Lately, I've been shedding people and things that don't fit who I'm becoming. No hard feelings behind it. No formal exit, either. Just the way a tree lets go of leaves it no longer needs to survive winter.
And the strange part is, I don't feel guilty.
I think I'm in a new season now, and some things simply don't belong in this one anymore. A coat that kept me warm in autumn can feel like a weight in spring. It's not that the coat failed me. It's that I'm not the same person who needed it.
Friends whose roots grew in a different direction than mine. Hobbies that filled hours but never filled me. Conversations that circled the same drain year after year, promising depth but never actually diving in.
I used to think loyalty meant staying no matter what. Now I think it means staying only where growth is still possible, for both sides.
Whatever grows in this new season will have room to breathe. And whatever couldn't survive the shift was never mine to keep.
That's what I asked my boyfriend last Tuesday. Through a screen. From 1,900 miles away. With my heart in my throat and my finger hovering over the mute button in case I needed to fall apart in silence.
He answered before I finished bracing myself.
Never.
I wish I could tell you one word was enough. That I took it in and the weight lifted and we talked about dinner. But I have spent too many years loving people who meant it until they didn't.
I'd been difficult lately. I knew it the way you know weather is turning before the sky changes. Something in me had gone jagged. Snapping at nothing. Moving through my apartment like a low current looking for something to shock. Some mornings I woke up already angry at a world that hadn't done anything yet.
He wasn't here to see it. But he could hear it in my voice. That's the thing about loving someone through a screen. You can't fake your tone.
So I couldn't just take never and hold it gently the way a softer woman might. I had to press.
Even when I get mad?
He smiled. Even through the screen, it reached me.
You get mad because you love me.
But sometimes I raise my voice.
He took a breath. I watched him find the words. Carefully, like he knew what he said next would either confirm everything I feared or break it apart.
Yeah. Even then. I don't just focus on the reaction. I focus on why it came out.
I couldn't move for a second.
Because I have lived inside a belief for so long that love has conditions. That somewhere there is a list. Written in invisible ink, shown to no one, enforced by everyone. Don't be too loud. Don't be too angry. Don't be too much. Be easy. Be pleasant. Be the version of yourself that never makes anyone uncomfortable, and maybe, if you perform well enough, they'll stay.
I thought I was doing love right.
I carried that list into every relationship I've ever had. Swallowed sharp things. Smiled when I wanted to scream and called it maturity.
And then this man, from hundreds of miles away, through a screen that makes it so easy to look away, said the thing no one had ever said to me before. Not "I forgive you." Not "It's fine." But: I see the whole picture. I see the why. I'm paying attention. To all of you.
I didn't know I was holding so much until he made it safe to set it down. Through a screen. Without touching me. From a city I won't see for another two weeks.
All I ever wanted was for someone to see me.
Not the curated version. The real one. The one who wakes up mean and doesn't know why. The one whose voice gets loud when she's scared. The woman I spent years trying to hide from every person who told me they loved me.
He sees her. He sees me.
There is no list.
There is only a man who watches my storm through a small bright window and sees the woman standing inside it. And a woman, slowly, learning to stand still. Not because anyone told her to. But because she finally found someone worth staying still for.
There is a version of this story where I tell you about Berlin. The Wall, the graffiti, the grey March sky. The tourist version. The one with a beginning and a middle and a lesson at the end, neatly packaged like something you'd read on a plane.
This is not that version.
This is the one about what happens when every plan falls apart and you let the falling be the plan.
. . .
I arrived wrong. That's the simplest way to put it. Wrong city, wrong timing, wrong state of mind. My friend, the whole point of the detour, had cancelled two nights before I was due to arrive. Something came up. Life happened. And I'm not the type to punish someone for that because who am I? Life happens to all of us. But the hotel and trains were already booked non-refundable, so I went anyway.
Berlin Hauptbahnhof opened around me like the ribcage of something enormous. Glass and steel and too much vertical space. I stood on the platform with two suitcases and watched everyone else move with the terrifying clarity of people who had somewhere to be.
I had nowhere to be. Three days of nowhere.
. . .
