#13: Yearnings for the Past in Freiburg and Elsewhere
Learning where to find the fragments of light which my friendships left behind
Above: Freiburg, Germany (photo is my own, summer 2009)
When I revisit the sacred settings of an emotional attachment to another human being, I usually have the eerie sense that some version of the person is still there. A fragment of their light which they left behind. A piece of their soul which has its own essence and prowls about. I have a crippling apprehension that the past is still somehow happening, over and over again, on the surface of the Earth where I am standing. If only I could find a way while I am there to genuinely live it again.
I try to reach through the decades and immerse myself in the extinct. If all the exact sensations and circumstances of some vanquished moment can somehow be reenacted, then maybe I can flood my soul with the same feelings and perceptions as I had back then. Those impressions, those sensations, they are there in the sacred place. Ghostly chunks of them floating in the air, eager to be reunited. It can all be reassembled into something like what was, as if the past were happening again.
But this exacting method of spell-casting is not without its challenges. What is required is to provide the body with precisely the same shades of light, the same temperatures internally and externally, the same sounds of running water, the same colors of sky and grass and street, the same thoughts and mentalities which captivated the old mind, the same objects which may now be sitting in a garbage dump somewhere.
Difficult as it sounds, perhaps if I merely reassembled some portion of it… then, by concentrating on that past moment with all my strength, it could happen again. All I would need are a few pieces from the wreckage, combined with my imagination.
Once on a driveway, in an attempt to cast this spell, I absorbed the spectral vestiges of another time. The light from the sun, shining in my face, possessed all the same properties as it had before. The scent of the lawn and the sound of the water running from the hose were both the same. My mentality and worldview from that time were restored. Everything I had learned in the previous fifteen years was forgotten, all my experiences forfeit, and I was once again the person I had been.
Then a faint body of light, which could hardly be perceived, was beside me on my parents’ driveway. This was the astral corpse of my past self, I hoped. In a flash of revelation, it felt like my soul had somehow fused with that long-confined carcass. Or maybe I was temporarily possessed by the spiritual remains themselves. It was a possession which I eagerly welcomed, for it was the method by which I could truly re-experienced the past. And I did relive it all just as it was, but it only lasted a second.
I tried to do it again. Upon which I suffered the painful realization that it was all just a delusional product of my imagination. I could never get back to the past. The grim-faced scientists, with their calculations and their supposed laws of nature, were standing in my way, urging me to abandon my instincts and emotions in favor of reason and logic. “Don’t listen to that part of yourself,” they urged. “We believe in experiments now. We abide by the findings of carefully crafted regression analyses.”
“I will never listen to you,” my heart must have told them. “I will never again so callously shackle the poetic thinking of magic with the gruesome chains of reason and logic. Instead I will craft spells to enter the astral plane. Because in that sacred space lingers the corpse of the person I used to be and the corpses of the friends I had.”
But then I was just standing there on the driveway like any other person. “I’m normal,” I told myself. “I’m not weird at all. I’m just a normal guy standing in a driveway. All my thoughts are ordinary and nothing to be alarmed about.”
I persist in my attempts to roll back the effects of scientific brainwashing. I strive to reactivate the emotional and animalistic inclinations of my intellect. I do not like what the scientists have been telling me. I do not like the way they have taught me to think about the world in a rigidly materialist way. “Be gone,” I tell them, “with your computerized statistical models and coldly calculated clinical trials.” I feel like maybe reality could be different, and I suggest so even in the face of their dismissive mockery. Maybe I can send my soul into the past and experience everything exactly the same way again. I want to believe this. I once tried it elsewhere, too. In Germany.
I was blessed with the fortune of spending my junior year of college studying in Freiburg, Germany. Twelve months after that experience ended, I launched a months-long backpacking trip with a visit to the city I had wanted for so long to call home.
Having arrived from Iceland that morning, I got off the train in Freiburg. I thought back to the first time I’d arrived here as a 20-year-old almost two years before.
