8th of July, 2023
One of the ways to get to my place from the centre of berlin includes a lovely 15 minute walk through a forest and therefore provides shadow and freshness – and I love this route in the hot summer days a lot!
I step out of the train on my station. Although it is already around 4 in the afternoon, the sun is still very aggressive, so I rush towards the forest quickly, just not to stay on the heated asphalt and concrete roads for too long.
Even despite something beautiful I am listening to in my headphones, uninvited anxious thoughts about climate change and irresponsibility of humanity towards our common future start creeping in.
My hands roll a cigarette as a mundane automatic reaction to unpleasant thoughts. A few seconds later after a lighter‘s flick I am feeling nicotine flowing into my system along with the smoke I inhale. I guess I can get back to focusing on the music I listen to. I dive back in, music has my total attention now.
My feet bring me to the forest quickly and a new round of anxiety starts – a realisation that I have still a burning cigarette in my hand and I’m entering a dry forest on a 32 centigrade heated day after long period of no rains at all. Luckily I have a portable ashtray that I tend to throw into my bag for such situations and just generally to avoid littering if there’s no other trash bin available.
The moment this thought hits my brain I hear something through the music in my ears, as if through a thick layer of water. I take off my headphones and hear a shout „Raucherverbot! Brandgefahr!“* in my face from a guy quickly passing me by on a bicycle with a much smaller bicycle species connected to his, and a little girl sitting there.
(*No smoking! Risk of [forest] fire! [German])
Having shouted it, the guy disappears in one of the forrest alleys.
I feel like my personal space is invaded in the most treacherous way. I wanna cry of helplessness, but I can’t cry and I also feel like I don’t wanna be a victim again who had been abused and then just be silent and helpless, and so many things crossed my perplexed mind all at once that I can’t really describe, but this cocktail is killing me. So I shout the first thing that comes to my head:
“Why you Germans have to be a walking law book all the time? Do you get paid for that??!”
“You’re stupid! Idiot!” I hear the clumsy English cursing from the woods.
At that point I’m panicking even more, I have no fucking clue how to find the fucking ashtray in my total chaos of a bag, which in that day included: keys, cigarettes, tarot cards, my journal, beach towel, an umbrella (yes, I was born in a very rainy city and I always have it on me, although I hate umbrellas and almost never use it even if it rains – sounds weird, but here i am – a psycho bitch with quite strange ways of thinking), an e-book, probably a small unknown civilisation of micro-people might also easily be found there, I suppose.
I need to focus and find the damned ashtray, and the cig is already burning my fingers, and at the same time what I wanna do is cry like an insulted child and run clumsily to my mom who’ll sit me in her lap, stroke my hair and says it’s alright, this guy is just having a bad day, forgive him.
Oh here it is, the ashtray, cigarette is neutralised, no current heavy danger to the local ecology system present.
There is another personality inside me that comes into play after that, and I don’t like that bitch, she’s evil, a sort of my own private psychopath that i took years to gain control over. I feel like I’ve been successful so far – nobody was murdered or damaged any other way. The presence of that side of personality is a normal thing, as I see it, we all have dark sides. The important thing is not giving the way to her. Being in touch with her helps me to make deals with her and feed her with horror movies instead of real innocent blood.
Fighting this crazy bitch and offering her to play my favourite strategy game later and nuking Russia in it seems to help, my feet continue taking me deeper into the woods knowing that my home and cat and comfort is soon to be found on the other side.
I see the guy pedalling back into my direction and part of me is happy that he wants to continue conversation, but another part of me is panicking – I have my nail polish and rings, and i know i look like a damn queen even if when i look kinda male-passing. And believe me, I’ve been harassed and beaten up many time before. I am losing my breath and trying to think clearly.
Then guy with the little girl behind him reach me and I know he wouldn’t beat me up in front of this beautiful innocent child, and there’s a quick thought passing my brain that a bad person couldn’t be hanging out with such a princess, so it calms me down a bit, but the he talks still feels aggressive and i feel like i’m still being taught how to live and what to do. I can’t vent recall exactly now, what he was saying, but I felt like i can’t really take it, it’s not the way I can communicate, so I say that I can’t continue this and just walk away, again perplexed as fuck.
I walk and walk and I think I know where I’m going but in fact I have no idea. I see the guy passing me by a few meters away again, we shout a couple of insults at each other and he’s outta site again.
Practical brain reminds me through all the anger and insult that I need to get home eventually. So I get out a device to look up the route on an interactive map. I start following the instructions of AI to reach the destination point. It leads me out of the forrest and sends along some sweet little streets with private houses and some block houses standing on the wood’s edge.
What do I see? My counterfeit and the child are entering one of the block houses. And I think: «Okay, possible this story needs closure and universe wants it this way». So I walk to the house door and knock on it – the guys opens and looks at me surprised. I say «Well, now I call the police and we sort this out». The guy disappears behind the door again.
