Repeat
My good friend, who says everything changes always, came visit us. Berlin and I (among other of her close people here). I've got used to miss her physical presence and daily communication, long before the successive lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic had forced us to social distancing, so I didn't really realized how much we needed each other without ever relieving ourselves until we actually met and stayed together for almost two enlightened weeks. We've been writing, video calling and even participating in creative processes together over the last year and a half... we both took the need for mainstream testing and vaccination quite seriously, she would had never considered travelling before all of that was (almost) globally finally taking place... We tried to remain calm and patient feeding our relationships simply differently - or so I thought.
Now that I can see more clearly how isolation to some degree also took place among our (sometimes claustrophobic) love lives, local social lives, spiritual lives, artistic lives, pedagogical lives, whatever life each one of us could reach out to in order to exist in - whatever possible - balance, I can say for myself that I did reach out for many diverse things regarding exchange, but it rarely did feel like enough or completely fulfilling for most of the time. One thing about healthy relationships is that one doesn't demand from each other or reprove each other's choices and so we did neither. The results of our personal choices regarding our emotional lives for the past years are now crystal clear, and I am so relieved that we could finally take the time and have had the energy to face them together.
It was overwhelming, exhaustive and beautiful: we talked and laughed much, cried a little, cooked often, drank daily tea together and had a lot of coffees, red wine and gin tonics (well, I did), we went for a nice walk around the neighbourhood involving voting and reminiscing, we both listened to some songs on repeat, danced and ate out a couple of times, slept close by every night, cleaned the house, took care of the garden, watched an inspiring lecture by Laurie, and even got to co-organize a highly desired dinner party with karaoke and an amazing concert, during which we celebrated our own - and of many social movements - 10 years anniversary on stage, by celebrating activism itself, together with another good friend and comrade (who says that life is too short to regret not doing things you've ever dreamed of). That is how we met 10 years ago, in the streets of Berlin: specifically at the steps of the "Altes Museum", in the Lust Garten, for the first of many Spanish assambleas (following the long acampada at Puertas del Sol in Madrid and the demo in its support at the Brandenburger Tor). After some time meeting regularly there, we co-grounded the International Group Berlin, together with many other international citizens, to fight from here for real democracy everywhere. We did so for many years in different locations of this city: healthy debating and sharing political information, preparing demos and other public actions (more or less creative, more or less law-abiding), writing and translating, but mainly occupying public space as the most basic citizenship act to reclaim it for the people before profit. Meanwhile many of us left the country, someone died, someone disappeared, others lost touch or gave up eventually. A few of us are regrouping now.
We believed in true communication then, the one where you truly listen to "the other" before contesting them, the one where one looks for consensus instead of blocking arguments or ideas right away, even if unconsciously. We believed in acting locally, thinking globally. And I am most happy to realize that we still do. We really do. It takes time and energy, loads of it - sad that not many people I know still have them to spare.
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