Back then, I had nearly twelve months ahead of me across the ocean, the longest I’d ever been away from home. I remembered the rush of excitement of arriving and checking in with the program director at the station. Then I recalled getting onto one of Freiburg’s street cars and taking it to my new bedroom in a student-housing unit. I remembered arriving there, surveying the kitchen I would share with 7 students from Germany and elsewhere. Then I had gone into my room, which was furnished with a twin bed, a desk, and a closet. Suddenly, I was alone in there, with completely white walls and sheets and no Internet or phone. I began unpacking, only to find a note which my dad had slipped into my things. I read it on my new bed. I cried because I already missed him.
But soon I was surrounded by blossoming friendships. These happy connections then swiftly transformed that alien city into a place which I liked to call home.
So when revisiting that forge of so many cherished relationships, I didn’t need anyone to greet me or give me directions. I took the street car to my old dormitory complex, Stusie. And there I met John, another American from my program who would be hosting me for a couple days. Unlike me, he and some other people from our program had stayed in Germany for another year. One of them had even permanently transferred and would be earning her degree here instead of her American university.
Stusie sits right beside an artificial lake. Around it are strung paths, trees, and great spaces of green grass on which to sit. On the afternoon I arrived for my visit, we sat on a grassy hill overlooking the lake. We drank with some of the American students who were there that year. I don’t remember any of their faces or names. Because the whole time I was thinking about my own close friends who weren’t here anymore.
When they were here, we sat by the lake at night. We brought two-euro bottles of Macedonian wine from the nearby Penny market. The produce there was sometimes so bad you could stick your finger right through the peel of an orange. But I really only ate chocolate muesli and frozen pizza anyway. Plus, the wine was cheap and satisfying. We would sometimes each drink straight from our own bottle.
I remembered the daytime picnics we used to have here. Drinking Rothaus beer from small kegs. Eating strawberries and blueberries from Tupperware. Making out after midnight in a concealed patch of nearby trees. I thought about how several of the others went swimming many times in the lake while I kept my distance from the water; I was too afraid to put my bathing suit on in front of other people. I recalled one of the first times I got high, right here in this grass at the sun was setting.
Pieces of my old companions were still here. Their astral corpses were jumping from the dock into the water, splashing and laughing. Fragments of light from their spirits were around me among the dazzlingly green plants. They incessantly rushed about beneath the tree branches. I would connect with them somehow. I needed to be here with them again, my beloved companions of old. Not with these weirdo new people.
I still had my tiny 2008 Nokia phone, with a recently-refilled ALDI sim card. This had been my mobile telecommunications technology when I lived here. I called the German numbers of some American friends who weren’t here with me anymore. On their voicemail recordings, I listened sorrowfully to the soothing impressions their vocal cords had left behind. I played back the voice messages they left for me that year. I read their old texts.
It brought my soul so much closer to the shadows cast by the the rapidly decaying residue of their loving light. Filling me with remorse and sadness. Yet some of these specters kept ample distance. These resided in the the dark places which I could have shared with them… but didn’t. Like the water right there in front of me. The water in which I never swam with them. If only I could have another chance.
I left a voice message on one of their numbers. I sent a text to another. “I’m a lunatic,” I thought. “Imagine what they would think of you if they knew about this.”
But maybe if I just kept calling and texting, I’d recreate the conditions necessary for my soul to transport back in time. I’d attain more than just the fragments of light left behind. I’d be with them again right here in this special place.
My spirit would be with them at this lake again. This time I would jump into the water with them, unafraid to be in a bathing suit. And we’d always have that together. Instead of nostalgia, I would feel everything just the same like I felt it back then, as if it were still happening. But it would be even better. Because the mistakes of the past would be corrected and rectified by the happy pleasures of a hopeless delusion.
