Second dispatch in a month. How I spoil (or torture) my loyal readers? Lots of changes afoot, why not take record? First of all, after three years in this madcap apartment, Dracula’s Mansion as I named it in Sarah’s rambling blog Episode 13. Long story short, the landlord (to whom I brokered deal of selling the flat from my previous landlord, the son of my professor during my brief and pandemicy journalism fellowship days) had been talking about wanting to move in for a while, so I decided to get ahead of the ship jumping and land in the home a friend who might, quite possibly, be a vampire herself.
She hates the sun. She has white blond hair and even whiter skin. She spends her days in an echoing warehouse filling canvases with gloomy, mythology-inspired abstract shapes, dreams up sculptures of blood, puts on performances where she crouches on her knees and counts from a collection of her own hairs in whispered Russian. We met last year at an exhibit of a Jack London-meets Alistair Crawley-style art space that is run by someone with long, billowing, Viking-like hair, grills and a selection of leather waistcoats and skull-shaped rings with whom she had a history. We connected over a shared interest in art, psychoanalysis and healing journeys. So far, so serious. So dark and mysterious and intellectual. One night, she comes round, lights up numerous cigarettes, suggests we listen to gothic rock pioneers Bauhaus, and starts to tell me stories from her life. Stories about going in search of very old trees who offer up a sense of security and rootedness no human can offer, of removing a stone from a graveyard only to feel cursed by it until she returned it to its rightful place, of the experience of creating an artwork being akin to giving birth to, nurturing and inviting a child into freedoms and autonomy of adulthood. ‘It makes sense that you’re a journalist, you always ask such probing questions’, she says. And of course, it is this quality of attentive listening that I do enjoy offering that makes her so proactive in ensuring we become fast friends. The rare delight someone feels in the company of a listener whose craft is directing them towards the story in which they play the central role. Some people hanker for that experience more than others, some people pine more than others for a witness to their heroic moments, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. With this desire. Or, a better word I think would be ambition. There’s nothing wrong with this ambition to be understood in heroic terms. The only thing about ambition is that, along with all the positive qualities it brings to the party of life (and there are many), there’s a whole lot of dark sides .If you’re the hero of your own story, that means that a) you’re kind of always doing everything on your own because claiming any support would negatively impact your heroism ratings, b) the odds you’re always facing up to have to belong to an increasingly insurmountable chain of insurmountables and c) Every noteworthy event that occurs will have to fit in neatly with the overarching story of how you became who you are and what that says about where you are going. Some years ago, I asked someone, a budding literature academic, if they were the main character in one of the books on their reading list, which they would want to be. “Oh, none of them. Heroes never really have actual friends, do they? I mean, not real ones,” she said. As I’m packing up my things slowly in this big, echoing den I’ve called home with an obnoxiously blood red paint wall and all that for the last three years, I take stock of the chain reaction of events that brought me here. First, the person in my industry who hired me for my first journalism internship well over a decade ago suggested I apply for a fellowship that introduced me to a professor whose son was looking for a roommate who ultimately sold the flat to my neighbour’s son whose mother I befriended in friendly stairway chats through the pandemic. In fact, if I interrogate all the big events in my life in this way, I notice all these spider diagrams of interplaying agents other than myself driving some of the disruptions and changing courses, for better or for worse, or for whatever we call all that in between stuff. Another event: a career segway into the world of advertising, a new role for which a friend recommended me, who by coincidence, was the friend I adopted my rat children from, via a post in a whatsapp network of female creatives I was invited to join when I offered to edit text accompanying the film of friend’s collective. The downside of all of this is, of course, the more I take stock of the support that surrounds me, the more my own achievements threaten to diminish next to it. But on the flipside: All this support. I recently discovered that my vampire friend had a sense of humour. Not just all ‘we listen to Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails covers, chain smoke and talk about our trauma’. She had invited me to a gig at her ex’s art space, and told me to wear black. I joked that she only ever hung out with other goths. ‘Not only goths wear black’, she rebuked. ‘Monks do, too. And funeral workers. And crows’ she continued. And most Berliners. She’s well aware of her circuit’s silliness. ‘Posers!’ she whispered in my ear at a recent vernissage at a gallery in Kreuzberg, where I lost count of the face tattoos and everyone was dressed up as if it were the set of a Tim Burton Alien remake. Something someone said to me recently, a posh guy from Düsseldorf who was a bit dismissive of Berlin’s bad -latex-leather-clad boy status. ‘Everyone in Berlin tries so hard to be different, so much so that they all end up being the same.’ Hmm. To be honest, I would prefer being around people whose goal is to find their own way than people who strive to be just like everybody else. But it does seem to mean the following: The fight for individualism does make integration a much trickier game. Recently I was talking researcher of AI who uses bots to orchestrate mass conversations of intimacy at scale. On platforms across the world, individuals are talking to programs repurposing text from previous conversations he’s had to build new connections. He’s trying to understand how easy it is to simulate a connection, and what that means about the connection in question. If someone on a dating app, for example, manages to get a date out of you by using a program that has been fed previous conversations. So it's still their words, but not intended originally for you. How would you feel? Cheated? Lied to? I mean, it’s still the same person. But the words you thought were for you were originally meant for someone else. But then they worked for you, didn’t they? So there you have it. You are not the hero of your potential love story, anymore. You are not this unique, rare, wondrous person this other person has seen and embraced as uniquely you. You are a potential agent in a chain involving other agents that quite possibly moved and lived and all that, just like you. Is this a disappointing or comforting way to look at humans and love. I mean, I guess that depends on how you want to look at it. The researcher was telling me about one Chart Gbt program designed to give users a taste of love, via bots-as-boyfriends-and-girlfriends, had shut down over ethical concerns. Users were distraught, heartbroken. The connections they had made with their bots had felt real, genuine. ‘Well, I suppose you could say when you fall in love with AI, you’ve fallen in love with the universality of the human experience,” I said. He laughed and said I should get in touch with Chart Gbt’s PR arm as I’d do good work for them. But the thing is, one of our major fears really does ring true when we consider AI’s potential: the realisation that, really, none of us are heroes. We’re all an endlessly replicable blob of human data points feeding on and being fed by other data points, and that is, well the total mass that is the human experience. Soon to be human cyborg but whatever I think this tangent is a bit overbaked now. But anyway, humans as a mass blob of replicating experience and identity. Don't you love it when I talk dirty like that, baby? 1010. One of my pillars of support in my interlinking webs of action and reaction is of course my therapist, who has recently shown a bit of tough love in badgering me into going on more dates, as per my TOP-SECRET immersive journalism project 100000. The resistance in me to it all is still strong. But now, this resistance feels like the defiant tantrum of a toddler who is convinced they only need to put on one shoe. A toddler with a hero complex. If we can have phantom limbs, maybe we can also have phantom unhealable wounds. And what do we do with phantoms? We recognise them as what they really are: a whole lot of nothing.
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So, I’ve been trying to give my summer a tone-setting, punchy caption, because who doesn’t love a good caption?
And, with the help of friends, I’ve come up with a couple of good ones: ‘Outlaw Summer’ was one suggestion of one new friend, a sex writer I’m collaborating with who is trying to stoke an internal rebellion in me while I, in turn, try to teach her to ‘fitness’ which mostly, so far, has involved the drunken overtures about protein that most of my non-fitness friends have barred me from making. Another friend suggested I rename my ‘summer of microdosing’, ‘summer of Sarah being kind of high all the time,’ which made me reflect a little bit on my chosen dosage, especially as it had followed an evening of telling her, quite emphatically, and repeatedly, what a lovable person she was, and that yellow really was her colour. Sometimes, sound does bend a little bit. One event that prompted me to take a break from it (which is, the diligent researcher that I am, to be advised as it allows for elucidating points of comparison), was a visit from my best and oldest friend, C.. I don’t really need anything at all when I’m in her presence to feel that same sense of peace and reassurance and wonder about the world. When we’re together, everything is right with the world, nothing really hurts. And that’s true love, mannn. Flashback: We’re 13 years old, and we’ve just met. I’ve just arrived in London, at a new school, the third one in three years. It’s a girls school, we’re decked up in these hideous, boxy green and pink uniforms. I've decided I hate everything about my new life in the U.K, even though I’d always looked on the place from afar as the ‘home’ I would return to. One thing that doesn’t entirely suck about this weird school where girls (or ‘young ladies’ as the teachers call us) send themselves love letters from fictive boyfriends, sing Nelly songs as they gyrate against hockey sticks in the changing rooms, slap each other in the lunch lines, is that I’m accidentally popular, only because I’m enigmatic and new, and have a weird American accent I picked up as a social survival strategy in my last school. Making wands It’s all very Mean Girlsesque. The popular girls, many of them blonde and caked in foundation, would invite me sit with them at lunch -- and I can’t for the life of me remember what any of them ever said so it can’t have