Saturday was full of my favorite things.

I understand today the full purpose of the postcard assignment. I’ve enjoyed doing the assignment because the writing has helped the photograph come to life however today as I sit on the ground before the scaffolding-covered Pergamon Museum, looking nothing like the photograph on the flip-side of the blank space I’m filling with my manuscript, I understand the basis of this assignment and its relationship with memory and nostalgia. This is important.


I feel the clean whiteness of the scaffolding reflected on the inside of the museum in an echoing white room plastered with broken bits of history. The stone bodies shaped by hands of the past stand tall above me, showing what little expression they have left in their tired and pieced together livelihood. They’re looked at every day. Talked about. Learned from. The horrible, lackluster acoustics of this high-ceilinged room makes me feel as if I am standing inside a microwave. I feel like the little boy who watched too much TV, over their heads in a million pieces. There the sounds go, bouncing, twisting, returning. Boomeranging, they give me a headache—but in the room we remain.

I find myself in a second sound tunnel soon after: the Olympic Stadium where Berlin’s football fans congregate bier in hand to dizzily watch the professionals play. A blue-and-white sea of excitement rushing up and down in height and extremity surrounds me. Noise for hours. Hundreds of thousands of fans, packed densely together, each turning their identical team-colored scarves like helicopter blades over their heads, around the entire bowl-shaped stadium. This is before me. I’m so far up and the people of supposed interest are so small but my true subjects, clad in the blue and white their favorite team member wears every day at work, the fans, surround me. I feel electric and safe. Stadiums always do this to me. My feet are dirty, but I shamelessly rest them over the seat in front of me, risking the possible mocking which absolutely will come.


Tonight I will bring in tomorrow dancing with new German friends and pour myself into bed after dawn, hearing the morning’s first chirps as I walk home and feeling the sun’s rising rays as I cuddle down into my bed, smiling for a colorful Saturday.