My hotel was across the street from the station, close enough to still hear the trains groan through the walls. I checked in, dropped my bags, sat on the edge of the mattress, and did what most millennials would do when they arrive alone in a city they never planned on visiting with zero itinerary.
I opened Bumble.
I wasn't looking for romance. I want to be clear about that, though I'm not sure it matters. I opened it because I hadn't spoken to another human being in six hours and my own internal monologue had become unbearable. She (me, the narrator, the voice) had been running a loop all day. You're alone. You're alone. You planned this wrong. You're alone. I needed someone else's frequency. Anything.
But first, I needed rice.
Two weeks in Europe and the Asian in me was staging a full internal coup. My stomach had tolerated the bread. It had endured the cheese. It had smiled politely through every potato. But it was done negotiating.
I found a Japanese place tucked into a side street, sat down, and ate like a woman who hadn't seen her family in years. Because in a way, I hadn't.
What I didn't notice — what I actively chose not to notice — was how casually I'd been treating my liver like it didn't have feelings. Wine with dinner. An Aperol Spritz at the bar because I saw someone else holding one and I am, at my core, very suggestible. Somewhere in Belgium, a week earlier, I had put away six glasses of draught beer in a single sitting and walked out vertical. So what were two different liquors? I was invincible. I was an idiot. I was both, and neither one was winning.
I returned to Bumble. Left. Left. Left. Each profile a door I didn't want to open.
Then I stopped.
Vietnamese. Born and raised in Berlin. Dark eyes that looked like they'd recently been emptied of something. His bio was spare, almost confessional. Not a man trying to sell himself but simply admitting he existed. Heartbroken. Looking for company.
Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the magnetism of recognising my own wound in a stranger's face. Maybe I've always been the kind of person who sees someone drowning and jumps in, forgetting she can barely swim herself.
I swiped right. A match.
His message came fast, like he'd been holding it in his hand already: Hey traveller, do you want to meet up today?
He'd read my bio. He knew I was just passing through. A comet, not a constellation. I played it cool, the way you do when you're pretending you're not lonely. I'm eating at a Japanese place right now. We can meet after.
Short. Simple. Not too eager.
But he wouldn't have it. I don't want to stay at home any longer, he wrote. I'll just keep thinking about my ex. Got room in your stomach for more? We'll eat real German food and I'll show you the city.
Bold strategy. Numb your heartbreak by feeding a stranger. I respected it immediately.
Of course there’s always room. For German food. For the city. For whatever was about to happen next.
I paid the bill, stepped back out into the Berlin cold.
. . .
The streets received me differently this time. The mixed drinks had made the world impressionistic. Edges blurred, colours bled into one another. I knew what I was doing. I just couldn't walk in a straight line while doing it.
On the way to the meeting spot, I passed a man on a bench near the sidewalk, slouched with the confidence of someone who had absolutely nowhere to be. He pulled a rolled joint from his pocket and held it toward me like he was offering me a piece of gum.
Wanna puff before me?
I knew it was reckless. I was alone, slightly drunk, in a city I didn't know, about to meet a stranger I'd found on the internet. Every survival instinct I'd ever been taught was screaming.
But Berlin didn't care about my survival instincts. Berlin was asking me to be alive.
I took it. One drag. Two. Three. I handed it back, thanked him, and kept walking. Lighter now. Untethered.
Great. Now I was high too.
. . .
I arrived early. No makeup. Hair a mess. My body swallowed inside a puffer jacket two sizes too large. I wasn't there to impress anyone. I was barely there to impress myself.
I found a bench and sat, watching Berlin parade past me. Couples holding hands, old men with dogs, a woman on a bicycle who looked like she knew exactly where she was going. I envied her.
What am I doing? I thought. Meeting another heartbroken stranger. What are we going to do, throw a pity party? Split a dessert of mutual sadness and wash it down with cheap beer?
And then, an arm across my shoulders.
Not predatory. Not strange. The way someone greets a friend they haven't seen in years, warm and immediate. I looked up, startled.
He was a living anime character. There is no other way to say it. Porcelain skin. All black — jacket, jeans, boots. A smile so wide and so immediate it felt like a door swinging open. And from his left ear, a small cross earring, swinging gently like a tiny, silver pendulum.
