Void

This post may not be logical, or even chronological or complete, but I will try my best to detail that which I have for so long been hesitant to write. 

If I were to give any word to the Berlin weekend, it would be blur. The three days passed carelessly beautiful by just as the fields of yellow and green became mere brushstrokes of colour as our bus sped smoothly on the Autobahn. All I see now is a series of images blended into a stream of memories that will not so soon vanish. The Berlin of books and boring lectures became a brilliant painting with every step upon its streets. There is too much to be said, and I find my words failing me and my vocabulary vanishing. Some things exist in the wordlessness, but I will try to tell stories nonetheless.

I realize I cannot speak specifics, especially not after so much time has passed. I voice themes and a certain rhythm in my words. I start and stop no place in particular. A great heavy sense of somber had fallen upon me, and I can still feel it pressing upon me now even as I look backward in reflection. Memories come: It is Sunday in Berlin. I walked within a hall of crooked walls and angles. I walked upon a field of faces screams, and the loudness of the quiet. I found myself dizzied by the height of the towers and pillars. Staggered I was by my own smallness and near-nothingness. I knew a sense of calm but only because I had been so far drawn in thought. For the entirety of the Berlin weekend, I was awed. Death followed right behind each door we opened to the past. I burned, wept for that which was lost. I disappeared into an inner dialogue, and I began composing narratives of the scenes I had played.

The week that remained passed far too quickly still. The days were indistinguishable and even the details separating them are blurred; it was a great stretch of a strange mix of so many things. Similar sensations and themes found me again. Perhaps the most prominent of my reasons for hesitancy in recollecting was the sense of void that seemed to follow me. First in the Tower of Silence and then stepping over Menashe Kadishman's Fallen Leaves, I experienced an absence almost tangible—an empty space weighing down upon me. The feeling returned Tuesday as I looked upon Bergen-Belsen. The still trees and silence was unnerving. Green of life and peace covered what once was and only remains. The terrors of then are now but history—photographs, film, stories retold—but I felt it. I did not feel anything of what I expected to feel; I do not know what I felt. I just felt it. I felt such a void. Indifference, that was not it. It is something I might only say shared the name of one of Daniel Libeskind’s rooms; it was the Memory Void.