I called and called, texted and texted. I walked alone into the stress. I strolled in isolation on the shores of the lake, struggling to concentrate my mind on the hidden reality of their light’s lingering presence. I squinted hard in my attempts to make out the outlines of astral corpses around me. But the more strenuously I reached my arms into the air, the more vigorously I strove to touch the leftovers of their souls with my fingertips, so all the more painful it was to finally concede failure.
I thought also of alternative futures. Different present realities. Should I have transferred to Freiburg for the rest of my degree, like one of my professors here had suggested? He had recruited me for an upcoming class he was teaching about the European Union. His face was smeared with disappointment when I told him I was returning to America. But I knew this would not have solved the current dilemma.
The closest friends I made in Freiburg were gone, and they wouldn’t be here if I had stayed. They would just be really far away. It was them I really missed. Not the city, not the park, not the two-Euro wine. But the specific and peculiar way in which I’d experienced it with them. On its own, this place seemed to mean nothing. Everything here just had a special meaning to me because of the people with whom I shared it.
Without them, it was like being in an abandoned house haunted by the spectral presence of the dead. I felt some attachment to the place itself, but it was not the kind with which I wanted to linger. It was a connection that scared me, that made me want to run away. Sitting with it, I dwelled depressingly on the irreversible forward-march of time, on the impossibility of ever getting back what has already happened.
Of course, these people weren’t dead. They were in America, where I saw them often and where we shared all these memories. But it wouldn’t always be that way, would it? I shuddered at the thought that some of them might one day fade out of my life, something that did indeed happen. Even if they didn’t, though, something about what we were here was dead. No matter how often I called their old cell phones, I could not send my soul back to that time when this city and our friendships had coincided.
It was not Freiburg which mattered. It was the specific combination of place, time, and relationships. And all of that had blended into a separate entity, a different universal whole, which I would never know again. Because it was replaced now by a new universe, a new whole, a new present entity in which I was doomed to move, but which would also one day recede into the past, revoked forever by the gods. Even they probably couldn’t give it back to me, and why would they even care if they could?
Even if we were all to come back to Freiburg at the same time, there would be a barrier preventing me from transforming my memories into a present reality. The truth of what we are today prevents the full realization of what we were yesterday. The circumstances are lost; they cannot be reassembled.
Soon it was dark. My host and I were wandering the streets of the old town. Which is actually a new town, since it had to be rebuilt after the war. We revisited my favorite places. The banks of the river where me and my friends used to eat takeout pizza from a box. It’s a famous box, found all over Europe, which has a painting of George Clooney working a pizza oven. We went back to the bar, Schlappen, where we had spent many sloppy nights leaning in for photos and throwing arms over one another. We ate at the döner kebab shops where I once took a fifth of my meals. We sat on Augustinerplatz at night, where we used to drink with the other students on the steps. We sat up in the beer gardens which overlook the city from the tops of mountainous slopes. There, we drank Hefeweizen in the sunlight beneath the trees’ shimmering green leaves. I remembered the trails we hiked in the surrounding Black Forest hills, the serene layers of which we beheld rolling out beyond the stark edges of the city.
Though I greatly enjoyed these reenactments, they also flooded me with a remorseful yearning which I could not keep at bay. Not because I couldn’t continue sitting within the sparkling greenery of these beer gardens every day. Rather, it was because I was taking in these dazzling views without the people who had made them so special.
The night before leaving, I tripped in one of the Bächle. These are gutter-like drainage systems that collect and move water around town. Freiburg folklore has it that if you trip in one, you are destined to marry a Freiburger. It had never happened to me before, and it seemed like a perfect final moment in the city.
But I didn’t want a future here. Because Freiburg on its own, as a raw physical space, was not special to me. And I didn’t want a present in Freiburg either, because all I had here were the hauntings of spiritual remains. All I wanted in Freiburg was the past.
The next day, I left Freiburg for Munich. I admitted that I could never again have the exact confluence of relationships, mentalities, and extreme youth which had made Freiburg so special. I tried to be at peace with the past’s limited existence inside my inevitably weakening memories.
