Musa Okwonga’s astonishing memoir of the city, In the End, It Was All About Love, describes how Berlin calls her inhabitants home, compelled as if by the gentle contours of some mysterious gradient. I was caught in the well of its gravity years ago, when I first boarded a flight to come here for a conference knowing next to nothing about the city. It makes no sense that this is where I ended up, but reason and sense are not always conjoined.

The story told so often that it appears on my Wikipedia page, which is true but incomplete, is that I came to Berlin for safety reasons after the events in Charlottesville.¹ But why Berlin? is the question, why not Seattle or New York or London?

The simple answer I’ve given is that I happened upon a job at a time when a change sounded good. My best friend, Em, introduced me to a company called Thoughtworks that needed a data scientist even if in hindsight they didn’t really know what to do with one at the time. I found myself one day in an interview and before I knew it, boarding a plane, alone, with suitcases in tow setting off for a strange city, wondering how to maintain a marriage long distance, thinking maybe it would be a cooling-off adventure of a year or two. I had no intention or goal; the future was a big empty space.

That flight was seven years ago less one month. I never imagined it would have lasted this long or been this vast.

I have aged in these years, as the emerging gray streak in my jet black hair betrays, and I have filled the Spree with the tears I’ve shed from missing the rituals of home: birthdays and anniversaries, the deaths of pets, parties and movie nights and more than one community gathering hosted by the people I called comrades once. Charlottesville didn’t feel like home until the moment I had to leave it. In that time the Heimweh never really released its grasp, and the sorrow and the longing of the years I’ll never get back—nearly half of the years my wife and I have been together—have etched themselves scarwise into my soul. Though I am calmer now, more measured, there are still those nights when the anger and recrimination flare and a caustic fury rages in my heart against those who took my home from me and me from it.

I should instead owe them thanks. That big empty space lay out before me I filled with the most fulsome experiences: I have walked beneath the Eiffel Tower on a perfect September day; I have seen the tree-like columns of La Sagrada Familia and climbed the steps up to the Pražký hrad; I have seen the Colosseum, and the Parthenon, and the ancient, prehistorical temple at Mnajdra; I have dived naked into the Baltic sea at a Swedish sauna and relaxed among the hippies in Freetown Christiania; and drove in rickity buses through the mournful sublime of the Balkan Mountains; and the Carpathians; and watched the sun’s brilliant, waning light flicker off the minarets of the Hagia Sofia and out over the Golden Horn; and jogged the Thames' South Bank to the gothic reach of Westminster; and drank beer in Maß on the Wiesn; and lounged on the Zürichsee and watched the silent snow fall in parks in Rīga; I have seen the Slavic fearlessness and decency of Poles and Ukrainians in crisis, and the self-organization of the community of an entire continent to help them; and climbed to a crumbling watchtower on the Irish Sea; and walked the tiered, reclaimed canals of Utrecht; and been alone with Van Gogh, and Caspar David Friedrich, and Dalí, and let Guernica take my breath away; and walked the broad, communist boulevards of Bucharest; and Sofia; and shivered in the frozen Helsinki winters; and rode an old Soviet truck through an abandoned naval mine depot on an Estonian island; and swum in the Mediterrean and gambled beneath the Beaux Arts beauty of Monte Carlo; and struggled in French in Brussels, and in Català in Andorra la Vella, and in Albanian in Tiranë; and a hundred more stories that I am privileged to remember. And Berlin, city of my heart, who called to me, I have seen its ugliness and its beauty and its bewilderment and come to understand it and its pain. Its glamour crawls out from behind its traumas and lurking there, in the graffiti-covered walls, amidst its squats and its cruel coldness, one can find what it means to seek grace despite the calamity of the world, to find pathos despite pointlessness and what it means to endure.

Berlin showed me that the realness of one’s beauty seeps through no matter how many façades are erected to hide it. Berlin taught me to see people in a way that Charlottesville never could. Berlin taught me to see myself and that some tensions are not meant to be resolved.

In these years I have done and built such incredible things. Building my team at Thoughtworks will stand as one of the few truly great things I have ever done. Learning German in my 30s and 40s required a level of commitment, humility, and discipline I did not know I had in me. And surrendering myself to become forever an outsider required a confidence and self-assuredness I had long thought impossible.

But it is time now to go. To go back home.

Why now, with all that is going on in the country? Aren’t I less safe now than I ever have been? Maybe. But the years don’t make me younger, and if all I get is one more night to fight for my home and to be with my wife and family, then it is worth all the rest of the sunsets watched alone over all of those wonderful foreign places put together. But I will aim for ten thousand more and soon, in these coming days, will be the first of those.

I’ll be saying goodbye to Thoughtworks, taking a chance with a new journey in my career, and lining up a few projects I can’t wait to tell you all about. And I’ll write more, and read, and renovate the house, and run with the dog at the dog park in that infinite, timeless joy that dogs have that make it impossible to remember all of the acrid brutalities that punctuate life, and take pleasure again in mowing the lawn and listening to country music shamelessly and in public and in drinking beer with hops. Berlin may still lie in my future, but next time it won’t be alone.

So what was it, in the end, that called me to Berlin of all places? I can say it now: it was love. And it’s love that brings me home.

So ein wundersames Abenteuer, für das ich für ewig dankbar sein muss und sein werde.

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1. This is often confused with an allegation that I left America for political reasons; no, I left because a man was trying to have me killed, doing so even whilst he was in jail. His star has fallen from the sky in these intervening years, and today if he tried with all his might he couldn’t have a mouse killed at a cat convention. ↩︎