Here you are, traveller, he said, grinning. Nice to meet you.
I opened my mouth. What came out was: Hey. Nice to meet you too.
Clumsy. Stilted. The verbal equivalent of tripping up a staircase. I cringed so hard I felt it in my spine. But he just smiled wider, as though my awkwardness was the most charming thing he'd encountered all day.
Let's go to the meat shop, he said, already walking, and get you some real German food.
He'd warned me earlier that his English wasn't great. He lied. Or maybe he was being modest in the way that people who speak three languages sometimes are, apologising for fluency that would put most of us to shame. He was a talker. And I, that day, was grateful to be a listener.
. . .
The shop was small and warm and smelled like a hundred years of cured meat and woodsmoke. He ordered with the ease of someone who had done this a thousand times, pointing, nodding, rattling off German to the man behind the counter like they were continuing a conversation from last week. I stood there, all five feet of me, watching the bags fill up and doing silent maths on how two human bodies were supposed to consume what looked like supplies for a small army.
We walked. Bags of food swinging between us, our pace matching without either of us deciding to. He led me to the East Side Gallery, that long stretch of the Berlin Wall that the city had refused to let stay ugly. The concrete that once cut a nation in half was covered now, every inch of it, in colour. Faces, symbols, declarations of freedom painted over the bones of division. Berlin had taken its worst memory and turned it into the loudest, most defiant art gallery on earth.
He found us a bench by the river, facing the Oberbaum Bridge. It looked like someone had placed it there for a film and never came back for it. The sun was going down and doing too much. Amber everywhere. The water looked like it was on fire. The bridge glowed red in the distance and every few minutes, a yellow train cut across it, connecting two sides of a city that spent decades pretending the other half didn't exist.
We sat down and opened everything. Königsberger Klopse, meatballs in a caper sauce that tasted like someone's grandmother made them with her eyes closed, no recipe, just muscle memory and love. Blutwurst, dark and strange and honestly a little intimidating. Goulash, thick and brown and warm enough to make me forget I was eating outside in March.
And then we talked.
Not the small stuff. Not the polite stuff. He told me about her. I gave him the version of me nobody gets.
Then he looked at me and asked, What's your secret?
The rain was starting. I could feel it before I saw it, tiny cold pinpoints on the backs of my hands. The river in front of us had gone from copper to ink. And this man, this stranger, was sitting next to me asking for something I had never given anyone. Not my friends. Not my family. Not even myself on the nights I lay awake bargaining with my own ceiling.
I'm the best person to tell, he said. You don't know me. I don't know you.
The yellow train crossed the bridge again. The rain picked up. I opened my mouth and the truth walked out before I could stop it. Not the safe version. Not the one I've rehearsed in mirrors to make sure my face stays steady. The real one.
He didn't try to fix it. He didn't reach for words. He just sat there, rain falling on both of us, and let it exist. Not as a problem to solve. Not as a wound to dress. Just as a thing that was finally, for the first time, outside of my body and in the open air of a city that has never been afraid of broken things.
The river went black. The trains kept crossing. Berlin did what Berlin does. It held the mess and didn't look away.
He asked if I wanted hookah. I said yes before he finished the sentence.
. . .
We ducked into his favourite spot, a dim, warm cave of a place that smelled of apple tobacco and old wood. He ordered drinks and a hookah, and the smoke curled between us like a third companion. We drank. We talked. We laughed at things that weren't funny and fell quiet at things that were. The hours dissolved like sugar in tea. Slowly, then all at once.
At some point between the smoke and the silence, he looked at me and said, Gen, what a beautiful woman you are.
I laughed it off the way you laugh off a compliment you don't know what to do with, and steered us back to safer waters.
Another round. Another story. Another cloud of apple-scented smoke rising toward a ceiling that had probably heard a thousand confessions before ours.
He rode the train back with me. Berlin blurred past the windows. Streetlights smearing across the glass. Buildings I'd never learn the names of. The bright veins of a city that doesn't believe in sleep. We didn't talk much. Not because it was awkward. Because we'd already said everything. Some conversations don't need a clean ending.