But Munich was another city teeming with old recollections. I walked by the Hofbräuhaus, where two friends and I had eaten giant pretzels and drank liters of beer while in town for a Death Cab for Cutie concert. I went inside, sitting at the same table where we’d been together, grasping in the air for a piece of their souls. I strolled through the English Garden, where one of my first high school romantic relationships had shown late-stage signs of decay. I visited the halls of the Nymphenburg Palace, gazing upon the same old portraits of long-dead noblewomen. I filled up on pastries at the bakeries where I’d taken my parents during their wintertime visit to Germany. I walked on the fairgrounds where me and a big group of other exchange students had joined in the celebrations of Oktoberfest.
I walked within the light left behind by the people I had known here, wishing I could see them and speak to them. Which of course I could; as I mentioned earlier, they were all just back in America.
Each time I tried to connect with the essences they had left here, I was distracted by the hordes of young people here having fun. These youths were making their own new memories, I realized, something that was too late for me now. All I could do was walk around aimlessly, clinging to the pieces which I hoped we left behind.
I was an old man perpetually persecuted by the leftovers of life. I was an escaped nursing-home patient yearning to go back to his younger days, unable to avert the darkness to come. Although I was only 22, I needed to to save the young people from ending up like me. I would warn them, I decided.
I could perhaps grab one of these rambunctious youths by the shoulders and scream at them. “Savor it!” I would plead with a stranger perhaps two years my senior. With a fanatical desperation in my own spiritually wrinkled face, I would gaze into their eyes, gripping their clothes with existential urgency. “Cherish it before you’re old like me!”
Unsettlingly consumed by the hauntings of the past, I was aloof from the backpackers in my dormitory. “The time for drunken ravings is over for me now,” I lamented.
In the middle of the night, on the eve of my departure for Slovenia, I woke up in my hostel dormitory. I heard the angry voices of the girls in the bunks across the room.
“What the fuck are you doing?” one girl demanded.
Squinting in the dark, I saw a dark figure swaying about near a pile of the girls’ clothes. He was groaning and moaning. He tried pathetically to form a few clear words, but all that came from his mouth were isolated syllables and meaningless slurs. Then, as he stood right at the foot of the girls’ beds while facing the wall, a steady stream of urine began splashing on the floor.
“You’re fucking pissing on my clothes!” the girl shouted with a Midwestern accent.
“Blah bugh boo bah!” the guy said.
He zipped up his pants. Or so I hope, for it was quite dark. And he stumbled loudly toward the middle of the room. Then, just as deliberately as if he were standing at a urinal, he firmly planted his feet and aimed his penis at the floor. “Ohhh,” he moaned, with the euphoric relief of a desperate mammal that could finally expunge its waste.
“Oh my fucking god,” whispered one of the girls. “What do we do?”
“Blah bah dah boo bah!” he responded.
As his penis relentlessly sprayed pee at the floor, it steadily created a puddle in the very center of the room. When he finished, he paced slowly around his handiwork. His body staggered as he felt in the air with his hands. He made a few bizarre motions as if he were flushing a toilet. Then, with a loud thud, he collapsed directly into his grotesque creation. As his clothes soaked up his urine, he started snoring.
There was a long period of silence.
“Should we go get someone from the desk?” one of the girls whispered into the dark.
“Yes,” the other girl said.
“Hey,” someone in another bunk demanded. “Cut my man some slack! Haven’t you ever made any mistakes in your life?”
The girls were standing now. The drunkard was still snoring in his piss. No one had turned on the lights, and the room was still quite dark.
“Your friend pissed on my socks!” one of the girls shouted.
“Oh yeah?” said the guy from his bunk. “And I supposed you’re fuckin’ perfect?”
“I’ve never pissed on anyone’s socks!” the girl retorted.
“Fucking bitch,” said the guy.
The girls left the room to go get someone from the reception desk. This left just me, the guy on the bunk, and the guy sleeping in piss, the three of us together in the dark.
