I love Berlin because it doesn't pretend.
The scars are still visible.
Not in a dramatic way.
They're simply there.
In the architecture. In the streets. In the fragments of wall that remain. In the strange tension between old and new.
The city doesn't try to convince you that nothing happened here. It doesn't smooth itself over. It doesn't cover everything in fresh plaster and a marketing campaign.
It tells the truth.
I've always been drawn to places like that. Places that wear their history openly.
The weathered door in India. The old hotel bar. The worn stone step. The antique chair. The faded photograph.
The things that reveal rather than conceal.
Which has made me wonder if what I'm really responding to isn't beauty at all.
It's evidence.
Evidence that something happened. Evidence that someone was here. Evidence that life was lived.
The older I get, the more suspicious I become of perfection. Not because I think perfection is bad. Because I think perfection is often edited. Curated. Sanitised. Stripped of the very thing that makes something interesting in the first place.
Its history. Its contradictions. Its scars.
Somewhere along the way we became obsessed with removing every trace. As though the goal is to arrive at the end of life looking as though none of it ever happened.
Which feels odd to me.
Because when I look around, the things I find most beautiful are usually the things that have survived something.
Berlin survived. Old buildings survived. Vintage clothes survived. Relationships survive. People survive.
The marks are not separate from the story.
The marks are the story.
Perhaps that's why I've never thought much about the scar that runs across my stomach. Not because I love it. Not because I've built some empowering narrative around it.
It simply exists.
It's evidence. Proof that something happened. Proof that I have a history. The same way Berlin has a history. The same way an old hotel has a history. The same way a weathered piece of furniture has a history.
And maybe that's what I've been drawn to all along.
Not scars. Not nostalgia. Not imperfection for imperfection's sake.
Truth.
The traces left behind when something has been fully lived.
Because the things that move me most have never been the things that look untouched.
They've always been the things that reveal where life happened.