Morning of.  Sitting on my uncovered mattress, tired.  Twice I have encountered two old men on the street.  One walked with a cane; I tried to take a picture of him with my zoom lens.  He ducked behind a building before I could click the shutter.  He reappeared in a completely different part of the city.  Suddenly there.

Another while I sat at a corner cafe, sipping wine.  An old man approaches, hands out, wanting something.  I pressed coins in his palm.  He smiled and backed away.  Blocks later, he shows up again, lopsided grin, asking for more.

My arms ache from lugging baggage, and I trade my heavy awkward bag for another.  I donate my old one to the hostel, easily discarded.  I am afraid the replacement–a cheap, polka-dotted-covered plastic sagging satchel–won’t last the journey.  I envision my belongings falling out at a railway station –me staring at the detritus of my life –lotions and creams, books I haven’t read, maps of the places I have been and will go.  A camera to record it all in a blur.  I stand there at a loss, always.

At the cafe the man moves on.

If this trip was to be found, I am as lost as ever. —

My plans changed:  I only stopped at a cafe for a meal once.  Instead, I found a corner grocery and stocked up on granola bars, bananas and beer.  This is my old self again: holed up in a dark apartment in a place where I didn’t want to be.  Paris, where I ventured out for a baguette and a bottle of wine; or Chicago where I made my way to Walgreen’s for daily provisions and back again; New York City, where I pined away for a man who could never love me, painting my nails and reading nothing, bestseller-trashy novels where I could be lost in someone else’s life; waiting for my picture to be taken in Tokyo somewhere, makeup done, glasses off, blind.

I have shared three meals in Berlin: one on the bike tour; we stopped for lunch at a beer garden.  An older woman traveling with her grown daughter sat at the other end of the bench.  Who was the woman across from me?  Where was she from?  Who was the man she was with?

The men are lost, misfits: the skinny guy from London on the hostel patio, smoking cigarettes, an expat who has been here for five weeks and is waiting for money to come through, something to happen to change his life into something different than this one, on this patio, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer while the young people all around him ignore him, giddy in their own worlds, oblivious.   He smokes and shuffles in a funny way, scraggly hair that hangs down his shoulders, hands drawing pictures in the air, tired of waiting for his life to begin.

Women are warriors, going out into the world, righting the wrongs, saying Fuck you! loud and sharp and clear.  Take it or leave me alone.

I want validation.  When it is not forthcoming I sit there thinking: I am 56, I am 56, I am 56.  I am disappearing.  No one notices, or cares, lost, too, in their lives.  The people languish in the lounge looking at their phones.  Late at night they chat on the patio, but I don’t feel compelled to join them. I listen from my box of a room; Berlin.

The streets are filled with life and energy, yet completely different from what I expected: this is not a European New York. They walk with purpose, but it is spread out and not as frenzied.  The bike trails crowd the sidewalks; if your head is up in the sky you will be clipped.   Everyone here is  young, hip.  Wearing clothes that are haphazard but somehow work; they smoke cigarettes, talk about life and how they will change it.

I was taught to look for something, not knowing what it might be.