Dinner rolls and possible displacement.

A note on my belonging.

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On Tuesday night I shoved a couple rolls into the air fryer and dug through all two drawers in my shared fridge to find something to spread on them. My fridge was empty. The search was short. I grabbed two half-empty jars of veggie spread and what was left of my block of butter and sat at the dining room table, waiting for my buns to brown. While au pairing—cooking in someone else’s kitchen, unable to control what was in the fridge or on my plate—I often dreamt of what life would be like once I landed my cushy nine-to-five. I pondered buying a Jamie Oliver recipe book and working my way through every meal, page for page, in my own kitchen, with my own ingredients. Fish and cream and garden peas and jasmine rice and olives and capers and anything else I was deprived of when the palate of three children under the age of eight set my dietary guidelines. I imagined sipping a cheeky glass of wine in a button-up shirt with an open collar, the sun shining through the window of my small-but-chic Berlin apartment that I’ve got all to myself. My dream flashed and fled as I burnt my fingertips trying to grab the roll out of the air fryer and drop it on the cutting board.

While drying up dishes later on in the week, my glass lunchboxes I take to work and the pasta bowl I ate my emergency tortellini out of, I opened the shared cupboard where a housemate and I keep our crockery and actually uttered a phrase of disappointment aloud (in Afrikaans no less, which shows I meant business). He’d ‘put the dishes away’, and while everything was technically in the cupboard and the door closed and everything, I think he violated the spirit of the thing. My two pasta bowls lay inside of another, bigger fruit bowl. Within my bowl was a saucer. No cup. Next to them, on a stack of plates, was a different bowl, a stack of which actually resides behind the plates. On the shelf underneath the crockery are our (his) pans. The shallowest of which was resting on top of its lid for reasons I hope never to uncover nor understand. Confused and bewildered, I rolled my eyes and reorganised accordingly. What really bugs me is that he knows where his one bowl came from, it came from the stack behind the plates, but he just put it back on top of the plates … I considered scheduling a time to talk to him about everything but then I caught myself thinking something like oh, what’s the point, I’m only here temporarily, anyway.

And I suppose that’s true in the sense that we’re all temporarily here. Then I begin to think about how long I plan to be in my house and I … don’t know. I’ve been on the move for some years. Always changing scenery, initially in the way that many of us do: high school, university, maybe living away from home a bit. While friends were settling into jobs and starting to save up to move out of Mom and Dad’s place, I was wandering through a forest in upstate New York and google translating signposts in Berlin. My head’s finally stopped spinning, I’ve settled into a job and a house, and I’ve been hit with the emotional jet lag; wait, what? What have I agreed to? How long will I be here? And where is here, exactly?

I walked through Berlin on Thursday morning and had an odd moment of recognition: wait a second … this is Berlin! I’ve walked down streets and into dodgy train stations in this city for a year and a half now. My zip code isn’t a shock. That said—I’ve been having a sort of repetitive deja vu feeling while doing everyday tasks. I’ll be in the middle of shopping, scanning my long-life milk at the self-checkout at ALDI, and I’ll muse to myself that we don’t have self-checkout at home. Then the train of thought derails and I realise where I am. I’m in Berlin, where I have been for almost two years. I’ve scanned the barcode on my own milk dozens of times! Where am I? How did I get here?

It’s not homesickness or feeling displaced. I think that what may be happening, is that I’m approaching the cusp of something. A belonging. I considered myself a Berliner months ago, but I’ve gotten to the point now, where the city isn’t novel to me. I’ve seen this season, this neighbourhood, this shop, this train a hundred times before. I don’t catch myself looking out at the Spree river and thinking how far from Table Mountain I am. And then I catch myself because I haven’t caught myself. I’m losing my Afrikaans, I haven’t braaied a lamb chop in months, I don’t even wave at strangers on the street anymore. What’s happening to me!

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Well, I still wave about thirty-seven times more often than real Berliners do. A Berliner will stare you in the face while you stand aside and let them through a door first without cracking a smile or saying a word. Nee dankie, julle. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.