Who am I at 25? At 45 or 65? How do goals, longings, perspectives shift? Are we essentially the same person, regardless of whether we live in Vienna, in Berlin or, like me, in Tel Aviv now? And in the end, do we really only regret the things we didn’t try?
Not believing the arrivals are true the farewells.
Use Aichinger
Reinventing yourself abroad is such a saying, such a lie. And yet every place, every encounter changes you, and with it your own writing and reading of the world. In the part of Tel Aviv where I live now, there is a small café that doubles as a bookstore. The manageable menu is like the selection of books: Hebrew, Arabic and English. The new language and its unfamiliar characters, which I am slowly learning, run from right to left, against my usual reading direction. The new environment, my everyday life, the people I meet, everything works in the opposite direction to my habits and expectations, although I thought that I hardly have any. It starts here, at my starting point: I’ve gotten used to sitting in the coffee house in Vienna. So I stick to my habit even when I am abroad, turn the cup with the black coffee in my hand clockwise, the city rushes around me, its alternating rhythm of hectic and indolent. I think of my regular café in Berlin-Kreuzberg, with a view of a cemetery where it still smells of winter.
Winter smells different here, and yet you can feel it. There are the books in the cafe, they could be a part of understanding. Here and there there is thinking, noting, taking pictures, looking for a WLAN signal. In Hebrew, in the sentences I’m trying to form, I keep tripping over the non-existence of the verb BEING in the present tense. In Hebrew, BEING only exists in the future and in the past. Every time I falter and miss the non-existent BEING before I can finish the sentence. It is a clever system – BEING in the present makes no sense, since the present does not actually exist.
Since the first day in the transitional shelter, I’ve been saying: I’m going home. It’s always been like that. My home is always where I am, even if the arrival is not far in the past and I could lose myself again in the unfamiliar streets two blocks from my starting point. A hotel room, the sofa in a friend’s apartment, a scholarship holder’s accommodation, a holiday apartment. I call all this home. Even, if only in my mind, my social media bubble.
Do we all have the same privilege to choose who we want to be? Who are we in our analogue and digital self-portrayals, what do these stagings say about us? How does the view, the classification from the outside, influence the view of us? Can we draw connecting lines to the analogue spaces and places in which we set up?
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