insignificant and immense

Part Two

                I woke up at 9:30 in Tierpark. I knew I was actually meeting up with Dasha that day, but when or where was a mystery to me, and I also knew that she was with someone else but I didn't know who. I waited a couple hours for Hannah to wake up, trying to fall back asleep, and around 11 Hannah gave me her laptop and I knew that Dasha and someone else had arrived and where in Friedrichstraße. Except that I was in Tierpark. I said goodbye to Hannah, who said that since I sleep quitly I should come over again. I went straight to Friedrichstraße and bumped into a classmate, looked around for an hour and then gave up and went to The Convent, where I got on the internet and found out that they had been at the Starbucks for most of the time I was searching in the station. A few hours later, after finally showering and brushing my teeth and eating and started to resign to the fact that maybe I won't see her, after not seeing her for three and a half years already (since the last time I went to Moscow.) And then she finally came online. We met up in Kreuzberg. 

"I feel like I know you" she said, and it was the perfect. We shouldn't know each other, but somehow we do, the smoke viciously coming from her lips as her and Natasha, her friend who she came with, lit yet another cigarette and we listened to music and drank beer and felt the tumult of the past present and future riddling our insides with cigarette burns. We talked about the futility of Russian politics, of question of where to live, of literature, and one line thrown in on a friend who neither of us talks to dropped out of University. Suddenly time and space (the three and a half years, the breadth of the Atlantic and then some) became both insignificant and immense; the months of silence across the ocean to soon be once again the reality, instead of the flow of desperate conversation streaming from our lips. "I feel like I have so many questions, but I don't know what they are" I said and that was perfect too, because if we lived closer we would know so much more about each-others day-to-day lives, information that is meaningless when meetings are so infrequent, our lives so different yet in some strange dark corner tangled together. 

We went back to The Convent "you don't look like much of a nun, T" to figure how to get them to Tegel airport at 6am. We searched and finally asked Sasha for help, who of course turned out to be the half-brother of someone she sort of knows. I'm not surprised about these things at this point - well, I am, but also these things happen. Often. There was exhausted giggling and the sparkling apple juice disappearing down her throat and then he showed us up the roof and I saw the stars for the first time in a long time. I'd been thinking about them, and at this point I was so exhausted that that's all I could take in, on the roof of a building filled up fifty percent with theology students, a giant telephone tower tourists mistakenly call Alex hovering somewhere in the distance, an attempted testament to the power of East Berlin. They said something about me extending my stay since Dasha and Natasha are coming to Berlin on the 26th, and the back of my throat was too dry to say thank you for the suggestion. He left and shortly after we did too. Warm sleepily insomniatic hugs exchanged, and they disappeared into the night.  

A little single-serving paper-covered clump of tea that she got on her travels with Natasha to Thailand, is sitting on my desk. It's square and the rice paper is white with a red stamp on it, a sticker on the back keeping the edges together, neat. I don't know if I am ever going to drink it.