Sunset Trains

It is May and already the sun isn't fully set by 9pm. Tonight, heading back from Kreuzberg from am Indian dinner with Michael, the sun wasn't yet gone. I walked for a bit down tree strewn and leaf canopied streets around Mehringdamm as the sun slowly slipped down the horizon, dodging between buildings, through the blanket of green.

When I reached the U6 and headed to Tempelhof to catch the Ring Bahn home, the sun was dipping low enough to turn the evening pink. As I waited in the rosen dusk for my train, the exposed platform at Tempelhof took on a new life. It was the moment before streetlamps come to life- when life in the pink, or at least behind rose colored glasses, seems infinitely and believably possible. Bathed in the warm glow of a day's end- everything became, for a moment, just.

On the Ring back, the sun continued to drop below the horizon and the familiar scenery outside the SBahn tracks of Eastern Berlin looked strangely different. For a moment, passing the Fernsehnturm at Alexanderplatz did not seem the icon of Berlin that I have lived with for the last nine months. It wasn't recognizable, despite the constancy of its presence down the old Stalinallee, the magic memories of it wrapped in fog, or the recent brilliance of its glimmer in the summer sun. It was a foreign object on the night's sky- one I was experiencing for the first time.

And as I walked through my courtyard, the sun's light all but gone, it too took on a new presence, the trees dark against a blanket of blue, the bicycles beneath silent and waiting, silence wrapping around, taking over the sun's warmth.