“Anne’s diary ends here.”

I got to the last sentence of that book when I was sitting at the kitchen table in an apartment in Berlin.

I was couch-surfing at a friend of Kathrin’s place. He was a friendly giant of a man who spoke enough English to say to me, “any friend of Kathy’s is a friend of mine” in this thick German accent before sneaking away to play first person shooter games in the next room. We coexisted fine.

The days were getting shorter, darker earlier. I’d made my way back to the apartment building through dark and rainy streets. I’d been walking nonstop for most of three days, exploring the many sights that Berlin has to offer on foot. My right knee was starting to hurt, and my dad and big sister told me to take a rest day. I could almost find my way there without the help of a GPS. Almost. I felt tired and lonely and a little sad.

I rang the doorbell a few times before anyone answered. There were folks gathered in the living room, sitting on the floor and doing each other’s hair and make up and lounging around on their phones and laughing. They were my cousin’s friend’s roommates and friends of roommates, and they were having a great time, and they were speaking German.

I can speak roughly enough German to order a cup of coffee, and I can understand just a little more. I’ve been trying to learn since January, and am slowly making progress. But in that moment, for the first time since leaving home, I felt isolated by that language barrier. I’ve gotten soo much better in the past couple of years, but I have always been shy, and not understanding the words made that shyness harder to overcome. I don’t think I’d ever realized how much listening in on conversations in a room of people talking made me feel a part of things. I felt like I was on the other side of an invisible wall, and couldn’t find a way through.

So I hid in the kitchen and I cooked. I had some vegetables and butter and bread from Aldi’s. I wish that I had tried to step inside that circle – I wanted to. But I was tired.

So that’s where I was at when I was sitting there at the kitchen table, escaping into Anne’s diary to get away from my own world for a moment, and that’s the day I was having when read the line “if only there were no other people in the world,” and that was the last thing she’d written in her diary, possibly the last thing she’d written in her short life.

I’d loved Anne, her story, her people. I loved her careful self-reflection and commentary and honesty and spark. I’d been stepping inside those pages in the evenings as one way to distract myself from how far away from home I am. Knowing that she’d been real, knowing that she wasn’t going to make it, only made that book more important to me. And then she was gone.

There were a lot of people in the apartment who didn’t know my name or where I was from or who I was, so I sort of hid in the bathroom until I could stop crying.

That same day I’d visited the Berlin Wall. I’d watched children playing between the rows and rows of dark monoliths that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I’d rested my chin on my arms on a stone ledge and peered into the tiny screen that is all Berlin has as a memorial to the gay folks that were persecuted under the same regime. “You are steeping yourself in the Holocaust. Be careful” my dad told me in a text. My sister recommended getting some kind of sage action for myself.

I read Night by Eli Wiesel that night. It’s a harrowing experience, “a slim volume of terrifying power,” and I didn’t mean to do that to myself on top of everything else, but something inside of me wanted to. I read it in one go, like drinking an entire bottle in one swallow. It was the only way that I could.

When I got to the end, I put it down. I felt years older and hollowed out and horrified and sad and my eyes were red and puffy and my head hurt.

There’s an ounce of self preservation inside of me that kicks in at moments like these. I put the book down. I took a shower. I brushed my teeth (I think I left that toothbrush there by accident, because when I got to the next city it was missing.) I made some tea. A couple of people from home reached out to me that night – people who usually make me laugh and smile and feel centered and connected to home – and I didn’t have the energy to write back much. I tried to communicate how I was doing, and just said that I needed to shift focus to self care things for a while.

I felt spiritually whooped.

When it gets too heavy, it’s okay to set it down for a while. It will be there if you want to pick it back up later. And it you don’t, that’s okay, too.

The next day, I got kicked out a coffee shop by a cranky German lady for not having enough cash for the coffee I had ordered, although she grudgingly gave it to me for free. On my way to the station, this older, homeless looking black guy smiled at me and asked if he could have a sip of the coffee. I gave him the whole thing. He grinned at me over his shoulder as we walked away, and called out a “you look good. I love you,” and I smiled.

I said goodbye and thank you to Kathrin’s friend. He gave me a hug and said “always again.” His girlfriend smiled at me, a little awkwardly, and waved goodbye.

On the bus out of Berlin, I read a lot of Terry Pratchett. I also got myself a lot of chocolate and proceeded to eat all of it. The sun was shining. The city was beautiful. The world was still turning.

It will be okay.