Got the immunization at Berlin-Wedding yesterday. It's been an exciting day. The air was hot = a summer day in early May. People stacked on the processing line: white bread Germans waiting in line, reddening under the sun. Dark-haired Germans administering the process – becomes one of those civilizing experiments in my mind. A water mark on whether we could do this together somehow.

The same organizational purpose I recognize during my own working hours. In the midst of the pandemic I still feel confident in terms of my approach to life and subsequent priorities. While we're here – all stacked – I try not to sacrifice structural development and foresight for momentous relief. I declare that I have a longer-term plan.

Then, I look at how my peers' everyday lives crumble. How they – despite beneficial circumstance¹ – cannot get themselves to be anything of anything. It's as if everyone had their plug pulled somewhere last year. As if life had stopped. To me, though, the world has never been as alive as it is right now. These are exciting times, too. I feel like this is where and when something is happening. Finally, this is our chance for change.

To me, the Germany of Berlin-Wedding marks an impressive demonstration of how willing those in lesser apartments, with worse opportunities – suffering language barriers and shitty jobs – are, to take (under which pretext, pretense, circumstance ever) on responsibility and carry it with dignity, humility and respect. Large, delicate processions like these deconstruct a vast mass of social matter into manageable increments. Civilization is claimed, one small step at a time. – And the posture you carry yourself with during that process betrays your fundamental attitude toward life.

Do you believe that telling thousands of people during a single day where to exactly sit, how to move, and who to go to next is worthy of your best effort? / Or do you harbor the urge to deconstruct and lament, to offend and expose?

To me, the down-trodden helplessness engulfing especially the apartment I share is utterly bewildering – and taken to its conclusion: sad. In here, some of us are non-conventional in a backhanded way. Within a rigid, secure system they could comfortably call themselves "renegades". In this pre-pandemic scenario "sporting dreadlocks" was attributed with some vague sense of political meaning – too harmless to face backlash, but unfamiliar enough still to raise your grandparents' eyebrows. Before, there has been a pleasant scent of failed revolution in the air at our kitchen table – which some are now accustomed to breathing.

For a long time, I felt intellectually annoyed anybody with something important to say was thus cheapened by association. Put together "with the whole lot." Now, seeing some of the dread-lock existences around me crumble doesn't fill me with satisfaction, though. Despair isn't attractive. It’s just sad, for every one of us involved. Because, yes, what made me hate the situation before was that I wanted my peers (even my roommates) to be better, life to be richer. Shit to actually taste bitter. Now, the feeling hasn't changed – has become more piercing, though.

In many ways, I regard this widening cleft with wonder – all the more as I don't seem to be affected by the pandemic quite the same way. So far, my life has mostly been (and continues to be) a pressure cooker. It's what I know anyway. Watching many of us get blindsided by how fragile the perpetual world motion can be, I find myself bewildered, heartless at times; distant, redeemed, and exasperated at turns. Watching how quickly some of us decline, how fragile their values are. How useless their principles! Now that the world is fundamentally compressed.

And yet within this pressure-cooker-situation a certain mildness within me soars: as demanding as the psyche of many of my roommates might be, I cannot hold them in any type of contempt. Moreover, I do find myself feeling loyal on numerous days. That is: despite their many misgivings and that superficial vulnerability –I'm comfortable. Because their vices are straightforward, acceptable and confined to habitable boundaries.

Apart stands Hans. The new guy in here, who makes me feel on edge all the time. I don't trust the clothes he wears, I don't trust his words, I don't trust even a smile. As a very typical "guy," the pandemic has cut him off from the status he's accustomed to. Here he is: stuck in a situation where he sees himself increasingly socially worth less, while the inner turmoil he doesn't know how to address or contain soars with every new day. I don't like Hans. But I know that him fishing for phrases like "you’re alright," or "…a good guy," are desperate in that he needs that approval in order to function and feel sane. External affirmation has helped him survive. He wouldn't know how to otherwise.

I don't have any incentive to keep Hans afloat. Something within me has changed: I found my own journey, this is a makeshift *home*. So, while I'm (for roughly the next ten months) busy putting up my own business, I welcome the comfort of this communal space any day with open arms. To me, this situation is worth preserving. To me, yeah, life that way is – at the very least – *fine*.

Nothing's eternal, I guess. Everything's afloat. Even when you have children you know to prepare for the time when they won't be around. Which isn’t long: 20 years maybe? – Then, you're back on your own. I like who I am these days. I like the apartment we share, I like my room. I'm willing to share this time and space with anyone. We have to do it together somehow, don't we?