I start calling the police, I explain the situation and name the address so that they come and help me. At the same time I see the guy walking out of the house talking on the phone, probably, to police as well, as I am guessing.
Once we both are off the phone calls we stand outside his house and stare at each other. I start feeling that perhaps that person isn’t actually really aggressive towards me, seems like he’s pretty confused, too.
I’m thirsty as hell, all this time since I’ve got out of the forest I was looking for some shop where I could grab some water, but no shops in sight. I feel like my tongue is getting dry and I can’t even talk properly – the sun still shines pretty ruthlessly on us.
I say: “Man, I’m really thirsty, and I would really kindly ask you to get me some water from your place, I promise not to talk to the police before you come come back”. He admits that he’s thirsty too, then calls his wife to ask her to bring some water to us.
A very friendly woman emerges from the building a few minutes later with two glasses of water, we greet each other with smiles. I drink the water and start calming down – I don’t feel danger any more.
“I’ll be out with sandwiches in an hour or so” – she says with a smile and disappears behind the house door again.
We start talking. I explain, that I wouldn’t really think of throwing my cigarette out in the forest, that I’m not an idiot and problems of ecology also lay close to my heart. But the way the information was delivered was unacceptable and frightening to me. I explain that I had a few bad experiences and situations like this really kick me out of balance.
He explains that, as they live on the forest’s edge, they are really afraid that “thanks” to some idiot the fire would start and they’d have to breathe this smoke. We both agree that it would indeed be a bummer.
Then he starts talking about his thoughts on German CO2 policy, criticising their decision to give way to coal-based energy. I shake his hand in agreement. We both laugh with relief.
I already see that he’s not a bad person at all and I start feeling, that police intervention would already be unnecessary, so I suggest that we both call the police ** and cancel this whole thing. We do so, apologies follow on both sides.
He suggests that I come by shortly to celebrate our de-escalation with a glass of beer. As an alcoholic trying to avoid alcohol I should have probably politely declined, but this seems really appropriate and my will-power is somewhere around zero after all the stress, so I graciously accept. On our way upstairs to their apartment we actually encounter his wife with a plate of snacks, we all back to their house and I’m invited into the living room.
The little girl I saw with him in the forest, their daughter i.e., looks out from the hall shyly in disbelief – she saw those two grown-ups shouting with each other and then here there are sitting, drinking beer and talking friendly and excitedly.
The guy explains, that it was the daughter who insisted that they turn back and talk to me, she didn’t like the way the conflict unfolded as well. I almost cry of happiness, realising how much wiser children can be, than us, the lost and over-stressed adults. He also says that he didn’t intend to sound so rude, but having to switch to English and with the adrenaline levels rising within milliseconds only a “stupid idiot” came out, and we both laugh about it and I can understand that totally as well.
Half an hour or so later I finish my drink and am ready to go.
We exchange contacts, hug each other and both conclude, that we would wish that every conflict could have been solved in this friendly manner. After all, we both understood our positions and contexts of our anger/fear and other unproductive emotions that came into play.
I go home smiling, feeling relieved. If that conflict wasn’t solved this way, it might have stayed poisonously in my body for many weeks to come, but it flushed away by untangling motives and emotions, and all i have now is possibly a new friend, or at least a person I know I respect, a person wise enough to communicate, openly discuss mistakes and ready to hear others.
Conclusions:
- There’s no conflict that can’t be de-escalated if sides are ready to speak honestly and listen to the tenets of their counterfeit
- We need to listen to what children say – let them rule the world
- I need to quit smoking
- I need to find better ways to seal peace treaties than alcohol
** as we discuss the story i am writing with the guy per emails, he notes:
“Although we were both angry – but we attacked us only verbally and did not threaten us physically.
Every year in Germany there are many millions of real crimes and police operations with which the police are already busy enough. I consider apologizing to the police for my phone call and donating some money to a non-profit organization that supports police work. E.g. to the police chaplaincy, see: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polizeiseelsorge “
And although I do agree that in hindsight these calls were unnecessary in the end of the day, I am not ready to neither apologise, nor donate to german police for two simple reasons:
- They don’t need a fucking squad to escort a refugee to the airport to be deported. When this happened to me, I felt like it was a major operation of arresting Pablo Escobar or somebody of that sort, when a crowd of policemen invaded my place on early morning of 18th of July, 2018. And I spoke to other refugees in similar situations and seems like it’s their normal procedure. So I might consider talking nicely to the police after their apologies follow, but I don’t expect any of this to happen, indeed. Read my story about that day here.
- Donating to the police would also be against my principles, as far as the state is spending huge amounts of tax-payers’ money on marijuana-related police proceedings. This information can easily be found, for example here
2,39 Milliarden Euro. So viel könnte der Fiskus durch die Legalisierung von Cannabis pro Jahr einnehmen und einsparen, unterm Strich ***
Von Felix Sommerfeld
16.11.2018 / Spiegel
*** Translation: 2.39 billion euros. That’s how much the Treasury could earn and save by legalising cannabis per year, the bottom line.