“Can you believe those bitches?” the guy asked me. He didn’t get down from his bed. He left his friend snoring happily in his own puddle of bodily fluids.
“I mean,” I said, “your friend pissed on their clothes. What do you expect?”
“Oh, right,” he said. “And I suppose you’ve never made a mistake in your life?”
I sighed. Soon the door burst open and a man I recognized from the reception entered. He flicked on the lights and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Get up,” he shouted. He walked toward the guy sleeping in his pee, lightly kicking him on the side. “Get the fuck up,” he repeated.
With the groan of a dying man in an immense amount of pain and discomfort, the drunk guy slowly stood up. The hostel worker shoved a mop into his hand.
“Clean up the pee,” the hostel worker told him.
He dropped the mop.
“Pick it up!” the hostel worker shouted at him.
He knelt down and grabbed it. Then he stumbled as he lifted himself back up. Unable to fully control his legs and arms, he struggled through a few halfhearted mop thrusts, all of which almost completely missed the urine.
The hostel worker kept shouting at him, telling him to put more effort into it. But then he wobbled and fell down again, back into his piss. He moaned and groaned in agony, twisting around and flailing his arms as if pleading for mercy. Then the hostel employee told him he was evicted from the building.
“Are you fucking serious?” the drunk man’s friend asked, still up in his bunk bed. “Where is he supposed to sleep? Don’t you see the shape he’s in? It’s three in the morning!”
“I don’t care,” said the hostel worker. “He can sleep on the street if he wants. Once he’s out those doors, I don’t care what happens to him.”
The sober one finally got out of bed. “You see what you bitches have done now?” he asked the girls. “What’s going to happen to him now? Huh? It’s three in the morning!”
They laughed at him. “Who cares?” one of them asked.
“I can’t believe how heartless you are,” the sober guy said, disbelief and hatred visible on his face. Then he led his friend out into the night to find somewhere else to sleep.
It took quite the effort to even get him out of the room. He was entirely incapable of walking on his own. He was hardly even able to utter a coherent word.
The girls, having been offered a private room, began putting their things back into their bags. As they packed, we talked for a bit about what had happened. Then we realized we were all from Michigan. “We go to Eastern,” they said. “Oh cool,” I said. “I went to State.” We exchanged pleasantries about our travel plans. I wished them luck on their trip. And soon they were gone, leaving me alone in the room.
An hour later, the guy’s friend returned. It was just the two of us now. He climbed into his bunk to go back to sleep. “I seriously can’t believe those sluts,” he said.
“I mean, that was pretty fucked up what your friend did,” I said.
“You’re just like those bitches huh?” he asked. “Never made a mistake in your life.”
Soon he was snoring, and I finally fell back asleep.
The next morning, I was excited to leave Germany behind as I boarded my train for Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. I felt a new kind of nostalgia. I didn’t regret anything about how I had spent my time here in the past. Although the guy who had collapsed into his piss certainly might, assuming he is still alive.
I’d returned to Munich alone, hoping to relive the satiation which once had been. I had wanted to walk around the city thinking about the events which had taken place on certain streets, in particular restaurants, within the halls of ornate palaces and along the paths of elegant gardens. I’d wanted to experience those same emotions again by recreating the conditions which brought them about. I thought it was only by physically being here in Munich that I could really reconnect with it all.
But without the relationships that made it meaningful, Munich was just another Western European city filled with belligerently drunk, Anglospheric backpackers. It was just a place where I woke up in the night to a guy pissing on a girl’s clothes.
There were memories to be savored, yes. But it was not these physical spaces which made them special. It was not by making pilgrimages to these graveyards that I would find satisfaction. Rather, these memories were special because they were shared - in the present - with close friends whom I hoped to keep for life. I didn’t need to be there in that hostel dormitory with those strangers to cherish that.
I did not need to travel anywhere seeking fragments of light which my friends had left behind. Their light had been impressed upon me long ago, and not merely in tiny illusory pieces. Even now that light is a part of my soul, as it will be forevermore.
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