This piece was first published in issue twenty-eight. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

I fall over again, flat on my face, on the pavement of Czeminskistraße opposite my apartment. This time I don’t even cry out. I turn one cheek to the ground and from this angle my vision re-articulates itself around the sky. I see the windows and balcony of the top floor. I see the rooftops.

Sometimes (more often than I let on), when I am on my own, and not looking at the ground, or when it is dark and the streets are badly lit, I trip over. Sometimes, like today, I fall flat on my face. I do not know many feelings as childlike as the whack of the ground coming up against my nose. Winded, and scraping the skin off my hands as I scrabble for a hold, I piece myself upright. I am a baby deer, learning to walk.

It was G’s idea. He had met me at the airport to help me move in, three years ago. And when we got into the little room in the big apartment on the sixth floor, the first thing he did was to uncatch the catch on the window and put the little screws to one side, with me thinking, “I’ll have to screw that back in, in a year’s time,” and then we pushed open the window and, with a bit of straining, hauled ourselves out over the ledge and onto the roof, reeling a little in the warmth of September air. “Just don’t fall,” he said, and we had a year ahead of us.

Houses are not spaces you usually break out of, especially when you’re just moving in. And especially these big Berlin altbau apartments with their huge greasy wooden doors and their bulky staircases and their mean, thick-set walls. They are buildings to settle in, buildings to turn to dust in, buildings that want to keep you, meanly, in.

The roof was a vast flat stretch of dark tarmac, and you could walk, or run, or skip, quite easily from the top of my apartment building to the top of another. You could probably cross the whole city that way.

Habits are funny, awkward things, hard things to own or pin down. That rooftop became my habit. I ate breakfast up there every day for a year. Bowls of hot porridge, sitting on a blanket, watching the scrawl of traffic underneath and the huge tree below in the courtyard as it slowly turned brown. Coffee, in Dr Martens and a borrowed winter coat when it was all iced over, taking tentative Bambi steps and thinking smugly, “If I slip now, I might well just fall and die.” Once, in the summer, a whole melon. I lay out there with a book on a towel on the bloated, sweltering tarmac, and felt my skin singe. It was the quietest sunbathing spot in the whole city, and perhaps the closest to the sun.

Inviting people up there to drink wine and watch the Silvesternacht fireworks, proclaiming it, a little drunk, the best viewing spot in the whole city and probably the closest to the sky. Hiding from people. Reading. Crying. Humming to myself absently. Cups and cups of black coffee. Porridge. Coffee. Watching people on the balconies of adjacent top-floor apartments. Coffee. Smoking pilfered cigarettes. Coffee. Thinking, often, a little blandly, “I could just jump. I could just fall.”

We spent one summer night sleeping up there when we hadn’t known each other very long. We were drinking beers and I was wearing his t-shirt and cooing over the sunset when he said, “Honestly, du, we could be in a field right now,” and gave me a very sweet, very earnest look. At about 4am we gave up, shivering, and scrambled back through the open window and into bed.

At the end of the year, in the mess of moving out, I found the little screws and screwed the catch back in, and pulled the window shut.

. . .

Three years later I am back in Berlin and by the strange workings of chance I have moved into the same apartment block, into a room on the first floor. I hear my old stories pacing around, floors and floors above me.

My new room is a dark, snug little den with thick-set walls. It is a good room to turn to dust in. The window by the bed looks out onto the courtyard where the tree I used to look down on blocks out most of the sunlight and turns slowly brown. I eat my porridge in bed now, with the window ajar and the radio on. I do not drink coffee any more. We are eating breakfast, sitting on the bed, and I am wearing his boxers and somebody else’s t-shirt when he says, quietly, with a very earnest look, “Du. I think I’m finding this hard.”

Up. Down. On the rooftops. Sprawled out on the pavement. The brash and childish whack of the ground coming up against my nose.

I have another year ahead of me. This is a good thing, I think, reeling a little, putting down my bowl and pushing the window open to let in the September air. It is a good thing to have lain on summer rooftops all night and to have stayed in bed all day and to have swum in lakes and watched fireworks and watched trees turn brown from the sky. It is a good thing, I think, to fall flat on your face sometimes.

A friend reminds me, a little cautiously, when I ring her up to tell her how well I am doing, that it is okay not to feel okay.

This is what I think about, having fallen, sprawled out ungraciously on the pavement opposite my old and new apartment with a bloodied nose. This is what I think about, turning one cheek to the ground to look up at the anxious faces of strangers and beyond them at the rooftop of my old and new home, and sobbing—no, this time laughing to myself—and already thinking, “I’ll text G about it from the ambulance,” because I know he’ll find it funny.

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