Sounds like a one-night stand

Jean Marc is so darn beautiful.  It's his molasses lashes that curl up into his pale lids.  And his pink lips pout, "I watched my father die for six months."  God, he's grim.  And he blinks twice.  I keep calling him Jean Paul.
He sits next to me on the wood bench, splinters stapling into our thighs, and he tells me that he watched his father die for six months.  Nice to meet you too.  We get along swell and we walk around the grounds of a monastery and a gust of hot halitosis wind (it smells like bathroom here) blows off my straw hat, down into the running stream.  And he dives in after it.  No he doesn't, I'm lying.  He just watches it float away and he blinks.  He's so beautiful.  Isn't it weird that he loses his hat too?  But that happens later.
When does it happen?  I think it's when he's complimenting my teeth.  His face is too close to mine, I can feel his exhale on the ridge of my nose and I can smell his flesh.  He's looking down at my teeth, my gleaming kernels, my pearly whites, telling me that I have the most beautiful teeth he's ever seen, east of the Andes.  It's that moment, him looking down, admiring my teeth, when I kiss him.  After wards, he realizes he lost his hat.  "Isn't that weird?" he asks. 
We know each other for six hours.  I know all about his father and mother and his estranged brothers.  About India and Nepal and those heroin smugglers in Pakistan, who were the most hospitable people you ever met.  At the end of the sixth hour, we're sitting in the open courtyard, just off of the main Khao San Road, drinking a soda and a Singha, and we've already fought twice (I can't remember about what).  And we kiss goodbye because his bus is leaving and I'm going home.  "I'll miss you," he tells me.  And how can you miss someone you just met?  And there's a black-out on the road, while I'm sitting at the last open restaurant, slurping red curry.

And now, while writing this, thinking about Jean Marc, Chelsea comes in, asking me what I'm doing.  "She's a ball of nerves," she keeps saying, and then she adds, "I see that now."  And I keep thinking about that girl, that ball of nerves, with the red rash on her freckled neck and her collar bone; it looks like a hand print.  When we were at the church with the Gothic chandeliers, Chelsea and I partook in the holy communion.  Grape juice and wafer, kindergarten snacks.  But, it's that girl's rash, which Chelsea calls, "a severe case of eczema."

And were you ever speaking to someone and forgot what you looked like?  I remember being in Tel Aviv (or was it Edinburgh?) and speaking to her on my rented cell phone (that I eventually lost) and she was crying and I was crying.  One sloppy sob fest.  The two of us crying like big old babies.  And she's reassuring me, "I'm okay!  Really, I am."  And she's crying in hiccups.  And I'm crying too because it's so damn sad and I don't remember what I look like.  I can give vague generalizations: brown hair, brown eyes, mouth, nose. etcetera.  But, nothing beyond that. 

I Heart Berlin

Berlin isn't romantic like Paris or charming like an English sea-side town.  It's grungy and underground, but clean-shaven too, and, because of everything I've learned in history books, a bit taboo.  I fall in love with the city one evening, drinking mugs of German pilsner in Prater Biergarten, Berlin's oldest outdoor pub.  Rows of picnic tables are lined symmetrically, one after the other, and strings of light bulbs criss-cross above your head.  I'm sitting with two substitute teachers from Maryland.  Later that night, we play ping pong in an empty white room, then we get our hands stamped and go dancing.  But at this moment,  with two strangers from Maryland, slap-happy and on-the-verge of sloppy inebriation, I sort of stumble on my words when I pronounce, barely, "I love this city."  I mean it too, every single syllable.  It's the artwork that's tagged on the side of concrete buildings and it's the relevancy, how recent everything is.  In 1989, the wall crumbled down and the east ran west, bottles of champagne spilled in celebration, and, as history goes, David Hasselhoff was somehow responsible.  Berlin is zany in that way.

Right after leaving Berlin, all I want to do is return.  It's my favorite city, hands down, and the people are ultra cool and I drink lots of Berliner.  I travel to the east-side gallery of the deconstructed wall and I get lost in a fenced-in-lot with Carribean music and imported sand.  The streets are studded with curry wurst stands and vintage shops; I like the people and I love this weird city.

Berlin has been divided and broken-down and bombed, but, miraculously, it's transformed itself into this phoenix, rising from its ashes (and in Berlin, there's a whole lot of ashes), an emblem for re-construction and reinvention.  And, although the city is spanking new with lots of cement and mohawks and worn-in combat boots, you can't really escape its past.  On a free walking tour, the very short guide leads the group into a parking lot.  "This," he projects for the whole group to hear, "was the location of Hitler's bunker."  Cars are parked and the ground is un-paved.  And that's basically it.  There's the past, which is very much present, even if it's a parking lot.

And I'm Jewish and my dad's a Rabbi.  Growing up Jewish, you eat bagels and lox, and kugel, and kishke.  When you meet a fellow Jew, there's this mutual understanding, this nod.  We, you both think, share the same ancestry, the same history, and together we were persecuted, and together we were saved.  It's this knowledge that we, somehow, share something and maybe it's Yiddishkeit or maybe it's the holy land, or it might just be that we both eat matzah ball soup, but it's something.  It's the common 'we.' And there's the Holocaust, where families were dismembered and humans were slaughtered.  Survivors come into your first grade classroom and speak to you and they say, "I survived, but there's this number," and they show you their inked wrist, numbered like a bar-code.  And this amazing city of Berlin was the epicenter, the blinking control room, for Nazi Germany.

When I'm there, I don't think about it much.  There's too much happening in the present.  I'm above ground, where Hitler's bunker is land-marked, standing next to a sea-foam green hatchback.  "Alright," it doesn't process, and then I'm off, walking to the next historical site, following the absurdly short tour guide.  After being home for several months, looking back, the city's very strange and very far.  It's similar to when you're so close to someone and then, all of a sudden, you're not.  A falling out perhaps.  Something happens and that person becomes the furthest and strangest human being to you and you think, "Who are they?"  That's the way I feel about Berlin right now.  I'm conflicted and confused.  I still love the city, but it's different now.

My last day in Berlin, I take the train to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.  There's a huge concrete tower before you enter the premises and there's a memorial garden with butterflies.  Weeds disguised as yellow flowers grow rampant.  There's a gift shop with souvenirs and, for a pound, you can purchase a map of the grounds.  When I first get there, sludging through the mud, tourists pose for pictures, smiling in front of the tower.  This place, which symbolizes death and human cruelty, has a gift shop and smiling tourists with flashing cameras.  After you enter the iron gates, it's quiet and isolated and spread out, so that most of the time, you're completely by yourself.

When I first arrive in Berlin, I don't know what to expect.  It's overcast and a dark fog creeps low. You can't see much, except for the tall pin-needle of a building, several kilometers away.  The city's history precedes itself and is eerily present- it's in the skyline and in the fog- and you think: 1940's Berlin, this must have been hell.