been very interesting -- and query how much time I spent with the weird two girls that would wind up being my best friends, mostly because they were the funniest people I had ever met, and also because we had agreed that a Harry Potter fanclub was the one thing our school desperately need, which we would go on to create. It had, and maintained, a membership of three. We tried to make our own wands, our third friend, V., kept a folder and minutes, and I was tasked with creating lyrics to go with the Harry Potter theme tune of the film that had just come out. My offering began with: ‘Harry, Harry, show us your wand, please”. I think it was only a couple of years later when it actually dawned on us that this opening line was not ideal. We were all Gryffindor, although I think if C. had a choice she would ask that V., -- who I think regressed while we grew up and who is now a self-anointed, crystal peddling “empath” (read: self-aggrandising, sanctimonious and hypocritical bully) with psychic abilities -- be moved to Slytherin. (To be honest, I missed most of that drama by being out of the country a lot of the time, but V dealt some seriously low, insecurity-addled blows that C. -- perennial pacifist and placater that she is -- did nothing to deserve. I suppose her only crime is that she is just, in almost every way imaginable: wonderful.) This specific brand of insecure, scarcity-mindset driven, ego-inflated woman. I think I’m allergic to them. Andrea Dworkin has a quote that I love: “Eat shit, bitch. Nobody said the sisterhood was easy.” Anyway, back to the HP fanclub. C. had no official task, mostly because we knew she wouldn’t remember to do it, and it was hard enough for us to get her to hand in her homework (sometimes doing it for her…) and not get expelled out of pure dopiness (a dopiness which I only now understand as dissociative coping strategies that speak to personal stories of hers that aren’t mine to tell). Regarding the popular girls: I was Switzerland for a while until one day, one of our ‘plastics’ saw me pull out a top I’d accidentally packed instead of our PE gear, an awkward, hand-me-down long sleeve polo shirt from my brother, whose clothes I basically lived in. Social armageddon. The beginning of the end. The best thing that ever happened to me. Snapshots through time One thing you need to know about C., my best friend, is, and she’ll absolutely hate me for saying this, but she really reminds me of Ron Weasley. A gorgeous, vivacious, Turkish but London-born, sexy-as-hell whip smart Ron Weasley. The same intonation. The same ‘bloody hell’. The same, “whaaat?” The same lionhearted loyalty that takes expression in how she will always break her chocolate Fredo in two and share it with you without you having to ask, she’ll always be the one waiting in the wings with an inventory of your talents to offset the dementor-like shadows of self doubt swooping in, and she’ll always rip you to shreds like the court jester you never thought you needed. She’d visit me once a term while I was at Oxford, surrounded by all that posturing and pomposity, and do things like log on to my Facebook account and announce to the world my undying love for boy bands I’d never heard of. And when I started to develop a crush on a pompous boy who lived opposite me in first year, who had a tendency of inviting girls into his bedroom to croon songs about heartache at them, she made sure I saw through the bullshit. “Christ, it’s the fucking Twilight Zone over there,” she quipped. Almost everywhere I’ve lived she’s visited. That’s 20 years of my lone wolf wanderings with at least one page for her in each chapter of my life. And I was looking through all the pictures of us from her every visit. I do not enjoy having my picture taken. Not even before the accident, but certainly not after it. And yet, in every picture of the pair of us together. In Budapest. Prague. In Hong Kong. In Istanbul, I look happy and relaxed. I glow. I think that says something. Now we're friends One especially funny memory offers itself: C. meeting my Hungarian uncle in the middle of nowheresville, Kisújszállás, one of Hungary’s poorest towns out in the dusty and arid planes where everything smells of rotting eggs, train stations don’t have platforms, and family members obsess and squabble over where their grave plots will go. He’s had quite a few shots of cherry schnapps, so he’s jolly and intense (but not crying, yet) and I see him grab C. by the shoulders and say, empathically, and using the only English I’ve ever heard him say): (please imagine this spoken with Dracula’s intonation): “Turks and Hungarians used to fight. Now, we are friends”. True enough, our family crest, which we apparently earned as warring knights in the late Middle Ages, features the head of an Ottoman Empire soldier on a sword. Of course, it would be nice to say this moment spoke to something heartwarming about bygones of healing and the peacemaking power of love and friendship. Whereas in fact, regrettably, the comment might speak more to a bubbling and problematic alliance between Hungary’s fascist prime minister and Turkey’s strongman leader, both seeing eye-to-eye about ideologies that claim some kind of shared roots and racial superiority. To be fair, bilateral ties run deeper than the wars Hungarians and Ottomans waged against each other. My friend C. even thinks that the name Karacs comes from the Turkish word “black lake”. I don’t know. What I do know is that hearing the Turkish language instantly puts me at ease and feel warmth, because of C., so I’m quite happy to be living in a neighbourhood in Berlin which has a huge Turkish