Amy Liptrot

Through the windows of my flat in Kreuzberg, there is just a parallelogram of sky at the top of the courtyard, only a small space to catch the passing moon on certain clear nights.
B said that people move here just so they can tell their friends back home that they’re living in Berlin. B said that people moving here often feel like they’ve dropped several years, that they can extend their youth.

I tried to be okay, to relax and be grateful for what I had, but I kept being jolted by a lurching for more. The same desire and self-belief that motivated me made me frustrated. The pain was a by-product of my ambition.

There were days when the loneliness built up and came spilling out in angry comments – often directed at the island. On nights when I was aching and alone, I wondered if this was the life I’d stopped drinking to live.

I’ve always loved how it feels to leave: the motion of the ferry pulling away from the pier and the island, the bus setting off down the A9.

I wanted to cry and often did. For the first time in my life, I felt aware of myself ageing, my thirties speeding by.

I developed a crush on a friend and after some time found the courage to tell him. Politely but firmly, he said he wasn’t interested. Boundless sadness. I was ashamed to be so upset over something that hadn’t happened, to be upset over nothing. I raised and destroyed armies in my mind.

I had the skeleton of a good life but there was no heart inside. I’d been wearing the same warm layers year round for the last two years. My summer and party dresses hung in the wardrobe unworn. My photos used to be all of people; now they were of the sky.

In my first weeks in a new city, I’m sometimes excited because no one knows where I am . . . and then I feel lost because no one knows where I am. I veer between ebullient and tearful. One day, I block out Berlin with a map of the island stuck to the window and I trace islands and coastlines, absorbed in intricate shorelines. On the U-Bahn or in Lidl I’m sometimes suddenly sad: I left the island because I was lonely, but maybe things will be just the same here.

I tried to be okay, to relax and be grateful for what I had, but I kept being jolted by a lurching for more. The same desire and self-belief that motivated me made me frustrated. The pain was a by-product of my ambition.

THERE’S ALWAYS A SENSE OF arriving in Berlin just a little too late. Five years ago, people say, that’s when it was really happening.