Even though I woke up at 9am, I laid in bed (cardinal error) and slipped back into a doze. So I awoke (again) to this sound at 1pm that was coming from outside.

The sun was beaming which is an unusual blessing that does not last long- it’s tar black by 5pm.

I managed to stack a few matching layers of clothes over my bones and wander down the five flights of stairs and into the warmth of the day. I treated myself to a “Hasselnuss Latte” for 2.90 euro, and it was one of the better ones I’ve tasted here. Damp leaves and packed mud led me through a path that passed a beautiful park, ironically beautiful, as if it was saying “I’ve been here all along and you didn’t know it. Yes, I am this striking and unique.” I had to take several pictures to capture its beauty but I don’t know if I did.

Then I walked through another adorable stretch of street in a great neighborhood, St. Pauli, that continues to unfold new special spots to me. I’ve never walked the same path twice though I know I’ve been more than a handful of times. There was a plant shop and dozens of delightfully arranged window fronts, some with basement entrances and others on the ground floor, each structure a little different from the next. The buildings are colored in unexpected hues: yellows, blues, sometimes mint, and each window collection is different from the next, in harmony with whatever the door style is or the shape of the roof. Each building is it’s own little story, not all of them stand out, but to me, they are all important. They’ve stood there since before I learned how to stand. I regard and respect each of them, as if they are students in a class of mine or one of a few leaves on a plant I want to keep alive, or one of Carlton’s whiskers.

 

I hear the clanging sound again and now I’m really wondering what could be so loud that I would hear it yards from my apartment.

I come across the park, and the DOM (the seasonal theme park/festival/carnival) in the heart of the city is turned up: lights flashing, things spinning, a crowd moving festively through the aisle of fun and toward the bright lights of the rides and attractions. It looks like a money pit to me, and an engineered party, but I am still happy it’s there.

I finally get to the big park, “Planten Bloomen.” Water juts through an area with walkways, little bridges carrying you around the water. It’s still water with leaves floating on the top, calmly, with nowhere to be. The reflections show the vast trees. The trees sing here, even when their leaves are departing, they have music all year long. Have you looked at Germany on Apple maps? The whole country is covered in green. I eventually find a bench to perch, finish my chat with my sister, and I hear the clanging again, but this time it is coming from the mouth of a bouncy child at the top of a climbing set, seems like she is 50 feet in the air. The play area for the children was spread-out and massive. There was a winding path of brick that emerged out of the ground in a round shape and snaked around the whole play area. It was probably 200 feet long in all of its winds and turns and the kids followed it, jumping off and onto the snakes back, into the sandy dips below him, and back on, following of being chased by friends. The sound of children playing in a different language sounds hardly different at all. Kid playing noises are just that: language is involved but the tone, mood and expression behind the words is universal and recognizable to anyone who has ever been a child.

After I sat, scribbled a bit about Sweden in my memory-scrap-book, I wound myself back into my outerwear and set foot homeward, though it was only 4:30 so I didn’t want to go home right away. I had the perfect gloves that warmed me without making me too hot.

Before you know it, I am in a different section of the park that is dignified with beautiful tall and wide buildings. Town halls they look like, or giant concert halls? They are big, that’s what I know. And they are surrounded with different elements: statues, bridges with pleasing graffiti reflected in water, trees of all personalities, and all of this positively coated in light-golden leaves.

The clamor of this glorious earth woke me out of my lady-cramp slumber at 1pm and into a splendid unfolding of a beautiful place: I’ve somehow been plopped in the center.

I’m in love with Europe and the romance was reignited today. My venture to the park was a gift that I feel I didn’t request or deserve, and I don’t know who gave it to me. The clamoring sound that woke me and led me through these sights was a certain pitch of which I am not familiar: it was a resounding joy. The kind that is strong, unchanging, that doesn’t waver in the sight of period cramps, changes in season, grief. This kind of joy is made out of statue, it stands for centuries, maybe it surpasses your lifetime but it carries you through it. I ate a croque with peppermint tea (a croque is a European grilled cheese but with more fancy stuff piled on), I jotted more in my journal, and walked the rest of the way home in the day (at 6pm).

When I moved home from Seattle in 2010, I had no plan, no money and no direction. I was also very ill with a depression that started by uncertainty, anxiety and then was eclipsed by an existential crisis set in a city with a sunless winter. At the onset of it’s full rage, I woke up in the night and sat at my sister’s bed and cried. I cried for 30 minutes, the type of bawling that wells up from inside you but it doesn’t subside, it rages out of your eyes, nose, mouth and it wales from deep inside your soul. It tells you there is no cure, it will not stop until it’s eaten you entirely: so why are you crying when you can’t win? So you just continue and continue to wail until you are too tired to stay awake. Like a tidal wave, I was overcome by it and it took me a few years to reemerge. I’ve since worked through so much interpersonally, I found a job that provided me the means to move out of my parents, to save, to develop a life.

And last month I sold it all.

It’s taken much, much longer to reunite with happiness, reintroducing myself with a timid handshake which doesn’t trust anything. I shake, waiting for him to pull a fast one on me and send me back under. Now I am most grateful for a medicine that assists with the medical component of depression, but there are many sides to the word and the condition “depression” and I am only an expert in my own meadow of depression, my table for one. But I know that happiness knocked on my door today and I woke to answer it. I didn’t question its motives or ultimate plan, I just followed it by way of the sun rays to a park, the continual vocal eruption of children playing, and the trees that witnessed it all. But I didn’t know it was happiness, I just heard this weird clanging outside that told me I should investigate.

I have good news: it was a colorful walk and a beautiful park and a reason to wake up even though I have less of a plan than I did when I sat crying on my sister’s bed 5 years ago. Now I’m in Germany and I am crying on a different bed for entirely different reasons. I’m crying because I can’t think of a good reason not to. It didn’t rain today, for example.