community. “I don’t like to automatically assume people are Turkish by looking at them,” she says. But everyone is assuming it of her, striking up conversations in Turkish, where she details our long friendship and describes the Turkish Cypriot community in London. They nod and smile. Another memory from our trip to Istanbul, which is something we’d always planned for our 30th. Walking through the gorgeous (and politically-complex) Hagia Sophia, our hair covered, I ask C. questions about the rituals involved in prayer. “How should I fucking know?,” she says. Precious and fragile things Twenty years of friendship and we’ve accumulated our own set of rituals. C. is the official keeper of my face. I remember one birthday present she sent to my Hong Kong address, not only had eyeshadow palette, a lipstick and an eye liner, but what reads like love letter in which she makes an inventory each of my facial features, elaborately describes what makes them beautiful and how I can accentuate that beauty using her handy toolkit. Every time she visits she does my make up, explaining all the tips and tricks she learnt from her mother, passing on a way of interacting that they had that my mother and I never shared. She always puts on a bit more than I’m comfortable -- she’s ever so glam -- and sometimes I rub a bit off, but it’s nice to look into the mirror and see a face she likes so much, and like it a bit more because of that. If the romantic overtones of our friendship seem obvious here, that’s because they are. We make comments to each other and interact in ways that have raised many an eyebrow. At school, rumours swilled about our friendship circle being lesbian for the simple fact that we loved each other so intensely. We thought them hilarious and hammed it up, and still do. There’s no shame in thinking that your best friend is the most gorgeous person in the world, whatever your orientation. “Want to join us for a drink?” a friend texts me here in Berlin. “Sure”, I reply. “Just give us a sec while we finish reading our tarots and put on some clothes,” I reply. “Oh, sorry, hope I’m not interrupting witchy naked time,” my friend quips. By putting clothes on I had meant that “going for a drink” in the land of Sarah and C. means going through a drawn out dress up session where each takes their time to look their best. I throw on a loose, lilac summer dress, she looks it up and down and goes: “Nah, something more sexy,” and I nod and go for something black, tight, low cut, with some leather and costume gold jewelry. She looks super classy, classic Sicilian housewife vibes, dash of black sequins at her shirt’s hem. Flawless. She does my face, and gives me a spritz of one of her ridiculously expensive perfumes. “My collection of these is way too big, when you come visit, I’ll give you one.” she says. I’d never splash out on these sorts of things the way she does, they cost an obscene amount and I really don’t know how she can afford them, or why anyone would spend that much money on a smell. But this is one of the many things we don’t have in common. And I think it’s good there’s a lot of differences between us. What’s the point in surrounding yourself with people who are just like you? Isn't love all the more precious when it comes from a place of peaceful, happy coexistence in spite of all the ways you’re not alike? Switches Just as she’s the keeper of my face, I’ve always been her protector. “When I told my boyfriend I was visiting you, he said: ‘From what you’ve told me about her, I am sure you will be safe’”. This was a compliment of course, but it did make me bristle slightly. See how different we are? If a guy I was seeing said something like that to me I’d break both his legs. I live in Berlin, not Bagdad, for Christsake, and I’m her friend, not her babysitter. But I’m also glad of course that she feels that safe with me, that I can offer this sense of security that sometimes I struggle to give even to myself. She’s always had a long list of anxieties that just don’t make sense to me. Moths. She’s terrified of moths. Babies, sometimes. She once freaked out because a baby was looking at her funny. A baby. Dogs, too. I remember that because apparently, once, when we were drunk and on the streets of Prague, a stray dog came loping towards us, and I instinctively stepped in front of her with my arms outstretched, “thou shalt not pass” style. No recollection of the event, but she recounts it often. I would take a bullet for her, and she knows it. I was joking around with my training buddy recently that I was the Robin to her Batman. And she said, very quickly: “No, I am the Robin to YOUR Batman”. It was a very sweet moment, sort of testament to a friendship that feels very adult and healthy a la: we take turns to superhero and sidekick each other and no one puts anyone on a pedestal. A beautiful, healthy friendship built on the foundations of adult wisdom that our childhood selves just didn’t have yet. If C. was always the Ron Weasley to my Harry Potter, then we’re only just getting to a place where we can work on her being the Harry Potter and me being the Ron. All these years and she’s only just started see me as someone vulnerable and fallible, occasionally fucking up like I did in the year that I left Hong Kong, and learning to cope with the reality that I have my own weaknesses, too. My own moments of pure stupidity. My own anxieties, my own dopey, helpless moments. Part of that comes with the reality that in order for her to see it, I have to let it be seen. |
Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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