I was lucky my elementary school was only half a kilometer away from our house, so from an early age I was able to walk there and back. In younger years our nanny took me there but I hardly remember those walks. Later I really enjoyed going to school by myself because I could focus on all the small details on the way.
I have known ████████ since elementary school. He was the tallest in my class, and something always seemed a bit off about him. I liked him enough to invite him to a birthday party once. At least until he catapulted chocolate pudding at the kitchen wall with his spoon, to the amusement of all the other kids, and nearly got himself kicked out of the house and barred from ever coming back by my mom.
In the two decades I have lived in Berlin, one of the few places that has held an unusually magical vibe and meaning for me is the immediate area around the Berliner Dom, that monumental cathedral on the Museumsinsel in the heart of the city. Its voluptuous neo-baroque appearance contrasted sharply with the socialist architecture of nearby Alexanderplatz with its iconic TV-tower punctuating the skyline, especially during the years when the brown, glass-clad, monster of the Palace of the Republic still cast its shadow over the area. The church overlooks the geometric Lustgarten park stretching toward the column-lined, Roman temple like, Altes Museum. The atmosphere has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Like fragments of imagined cities thrown together into one almost dreamlike landscape.
My brother-for-a-year, █████, had started a spring break job as a dishwasher at the legendary Babe's Chicken in ███████ to top up his pocket money. One day he asked me if I was interested in a weekend job. His boss, who also owned a successful country cooking restaurant in ██████, was assembling a crew to launch a Tex-Mex food stand at the brand-new Texas Motor Speedway, which was about to open that April. I was thrilled by the opportunity and accepted immediately.
A weekly activity during my teenage years in Heidelberg was going "into the city," which meant taking either my bike or the tram to downtown and following an almost ritually fixed path that took a few hours to complete, incorporating stops that satisfied all my special interests.
This was my favorite thing to do after a nice family evening at ████████, where I usually spent some time drawing or running around outside near the tennis court with █████, before indulging in a three-course meal of shrimp in garlic sauce, a steaming dish of cannelloni, and ice cream for dessert. I loved it when mom and dad got slightly tipsy and ignored our usual bedtime in favor of another hour of partying.
The sailing regatta began and there I was in a dinghy together with █████ and "the Wookie" of all people. The bottom feeders of our class, thrown together to race the cool kids. How the hell had I ended up here? To be fair, half the class had simply assigned me my old role from before I left for a year abroad. The other half were thrown off by how much I'd changed and treated me like a newcomer. Who was I? The old loser or the new alien? Either way I accepted my fate and got ready to lose. But first, let's go back to the beginning of the week...
"This looks like it's for you,” my mom said with a frown and a smile, handing me the sheet of thermal paper. It was a fax with a French sender number in the header and handwritten text in large black marker letters. The text was written in Elder Futhark, the oldest form of the runic alphabet, which was used by Germanic peoples until around the 8th century.
My parents had gifted me a portable Sony multiband world radio to take with me for my ten-month stay as an exchange student in Texas. It was a cute idea: something that would allow me to tune into German-language shortwave broadcasts if I ever felt homesick. In reality, I never used it for that purpose. But the radio nerd in me was thrilled to have even more frequency bands to explore than on my trusty bedside radio back home. Instead of using it to stay connected with Germany, I mainly used it to dicover exciting new FM stations I could pick up in North Texas.
It was time to board the bus. I was scared and excited at the same time. I gave my mother, father, and █████ each a long hug, then stepped onto the express shuttle that would take me from Heidelberg to Frankfurt Airport. I don't really remember why we decided that taking the bus was a better idea than all of us driving to the airport for a longer goodbye, but at the time it seemed fine. I could hardly believe what lay ahead of me: a ten-month stay as an exchange student in a suburb of ██████, Texas, USA.
After dropping my wife and daughter off at Seville airport around dawn, kissing them goodbye and hoping they would be fine, I drove to a nearby petrol station, filled up our Ford Transit escape vehicle, and continued toward Huelva in the morning sun. My head was full of racing thoughts and worries. It had been a difficult morning. ██████ had suffered a crisis of confidence. The plan had been for her and ████ to fly ahead to ████████ while I followed a few days later with the van on the ferry, sparing her the crossing because we knew how prone she was to seasickness. But the thought of being separated for almost a week, amid the chaos of constantly shifting travel restrictions, had suddenly become unbearable to her. We had talked through every alternative, but in the end decided to stick to the plan. It really did feel like some kind of escape.
I focused on scanning the edge between the warm, anthracite-colored dry sand and the pitch-black wet sand, where seagrass, sticks, plant debris, bird feathers, frayed pieces of rope, and plastic objects of every shape and color formed a meandering line along the beach. I enjoyed finding all kinds of treasures: oddly shaped driftwood or curious objects of unknown origin, always hoping to find a message in a bottle or real pirate loot. The surf here on the west coast of the island was raging loudly and sometimes waves would lap around my feet. I remembered to watch out for the black lumps of washed-up tar that looked like smooth pebbles, because stepping on one barefoot was a nasty surprise.
I clambered up the dune, the hardened surface layer crumbling underfoot and slowly sloughing downhill in cascades of warm desert sand. At the top, I followed a narrow sandy path between patches of sharp black volcanic cinders and dried thorny scrub until I reached my favourite spot right at the edge of the pitch-black lava cliff that contrasted so sharply with the white sand below.
Early bedtime was not a problem for me. At least not on Sundays and Mondays. I was looking forward to indulging in my secret evening pastime: surfing the radio waves. The white plastic clock radio right next to my bed had a mono jack, so only the blue in-ear piece of my GameBoy headphones worked but it seemed like a practical feature because it allowed me to hear when parents would potentially come upstairs to bust me.