Night in Berlin

Schonberg, Germany

It was the middle of the night. I’d sampled Berlin’s grungy bars which some fifteen years later would be considered more hipster than decadent. The night was very still. The streets back to my Airbnb were empty. I could see in the gloom the graffiti-clad walls, another decadent-turned-hipster reality in this time we now live in.

Back then I still felt more like an interloper than belonging to the European culture. This was my first week, having arrived from Luang Prabang in Laos. This destination had not been planned. It came into being one long sleepless night, the night my sister told me on the phone that my father had passed away.

I opened up Google Earth. My intentions were to leave Laos in a few days and travel on to Vietnam, a place I had been to just a couple of years earlier. I had more camera gear than clothes.  I was eager now to take on the persona of a National Geographic chronicler, certain that my untried skills would be recognized by Magnum Photos and my future secure.  I didn’t have a website then, nor did I post on Instagram. I thought I wasn’t good enough. I hoped through clairvoyant osmosis or some such magical confabulation, i would be discovered.

But that night I felt lost. A part of me wanted to return to the United States, put on once again the garments of the middle-aged, become regular. The other part of me, the dreamer, spun the Google Earth globe on my iPad, closed my eyes, and pointed my finger to the screen to stop the world.

That was why one week later I walked back in the dark night to my Airbnb in Berlin.

I don’t remember what illuminated her, perhaps a street light; at first I was alone and then I saw that I wasn’t. I felt unprepared for the moment, because I didn’t have a camera. Something in the way she lay still and unaware made my senses vibrate. I think at first I was shocked to come upon another person in the stillness of the night. 

We never know the times in our life that will affect us. That will never leave us. These instances can be very mundane, but they reverberate. It’s hard to tell someone else why this photograph never quite leaves the peripheral memories I have.

I can only tell you this. All I had was my iPhone. Back then the quality of the camera was still more toy than replacement for the suitcase full of lenses and camera bodies I had left in the flat. Besides a few selfies, I never used the iPhone to take photos.

But that night on that dark street, with I imagine in memory one streetlight beam of incandescence, I took my cell phone out and did my best to frame a picture. And something in me told me to hold out my free arm and give her a hug,

I am forever changed in that moment. Because the next morning when I looked at this photo more closely I realized something. 

It isn’t important, the gear. I had ended up in Berlin because I needed to hug someone. Even a stranger, who didn’t know she hugged me back.