Today is the rain

It started to rain when I was about thirty meters out of the door.  That was alright, I expected it.  It was fitting for the day anyways, and I was happy to have a break from the extreme heat of Italy.  I kept reminding myself that as I got wet.  It was a Thursday afternoon in Berlin, and I had taken a 12 hour bus ride the night before to get there. My eyes burnt and I was thinking slowly.  It was a good day to sit inside and watch the rain.  Instead, I was walking through it, trying to see some monuments while I had the time.

I did the first logical thing to do, and got as lost as possible.  I took turns at random and watched the buildings around me change from business to cheap residential and back.  I stopped myself at a bridge that seemed familiar, and looked for a sign.  I could not find one, but plenty of people were taking pictures of it, so I was certainly in the right area.  I walked next to the bridge, a red brick structure with yellow trains passing overtop it every few minutes.  The bridge had a few towers that stood thirty or forty feet into the air.  Beneath the walkway ran a river. 

On the far side I saw a restaurant, a small sandy area, and maybe fifty people meandering solemnly.  The rain was still drizzling, and some people stood motionless, getting slowly wet, and looking out over the river.

This was the East Side Gallery.  This was the Berlin Wall. 

Cordial, innocent faces spattered the wall.  Pleasant smiles, broken eyes, worn faces.  These were the bodies of war victims.  I tried to read quickly.  I wanted to be done, but the information pulled hard at me.  Coreographed bombing, repeatedly hitting me in the same area.  I was withering, failing, and the pictures went further still.  All of them were aged, named, and had their stories told, this exhibit called "War on the Wall" shared the horror stories of a few victims in the Syrian war.  No big burly men, no anger or hostility, just children, mothers, and peaceful young men who were all brutally maimed by the destruction of an outside force.

The faces wore me down.  The rain was too fitted, and I understood the want to watch the river.  I kept walking.  A fence used to block the way, but it had been broken down to walk further along the wall.  It felt like a fence had been there for a long time, and had been torn away repeatedly.  No one stood watch.  The cold air lost wind in that area, and I stepped across an invisible boundary and into a deserted field.  Weeds grew waist high, rotten wood scattered over the bare areas.  The wall was no longer a professional exhibit, only graffiti and vandalism. 

Hello my unborn family; my faded bloodline, my birth right humans.  This was the reality of suffering.  Bored children tore at the cement.  New generations following the paths of their forefathers, how beautiful; how terrifying.  This wall was a cemented, semi permenant being giving light to the falsified darkness of war's true gifts: maimed children, broken parents, death.

It is easy to say it was gruesome.  Actually it was plain, and honest.  There wasn't blood or death in the pictures.  I didn't watch murder or rape or beatings.  I saw less violence then on tuesday night broadcasts of NBC. It was just portraits of people, bandaged or scarred. It had a reality to it deeper then the sick stories of crime scene t.v. shows. 

I missed Italy.  Where was my sunshine and drunk evenings and beautiful women.  I saw some pretty young women while walking that day.  My attempt at a smile must have seemed pathetic.  They returned the sad favor of something good to hold onto.  It is not easily forgotten. I hope it is the same for anyone who sees it.  For any person alive who can empathize with the mistakes of a force so powerful, the force of a society, of a people. I will hold that in my mind forever, and rain may never be quite the same.  Nor sunshine for that matter, or pretty women, or graffiti, or rivers.  No, it is a simple action to forget, but it is not easy.  I breathed in the water of Berlin in the rain, and watched the drops add into the river.  That is the Spree, that is history and present combining.

I returned to people taking photos of the bridge.  Fuck these people.  These people don't understand. They are lowly.  Truth held in a tourists hand like a camera.  I hope you drop and shatter your memories.  Your selfies and portraits of a beautiful bridge.  I hope every photo is erased except a single shot of your wirey face covered in rain. The tears of a sky that remembers.  This is the grotesque realization of today. 

Tomorrow is a beautiful sun filled sky, and cloudless blue, and aperol spritz, and smiling again at kind faced women.

Today is the rain.  And I want to remember it like that.

That little dirt field ended quickly.  The graffiti and rotten wood gave way to a new building pushed to the edge of the river.  That is why I stopped.  When I turned around I walked past 5 people, two of which were the pretty women.  I wanted to tell them not to go.  It was a dead end.  They couldn't get further than just around the corner.  What was I really thinking?  This new paint is just another addition onto a woesome experience that is necessity.  Tonight a new artist will paint over the old. Someday the cement wall will be chipped away. And the river will erode to a new location. For today it's just raining.

I heard a baby crying.  It sounded so beautiful.  Why was it crying?  It was hungry, or it wet itself; no, I'm sure it was tired.  I wanted to cry because I was tired.  The baby's mother wanted to cry because she was tired.  And here we were just standing on the banks of the Spree river in Berlin. 

A drop falls down and the wind catches it, the drop touches leaves of a tree still green even in the darkest day.  The water slides down, flicks off the edge of its singley found home, and falls into reality, the Spree river, continuing through Berlin.