We wait in front of the lawyer’s office, she came around 8:30. She was easy to spot in the homogeneous environment of this city, but we can not sit on the bench for a long time. No one is acting like us. We need camouflage if we are going to watch the office for hours.
This world is frenzied, at least here. Essential is the immediate need of satisfaction. Hardly anyone smiles unless he or she has just received a message. In this way, the social is also a raw material that can be consumed immediately.
When people walk through the city in isolation, all but the young people seem tired, joyless, worn out, and somehow empty. The city, despite many people, also seems strangely empty. For no one wants to be where they are, but each and everyone just rushes through one non-place to the next non-place, noisy passages, noisy transit areas, uncomfortable, devoid of plants, devoid of aesthetics, full of garbage and noise; the need for permanent, immediate need of satisfaction provides a rapid beat of frustration and short-term relief, which, however, does not really fulfill. Thus, their day is a perpetual falling and rising. People here take the foreground of things as the true; but they have never learned to perceive this foreground at the same time as a nothingness, as a dream, as a light floating. They take the appearance as the true, and at the same time they miss with the true also the beautiful appearance as such.
The lawyer left her office at 6:15 pm. Ava and I followed her at high risk. She went into a three-story building with her nameplate on the mailbox.
We decided that Ava would approach her tomorrow morning at an opportune moment. Fare evasion on the S-Bahn is a risk we can’t take.
For the short night we went far on foot almost to the Schlachtensee. The wind has picked up, it is bitterly cold. Snuggled up to Ava, my heart grows cold. I haven’t been this lost in decades, last time in the hands of the IFM.