Berliner Str. 103

Alboba

by Alboba

Story

Right across the street from my building was this giant housing block. Berliner Str. 103. The concrete beast held over 800 flats. Menacingly, it overshadowed the other houses on the street. Subsidized apartments funded by the government. Junkies lived there. Inside was a labyrinth of hallways tinted with sickly green-yellow lights. So many doors, you’d enter the backrooms, taking the wrong turn, never to be seen again. To throw away the trash, you had to pass a Middle Eastern-looking group of men who were playing cards and waiting for customers in the washing room. With the machines squeezed into the room, imitating a tomb. Occasionally, vouchers would be left in the letter box. Fifty cents a wash. Nothing good could have come from that building. One gray day, as I opened the door to the street, I stood on the uppermost step of the three leading up to my apartment. I observed the people standing in their windows. Cigarette smoke spread over the street like a blanket. The smell of weed traveled along. In one of the windows, I recognized a guy from my class. My hunting instincts were itching, and I thought he was cute. We waved at each other. We texted. I visited. He had a joint between his fingers, standing by the window. “You smoke weed? That shit fucking sucks. Drugs are for losers.” “Oh, OK. I just wanted to stop anyway.” He took the stud and pressed it into the ashtray. He had just entered the place. Inside his white bookshelf, I found mostly hentai and doujinshi fanzines. He had good taste. The soft drawings often depicted feminine boys in skirts and long hair. I stayed over often. A dim blue light came in from the street. I loved watching him suffer when I was on top. Apart from the nauseating highs of sex, the rest of the relationship was dogshit. We visited his family often. They looked at me disapprovingly, like all other parents before them. Like I had come to ruin their poor boy, who had developed his perfectly exotic tastes all on his own. Especially when it came to drugs. “Hey, wanna hang out in the city? We want to check out Cologne!” My friends invited me. “Can I bring Fabian?” “Uhm … sure, OK.” We ran up and down the city as the night was breaking in, but I had forgotten how much I loved the yellow lights against the sky. I was absorbed in my childish romance. My head was transfixed on my boyfriend, who had become my world, and I forgot myself and everyone else in it. So on the steps of the Neumarkt station, I ditched my friends. These new friends went out of their way to make me a surprise birthday party for my 19th birthday some weeks prior. They had even made me a cake. To go home with a guy who wasn’t worth it. And right there, I threw away everything I had always wanted. I replay this memory of me descending into the station’s belly over and over in my head. How the guys looked at each other right there atop the stairs. I remember the selfie in our group chat with them. My face was not on it. I did not have anything like that for a long time after that. They stopped inviting me. I didn’t exist in group chats, and I was unable to participate in anything. I was constantly hung up on this relationship. I demanded that my partner fill my whole world. I was trying to get something out of a relationship that only these friends could have given me. I was stuck. At night, from the flat across, screams of agony filled the hallways. “Goddamnit, FUCK. Ahhhahahaaa.” This neighbor who was hooked up on morphine woke up at night howling because he couldn’t find a vein to shoot.

© Alboba 2023-09-01

Genres
Novels & Stories
Moods
Dark, Emotional