Post number forty-seven, Berlinale.

5:10AM, February 20, 2006

Grand Hyatt. Berlin. Germany.

L-Train was sitting on the bed, singing along to a Fred Hammond track while I hastily crammed my suitcases with formally clean, formally folded clothes. In his quiet/serious voice, he suggested we figure out when we’d see each other next, to make this morning’s goodbye less difficult. The next moment, oblivious to cliché and irony, he drunkenly declared the BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN theme to be “our song”, while at the same time announcing his absolute inability to connect emotionally with other people on more than a superficial level.

Bags packed, goodbyes said (with tentative plans for him to visit me in two weeks), I stumbled down the Grand Hyatt hallway, around the corner from our room and up to the bank of elevators.

I pushed the button, and beneath the almost instant whoosh of an elevator speeding up the shaft to take me away, I heard his voice calling my name from around the corner. My heart skipped a beat.

When I walked back to our hallway, he was standing there, nervous, smiling his thousand-watt smile.

He is confident and insecure. He is smart but doesn’t always act it. He uses his formidable charisma to get his way almost all the time. He doesn’t follow blindly. He always questions everything, a trait that I adore and abhor simultaneously. Simply, he drives me crazy.

I grinned dumbly back at him. We said goodbye again.

What a week.

It all started in NYC on February 13. I flew to Europe via NYC for the express purpose of spending Valentine’s Day with my Valentine, Hallmark Holiday be damned. I’m a sap.

The city was a snowy mess, icy sidewalks punctuated by great heaps of dirty snow and deep slushy puddles.

V-day we ate sushi at Nobu. Allegedly, Colin Farrel was there with us. Neither of us noticed him.

Wednesday afternoon he took me to his favorite sandwich shop in SoHo. We sat at a tiny table in the window, freezing and laughing while we devoured two of the world’s largest Italian sandwiches.

Wednesday nigh we left for Berlin. He flew direct, I connected through Heathrow. By 11AM on Thursday, we were under the covers at the Hotel Berlin, trying to sleep off the red-eye insomnia and acclimate to the local time.

Unfortunately, the hotel is currently undergoing major renovation that apparently involves significant use of a jackhammer from 9AM to 11PM daily. No nap for us. On the bright side, we were in one of the newly renovated rooms. It looked a little too much like an IKEA orgy, but it was definitely livable.

Livable, that is, until 6AM on Friday morning. The middle piece of a cheap triptych glued to the wall above the bed fell on my head, giving me a nice red lump and waking me from a desperately needed slumber.

Sleep deprived and unable to work out a suitable arrangement with the Hotel Berlin, we moved to the Grand Hyatt on Friday afternoon. Five stars. Nice. I fell asleep immediately upon checking in, and the two hour nap that ensued was among the best I’ve ever experienced.

The rest of the weekend was a blur of eating (no more sausages and schnitzel until further notice please), dancing (Madonna’s “Hung Up” is the ubiquitous hot song of the moment), movies (A STAR IS BORN, ALL ABOUT EVE, and a terrible film called VACATIONLAND), and general debauchery. We never made it back to the hotel before 3AM, where we ate impressive amounts of room service eggs, bacon, and sausage in our bathrobes before drifting off to sleep.

What a week together. It wasn’t always easy. We disagreed. We argued. We laughed. We doubted. We talked. We were honest with each other. It was an amazing time.

It scares me that this exhilarating relationship is a messy, human affair between two people with no guarantee.

It scares me that as much as we both try to sabotage this fledgling relationship with our own issues and insecurities, it continues stubbornly to deepen.

But then…

To be on the wire is life.

The rest is waiting.