Goodbye, Berlin. I saw the friend I’ve been traveling with for two weeks off to the airport yesterday. At the moment I’m on a train¹ ferrying my costumes from the last two larps I did to another friend who has graciously offered to store them on the outskirts of Berlin; once that’s done I’m back to Tegel and gone from mainland Europe for about two months. And looking at my peregrinations, I’m probably gone from Berlin for a lot longer.

One of the advantages of travel is that I get to see a lot of friends far more frequently than I otherwise would. The flip side of that is I have to say goodbye to them just as often. Social psychology tells us losses have more of an impact than gains,² that the intensity of taking something away is greater than the joy of getting it in the first place. That certainly feels true in this moment.

But I know a lot of what I’m feeling right is larp drop, that complicated mix of negative emotions that often settles in after you’ve said goodbye to everyone and the heightened reality and intense socializing you get from a game gives way to a more mundane existence.³ Many people experience it as bitter regrets over the choices they didn’t make, or certainty that other players thought they were terrible. I used to, too. But I realized at some point that since it happened at virtually every game it was merely part of the process, and being part of the process means those things weren’t real — they were symptoms triggered by the hormonal crash. Hallucinations are easier to ignore once you recognize them for what they are. Maybe you were terrible, but I promise you’re not going to find that out through a depression-induced snap realization.

I’m finding myself surprisingly emotional⁴ about leaving Berlin, more so than leaving New York, for example. I suspect it’s because the enormity of leaving NYC is just too large to really wrap my head around. I was grieving the city for months before I actually caught the flight out.⁵ Berlin is different.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking of Berlin as my waystation — centrally located, easy to get to, easy to move in and out. I’ve visited it five times in the past four months. The basic schedule for next year is slowly coming together⁶ and I don’t have much reason to come through Berlin again for months. I’m still emotionally woozy, post-larp, and there are people I wanted to see and things I wanted to do before leaving. But I’ve swapped stability for momentum.

My friend and I didn’t get much touristy stuff done in the city in the few days we were there. But we did get to another Christmas market, and our cab on the way took us past the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate and the Holocaust Memorial and the Tiergarten. I’ve missed them. I’ll just have to visit them again, later, when I have time.

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb has, painted on one of the walls, a quote from a poem by Mary Oliver.⁷ I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m not unhappy about having to leave — I knew the price going in — but it feels occasionally like I’m chasing butterflies. I’ve had these amazing experiences over the past four months, things I’d never have seen and never have done unless I was living the way I am, but butterflies only live for a few weeks. You have to keep running.

The quote is:

To live in this world

you must be able to do three things:
to love that which is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

I’m trying. Deep breaths.

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Footnotes

¹ Having hopped the train in the morning, I discovered the Berlin ticketing app doesn’t appear to allow you to buy tickets. No explanation. I’d find the route, hit “Buy Ticket,” and be presented with a list of choices, none of which responded to any manner of clicking. There was no time to hop off and buy a physical one.

Of course, not more than 10 minutes after we left the conductor came around. I showed them the app wasn’t working, and they looked puzzled, took my phone, punched buttons on it for about 5 minutes, shrugged, handed it back, said “It’s okay,” and moved on.

² I was just talking last night with someone who left Inside Hamlet last year (their first big Nordic-style game) absolutely certain they were never playing another one. Since we both just played another one, it clearly didn’t take. Emotional games have a way of doing that. The benefits are a great deal more subtle than the downsides.

³ Not that I’d categorize my current existence as mundane.

⁴ Verklempt?

⁵ To this day Spotify keeps pushing Susanne Vega’s New York is a Woman to me based on the obsessive number of times I played it in June and July.

⁶ This is roughly the season where most of the big upcoming larps are announced

⁷ In Blackwater Woods.