system<\/p>\n\n\n\n
where the commuters compete for space with tourists, and the unhoused throw guilt, and we all dodge their gazes. Where the crazies rage externally, and you do, too, internally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fields appear fallow. You have no big announcements of publications, but your own steady thoughts prepare the ground for the next season. Poems, essays, novels, and your omnipresent memoir are growing and expanding, unseen, they are spreading roots, establishing a firmament for the future. Sometimes you think you can see the delicate shoots jumping out at you, but the Berlin sun plays tricks\u2014when it bothers to appear\u2014and makes you wonder about your sanity. Can a writer be an identity you put on at will or acquire like citizenship? You have the right to stay in Germany now and someday call yourself a citizen, but being a person who sews rows of poems and harvests few, is that a writer or a hobby gardener?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the year your father dies. Though the saddest days were filled with joy, now you hear his belly laughter everywhere and can feel the joyful release from earthly chains vicariously. A good kind of sad penetrates the months leading up to his death. This is the year you learn your vocation and realize […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22122,"template":"","categories":[60,12],"class_list":["post-22156","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-29","category-non-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n