U-Bahn Femme (Jan. ‘19)

I sat on the U8 like it was confession.
The seats were red, plastic, unrepentant.
So was I.

I let the city read my sins back to me in Deutsche Bahn delay notifications and the soft slur of brake pads.
Berlin in January doesn’t flirt — she interrogates.
Gray skies like withheld apologies, concrete that remembers too much.

I wandered the Memorial to the Murdered Jews and tried not to cry between the stone slabs that swell taller the deeper you go — like guilt.
A few blocks over, Hitler’s bunker sleeps under a parking lot.
History here doesn’t whisper; it stares.
And I stared back.
Because I’m an American and don’t know better, and because some ghosts deserve to be seen.

That night I found a burlesque in a hidden speakeasy near Kreuzberg — red velvet, sharp eyeliner, whiskey in teacups, a girl who danced like revenge.

The next morning, I floated in a saltwater pool that played techno underwater.
It thudded through my ribs like regret in a bassline.

I thought about texting someone I shouldn’t.
I didn’t.
Berlin rewards restraint and punishes sentimentality.

At Kottbusser Tor, a woman with a shaved head and a sequined bag winked at me.
I was suddenly twenty-one again, crushing on girls I couldn’t read.
Or maybe she was just tired.
Or maybe I was.

I had tea on the floor of a Turkish tearoom, burned my tongue on sweet rosewater, and listened to someone’s heartbreak in Arabic.
There’s something holy about drinking from the same pot as strangers in a city that’s survived being split in two.

I thought of the girl I used to be when I first crossed the Atlantic — how I bought a one-way ticket to see if freedom could speak with a broken accent.
Turns out it can.
Sometimes it sounds like train brakes, like silence between tracks, like your own breath fogging a window in January.

Berlin taught me that healing wears combat boots.
That some walls fall and some stay standing in your chest.
That scars are just old maps with rewritten borders.

I got off three stops too late, on purpose.
Just to sit in it a little longer — the ache, the bass, the beauty.
Just to prove that I can still be a person between the versions of myself.

Author’s Note

This poem is inspired by my real, solo, very frigid, very formative winter trip to Germany — specifically Berlin, in all her grayscale glory. It’s rooted in lived experience: I wandered through January fog toward monuments heavy with history, slipped into speakeasies and saltwater pools, made stencils in a street art class, and drank tea on the floor of a Kreuzberg teahouse trying to feel whole again. Germany, unexpectedly, became a mirror. It taught me how to rise from the weight of my own worst mistakes. It taught me how to be in my body — naked in saunas, layered in sweaters, out of place and somehow still home. It showed me the fierce tenderness of burlesque and something stirred in me there, though I wouldn’t come out for another four years. But that night? I felt it. And I knew. This isn’t just a poem about public transportation. It’s about motion, memory, and the quiet revolt of becoming yourself in a foreign place that makes you feel, inexplicably, like you belong.