April 19th, my 29th birthday

This is a kind of personal entry, so if you’d rather just look at the pretty photos from Teufelsberg and not read any relationship crap, you can head over to Flickr instead.

On my last birthday, my boyfriend at the time took me out for a lovely breakfast at Gorky Park and a photo tour to the listening station on Teufelsberg (and also the Nazi olympic stadium, as we noticed it was nearby).

He was a bit obsessed with astrology, and both of our forecasts for the year said that around the time of my birthday things would happen that may mean the end of our relationship.

So what happened? At the time I really wanted to believe in him and not my intuition, and also our rock’n’roll lifestyles limited the time we actually spent together in real life, so it took several months more until I would finally end the relationship, quite abruptly, after finally having gotten my hands on undeniable evidence that confirmed that my intuition had been dead right.

At the gate into the complex we met two very nice guys (link) who chatted a bit with us. They were based in the UK and on a road trip through European abandonment and decay.

At some point later on Ilan asked me, “Isn’t it nice to talk to people?” Apparently he was assuming that I hate talking to other people. I pointed out that I do in fact like talking to other people, especially when they are as nice as these two guys. But that he would actually make a rather antagonistic comment like that was pretty disturbing to me.

After thinking about this for a while, I told him, “I thought you were different, but when you said that you were just like everybody else.”

I honestly don’t remember what he answered to that, if anything, after the initial hasty “Everybody is like everybody else!” that didn’t seem to mean anything.

What I meant but maybe didn’t even want to acknowledge yet that day was that I thought he loved me and understood me, but apparently he didn’t.

In fact he had been reminding me very much of an abusive and unfaithful ex-boyfriend all day, in very subtle ways.

While coming down from the highest dome, I stayed for a while on one floor and photographed the graffiti and the flapping ripped up canvas. Then as I went down, I didn’t see Ilan anywhere. We had been exploring abandoned places many times together and often one of us would have gone off on our own, but this felt weird. When I finally found him, I somehow got the feeling that he didn’t care if I was there or not.

He had come on a train from Geneva to Berlin just for my birthday, and was going back again shortly afterwards. I didn’t know at the time that in Geneva he was intensively spending time with a girl he had fallen in love with.

Although intuitively I kind of sensed it.

“Isn’t it about time you changed your style?” my mum asked me after I’d broken up with Ilan.
“I thought I had, but I guess I hadn’t”, I said.

Before I got together with Ilan I was literally scared to death of falling in love with someone again, after two very bad experiences.

How do I feel about it now? I feel very stupid, because suddenly I can clearly see all the warning signs that I should perhaps have taken much more seriously back then. I feel ambivalent, because a mixture of good and bad experiences is perhaps still much better than only bland experiences. I feel resigned, because I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to experience mutual attraction with somebody who is not a liar and a whore. I feel frustrated, because if I am only ever attracted to my opposite, maybe I should make sure that I am the slutty one in my next relationship (lolol). I definitely feel relieved that it’s over and that it was so easy to break up, so there isn’t really anything to be scared of, like I was before.

And there is actually one thing I do have faith in — my intuition.

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Recommended reading: Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds, which features a slightly more extreme version of this relationship pattern. I don’t particularly like the ending for the other characters, but for that couple the book has a very good ending.