I think it was the summer of 2012. I always have trouble remembering the dates, even some important ones like my school exams, college graduation, birthday, engagements ... That summer Fabio, my then-boyfriend, and I flew up to Berlin and ended up at the house of a boy named Stefan, an AIRBNB host, and his girlfriend Sandra.
Large bright apartment at Kollwitzplatz. A whole month spent together. A quiet place of joy and laughter. Pleasant evening conversations and long silences that meant all and nothing. Italy-Germany, little clashes of civilizations. A chance encounter became a long and deep friendship.
A few years later we’ve talked about this so many times, like an unforgettable experience, a period of unconditional happiness poured upon us. "Unsere Berliner Freunde" they repeated: our Berlin friends.
We were jealous of Stefan and Sandra, but deep down we were jealous of Berlin and the Wim Wenders’ two angels over the city. We were jealous of our exclusive relationship with that city that we felt like an unknown land that we discovered together with them, day after day.
The Judischer Friedhof, the Jewish cemetery with its ivy-covered tombs, the sidewalks littered with stolpersteines, thousands of brass stumbling blocks with the names of the victims of Nazism, the Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse, a street that epitomizes the ideological division between East and West. A portion of the wall still intact, the watchtower, a border between two worlds, two civilizations.
One evening we got into the legendary Berghain, the most closed underground club in the world and at the same time the most famous. No selfies, no videos, no photos. And all of it strictly forbidden. We stood in line for two hours together with hundreds of people before we step into its interior: a dirty tower which once housed a power station: steel stairs, concrete walls, dark hallways, the ceiling so high that you never see the end of it.
On the day of departure, our friends were crouched down in front of their door. With big colored chalk pencils, they wrote on the tarmacked path: "Friendship Is Powerful, More Powerful Than Death”, simply making us smile.
But the funny thing, the crazy thing is, that on the way home I felt a strange, irrational emotion which had nothing to do with nostalgia, but rather with jealousy, the suspicion that other guests would take a place in the heart of our friends. Other people Stefan and Sandra would eventually write to a few more ironic or romantic sentences on that tarmacked path.
At Christmas time Fabio was surprised to get a vocal message from Berlin saying that Stefan and Sandra would come to see us in Milan: "Fabio, mein lieber, wie geht’s dir? Emily?”, “Fabio, my dear, how are you? And Emily?” Stefan exclaimed without hesitation, his voice brought back so many memories. It was like the Gotye's concert at the Tresor club, the last concert we saw together, had been the night before.
The time for a kiss, a hug on a cold winter evening in Milan. I closed my eyes, there was no disappointment, vanished with jealousy. The morning after, I felt light of heart. Friendship is powerful, more powerful than death.
