After one phone call in 1963, my grandmother was ready to grab her suitcase, fill it with essentials, and escape Spain—ruled by the same people who had murdered her uncle during the war. Francoist Spain.

She left behind an isolated country, suffocating under economic stagnation and political repression. Meanwhile, West Germany was experiencing the Wirtschaftswunder—the economic miracle that turned it into one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. The country needed workers, and Spain, along with Italy, Turkey, and Greece, became a major supplier of migrant labour under recruitment agreements.

She moved, along with other Spanish migrants, to a village near Hannover, home to the Bahlsen cakes and biscuits factory. Her hands were cold enough to work with chocolate desserts. There, she married a Spanish man and had my mother. Thirty years later, I was born in Spain, fortunate enough to hear about the European puzzle I longed to be part of. She had started an engine big enough to change a boy’s mind and blood.

Life before

I have always been obsessive; my way of enjoying hobbies has been to absorb as much as I could about a topic, and Berlin was no exception. I first knew of the city not as the capital of Germany but as a personality of its own—through my grandmother’s stories. The Germany of the sixties. During those years, she visited Berlin with a tour group. Now I wonder how real her impressions could have been. She told me about how modern it was, about its amenities, about the wall that still stood and made the city a little sadder, about the cold and the snow, about how welcome she had felt, about the openness of the wide, paved streets—nothing like the ones she knew back home. She also told me about the other side of the Wall and how it made her feel. She was confused when she stepped out of the bus that had driven her group into that other reality.

Extract from a recorded conversation we had about Berlin:

“I almost felt like my soul was falling to the ground. The difference between the two parts of Berlin was huge. As soon as you crossed over, you found yourself in gray streets with dull buildings. Even the people seemed sadder.”

“Well, Grandma, there were also well-kept, green neighborhoods in the East.”

“That’s definitely not what we saw. I went back to the village with a strange feeling inside me.”

Did I move to the right country? she wondered. Yet, when she returned to the village where she lived and worked, the doubt faded. Life carried on, steady and familiar, and Berlin became just another memory—one she would later pass down to me, igniting something I didn’t fully understand at the time. Even though she had only visited Berlin once, the impression it left on her was so profound that it transferred to me, despite my never having been there. I clung to her words, tracing and retracing the paths she had once walked, building my own imagined version of the city, layering it with fragments of her experience. Decades later, as I listened to her, I found myself asking: How could she have ever come back?

As a hungry, information-chewer limitless-rover teenager, the thought of my small northwestern Spanish city being the place where I would spend my most important years—as I used to think of my adolescence—made my soul crash every single time. I couldn’t stand hearing about the big-city life I couldn’t live. In response, I developed my own form of rebellion: I explored every place I had access to. Even abandoned places. I enjoyed the sensation of trespassing a border I didn’t even know who had established. A tendency toward the unknown—something that pulled me away from the familiar trees, roads, buildings, and shops. I tried to make it feel like a simulation of the life I could have lived in a bigger place. Obviously, it never truly worked, no matter how hard I tried. By then, I already knew— from having heard so much about it—that Berlin was what I was waiting for.

And so it was. The borders of my imagined city were officially blown away the moment I arrived in the capital of Germany. It was hard to process everything my brain perceived while I was there, but I fell in love. The neon flickers at night, the sharp-edged teenagers dressed in movie denim, carrying the cinematic club glamour that I knew existed on social media but not in real life. The city had a speed that dragged me in, as if I had stood too close to the train rails and the engine had sucked me under.

I was there as an exchange student for a week—not enough time to immerse myself in what I had discovered. We took excursions to places nearby, but I could only think about Kreuzberg, Alexanderplatz, and the suburban neighborhood where I stayed with my host family. During our free time, I insisted on taking the U-Bahn toward Hönow with Héctor, my partner, on avoiding the same stores we had in Spain, and on stopping by the street art to truly soak it in.Berlin wasn’t the Germany I had pictured, and now I know it’s very different from the rest of the country.

I looked at my feet, at the footprints I left behind, and wondered if any of them would match the faint traces my grandmother had left there decades before. The city she had told me about was still there, but there was something else—something that had grown in the fifty-year gap between her visit and mine. Something that perhaps had only been a seed when she first stepped there.

I know that not everyone feels baptised by the neon after visiting the city. My friends who accompanied me didn’t. They loved it, clearly, but I felt as if I was the only one who had perceived the lurking energy that sneaked between the pavement cracks. And then I left.

Life after

I wouldn’t say I feel drawn to self-destruction, but yes, a projection of that destruction. I was seven when I discovered you could kill yourself by jumping from the top of a torn down building on a videogame I liked. It was the only thing I wanted to do when I played the next times. You died, start again. And again. There was something hypnotic about it, about pressing up against the boundary of what was allowed, of choosing to fall just to see what would happen.

Berlin was at the other side of that boundary. The city had offered me something I couldn’t quite grasp, something thrilling, and then it was gone. And yet, I kept replaying it in my mind, jumping again and again into the memory of it, waiting to start over. I started following people from Berlin I found on Instagram (some of them are still on my following list) and I wanted to copy their style just to see if I could understand the city a little better. Their style, their taste, their aesthetics. Did I lose myself? Not really. At times I thought I did, but now I identify those moments as growth, stepping out of my comfort zone and leaning out over the cliff. Björk sings, “I imagine what my body would sound like slamming against those rocks,” and that puts into words what I have always felt. I was so ready to jump off the cliff.

I also kept going back and learning about the city. In the meantime, I have bumped into many legends about it. About the poor but sexy Berlin and how it has changed over time. People used to flock there because it was raw, chaotic, alive in a way that felt almost lawless —this is how I perceived it at the beginning. Now, many say those times are over. Berlin is no longer poor, and maybe less sexy too. Rents have skyrocketed, the underground culture is fading, and the city is shifting into something new. Still, I wonder—how much of that rebellious spirit remains? How much is nostalgia, and how much is real?

I sometimes think my life was started before I was born, when generations back someone caused the butterfly effect that made my grandma have the courage to make that phone call in 1963 and leave the country she knew. How many of my decisions are really mine. How can I unwrite them, and how susceptible to change are they from the moment they are set to the moment I meet with them. How the expectation of a city can be torn down, distorted, only to reveal a new truth just as appealing as the first idea. How can I know it is not all responding to the same plan?

The Berlin I first imagined is not the Berlin I met, and not the Berlin it is now. But perhaps, just like my grandmother’s journey, my perception of the city was never meant to be static. Maybe those versions—the one I created and the one I found—exist together, intertwined in a story that started long before me and that will continue pulling me forward, whether I realise it or not.