At my hotel, we stood in the lobby for a moment. He smiled. I smiled. We exchanged Instagrams the way people exchange numbers they both know they'll never call. A receipt for the night. Proof it happened.
Then he turned and walked back out into Berlin. His black coat disappeared into the dark and just like that, he was gone. Like a chapter ending mid-paragraph.
. . .
I never saw him again.
I don't think either of us expected to. That was never the point. What we had was something rarer than that, and in many ways, harder to name. Two people, both mid-fall, who happened to reach out at the same time and caught each other. Not to hold on. Just to slow the descent.
I still don't know his last name. He still doesn't know mine.
Does having more turned my hands into clenched fists?
I remember when I was younger. My pockets were empty, but so was my chest. No heaviness. No tightness. I walked through life with open palms, trusting that God would fill them. And He did. He always did. Manna never stopped falling.
Now, life has handed me a fuller cup. But instead of drinking freely, I hold it with both hands, terrified of spilling a single drop. A small wind shakes me. A shadow on the horizon steals my sleep.
When did I start gripping the cup harder than I grip the Hand that filled it?
Is it because I've built something now, and buildings can burn? When I had nothing, I was a bird trusting the sky. Now I am a woman guarding a house, pacing the halls at night, checking every lock.
Does having more make me forget that I was never the source, only the vessel? Has abundance shifted my gaze from the Giver to the gift, from the Root to the fruit?
I think having more has tied little anchors to my ankles. And slowly, without my noticing, I've been sinking. Not into poverty, but into this world. Holding on to what rusts. Building my home on what shakes.
I don't want to be a gripper anymore.
I want to unclench. To open my hands again, the way a child opens theirs. I want to return to my Father who fed me when I had nothing, and remind myself that He hasn't changed just because I have more.
There was no siren. No sign from above. No moment I could circle on a calendar and say, there, that was when I knew. The room just kept getting prettier, and I kept forgetting to leave.
I swung my legs off the bed and looked around. The furniture was nicer. The view was better. I had built a life inside those four walls, a real one.
I cracked the window sometimes, let the wind play with my fingers. I collected passport stamps like love letters from countries I left pieces of my heart in. I tasted extraordinary, unrepeatable things. The room kept getting more comfortable. And that was the problem.
Same job. Same team I loved so fiercely that leaving them felt like blowing out candles I never wanted to stop burning. Same neighborhood. Same streets I could walk with my eyes closed. For over a decade, this comfort fit me like a second skin. Warm, familiar, impossible to argue with. And every time the wind called from that cracked window, I pulled my hand back in and stayed.
I loved the comfort. But little by little, between the routines and the paychecks, I became a hamster on a golden wheel. Running gracefully inside that beautiful room, going nowhere. The spinning blurred everything into one long, dizzy day that looked exactly like the one before.
So I decided to become a little reckless.
I burned the golden wheel.
Hence this blog. I deleted every social media account, every glowing screen that begged for my attention, and cleared the table for the only thing that ever truly fed me. Writing.
The walls of that room are cracking now. The paint is peeling. Somewhere behind me, something crumbles. And what a beautiful soundtrack for it all. Tamia singing "Officially Missing You" through my AirPods. But I am not missing someone else. I am missing a version of myself. The girl who used to sit cross-legged on her bedroom floor, scribbling stories into notebooks she hid under her mattress, believing with every breath that her words were seeds and one day an entire forest would grow from them.
I lost that girl for a while. She tried on a banker's suit and wore it for so long she forgot it was a costume. She learned a Spanish tongue and let it reshape her mouth. She became a wanderer with sun on her shoulders. She became a lover with her whole heart wide open. She wore many beautiful lives like borrowed dresses, spinning in each one, admiring the reflection.
But underneath all of them, ink still ran through her veins.
She was always a writer. She just forgot for a little while.
And now, after twelve beautiful years, she has finally walked out of the room. What is left of it, anyway. The light is different out here. She thinks she is going to like it.
So if you're reading this, stay. Watch what happens next. Her fingers are back on the keyboard.
And the door she walked through? She burned that too.
