Throughout the bumps

It’s been quite some time without GRITa. Now that the wildest year coming back and forth with high hopes and concrete attempts to build an alternative fresh starting point in the Portuguese countryside is reaching an end, I confess that the acknowledgement of my broken English and German got the best of me for a while, but not enough to quit forever. I rarely quit forever unless the pursuing itself becomes clearly pointless throughout the bumps along the way, which is not the case. Despite some lack of significant echoes, this ride has proved to be of elementary enlightenment to myself… So maybe I am lingering here for a bit more before morphing into something else in some other place. I do change direction now and then.

I am still living and working in Berlin with no foreseeable finale, even if someone calling themselves my friend has written a pseudo-political fiction article about it - loosely based on my own and my partner’s lives announcing our arriving, stay and departure due to all kind of [fake] self-righteous reasons - on the local newspaper. And I do still own a basic mobile phone perfectly capable of actual communication, even if facing professional bullying to get a smart one on a regular basis. It’s fucking cold and I won’t dare to turn on the heating just yet. There is still a war in Europe and there is this gray light all around again and I can’t help but wonder how many more Januaries and Februaries I’ll endure either within this coldness or that other one made out of hunger and fear. For now I can’t seem to feel anger anymore, just dullness. But perhaps these are just the passing effects of sudden happiness followed by a bad cold back in Babylon.

In the end, I know the soil my feet are stepping on, as I know where to find my friends. They also know how to reach me: it’s something reciprocal. Not in my head.

Untitled land (yet) in southwest Portugal