LOVE ME OR KILL ME; or, AS COOL AS BERLIN; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 2

but we have so many friends, she says. sure they may not be as reflective as we would like them to be, but what do we do to make them so supportive? what do we do? reflect, probably. and that does make you interesting, but it also makes you wonder why sometimes people aren't very reflective. "i wanna be future with a history, out of tune but in my melody; je m'en fous...but very trendy." not necessarily the last one, but those are the words. and berlin is really cool. really, really cool. except for its capitalizing on its communist past, although that past has undeniably played a part in making the city an interesting place to live, even if a handful of years was enough for her to know that maybe she didn't want to live its capitalist future. for now. actually, she says, it sounds like portland is a lot like berlin. or that berlin is a lot of little portlands with different architecture. that's why you leave after the first decade of the twenty-first century. hardcore vintage is over, so why put up with the rain? you're probably getting priced out of the architecture you liked anyway. (the communist portland is probably super easy to spot, and the authenticity of the industrial design probably makes the coffee even better.) but he doesn't follow. he doesn't even make a show of pretending to try. but it isn't like you leave for somewhere else just to roll over and die. that's not even intimated, and any intimation would just be a matter of reflection. she can be urban poetry, young and wild and free, a friendly kind of freak somewhere else. love me or kill me, she might say, but that would just be to impress, um, maybe the irony of feeling it so hard that you want to go on living to figure it out. or to find someone more worthy of killing you. and in the end it isn't the death that kills you but that the audience doesn't get it. they might get it somewhere else (but not back in bavaria). of course there's flamenco in berlin, but it's not like she's dancing here in hopes of going back to start a school in berlin. and she explains that in her andalucian spanish, which only ever echoes the standard idiom of the central iberian plateau when her mother german makes it too easy for her to distinctly voice the hardness of her soft j's and g's. she doesn't hear it. but she will reflect. "y de algún modo de algún modo de algún modo comunicar algo del abrumador inmortal irrefrenable incondicional omniabarcador enriquecealma abreconsciencia constante inagotable amor que tengo." para ti. "i wanna be, i wanna be."