I’m staying here in Berlin. Something won’t let me leave. I found a room in an apartment only meters East of where the most dangerous part of the Wall used to be. Its all park now, completely absent except for some plaques here and there. A Leviathan erased by its keeper; I may not ever have known.
Some of the Wall still exists, as we know, and is feed for tourists and history lovers (and our group). Curated, museum-like visual aids accompany the space–a small offering to visitors of this palpable memory. I know this is here.
Together, the small presence and massive absence of an important part of Berlin can make the air electric; tense, like the revulsion between the same sides of each magnet. Something is somewhere, and I need to find it.
This vague something is what I will now unwrap for you.
There is a space winding all throughout my head that is completely absent. Memories my own mind hid from me; forgetting as a means of protection, with a few solid pieces as proof to myself that what happened in my life did, indeed, happen.
When latent BPD II reared its ugly head this past fall, I found myself stuck in a torrent of memories. They would strike me down and flee from me in large groups, everyday, and I wanted so badly to keep them somehow, but I was unable to. But being here, in a place in a very complicated relationship with memory, makes me able to, for the first time in my adult life. Already I’ve been gathering the pieces that fly by, scrawling them down in an old notebook. I’d like to turn them into short, more polished pieces, and somehow map them out. Like the U-bahn map, which is linear but curving and moving in every direction constantly. The subway is an important symbol in my life, and it belongs in my project.
Active Memory: finding a museum in each part of Berlin, taking the train there, and spending time in them. Objects hold memories just as much as repeated, familiar actions. Even if you haven’t seen them. I will gently knock on everything I can to see what crawls out and helps me remember.
Daily train-riding and wandering in and out of different stops–I can’t count on the internet to tell me what Berlin is. I have to go there and make it up for myself, search for nothing and everything, drifting through the space in between.
Weekly posts will be made with each piece of writing, as well as drawings of maps of those memories. Psychic maps.

Active Present: To offset the outcome of existing constantly in the past, I will create handmade postcards with found objects–as many as possible–addressed, but not sent, to capture a sliver of the present, destined to become part of the past as well…

Reading list edit shortly