surabhi raj

Being in Europe is to drink coffee in the morning and again in the afternoon and perhaps an espresso martini at night and not care what it costs because even if I did care, it would all be too delicious to pass up.

To drink coffee as an event instead of as a fix is what all great vacations are made of. Asking, where can we find this beverage, actively being drunk everywhere, right here– and how can we find some so good that the people who live here might dare to claim it as their own despite its worldwide ubiquity. In California, I will tell you to go to Philz and in Europe, I will tell you to go anywhere.

I was reminded as I walked and walked and kept walking through the streets of Berlin, Prague, and Rome that, just as many other people and critics alike have observed, America possesses a lack of beauty.

We have plenty of highways, McDonalds, and homes that look just like other homes, but beauty can be rare. New York is beautiful by way of experiences and expectations but physically, the senses are too often bombarded by excrement and excess.

We make beautiful movies with beautiful celebrities that fill the world’s cultural consciousness, but the ground we walk on and the buildings we step into–the things that make up our daily life and eventually our whole lives–are mass produced and functional to the point that they do nothing to make me feel like my life on Earth, no matter the day, is in fact miraculous.

The people around me provide that, the art I consume can provide that, so why can’t the material things in life also possess a sort of human artfulness? I’m open to ideas!

I wondered aloud as cigarette smoke filled the sidewalks and as I peered into the designated smoking rooms in bars, why despite the continuous lurching presence of Big Tobacco outside of the states, I had this uncanny feeling that Americans, broadly, must suffer a worse mortality rate. My boyfriend answered, “That’s because loneliness is worse for you than any of this other shit.”

“Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel in Paris all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York. Perhaps you feel, all the time to come.” -Giovanni’s Room

Even in a place like New York City which has the connectivity of trains and buses, of walkable streets, and a deep history of art, industries, and habitants, one can’t escape the curse of American individualism. New York is a place unlike anywhere else and yet serves as a reminder that its people are just like everyone else.

The future pushes into you here without any proof that you’ll actually make it very far, as every block you once knew churns out new restaurants and cafes faster than you can get to know the last one– faster than the city can feel truly lived in on an individual level. And yet, the impact of its massive and ever changing population is undeniable.

Our footsteps on these sidewalks matter collectively but it can be so hard to feel like part of a collective here, to feel collected at all. Should the city remember the weight we once carried around it or or is it up to its people to discover that compounding weight of all who ever walked here, themselves?

The way history is preserved in Europe feels like another world staking claims in this one, but in New York it feels like the world of the past so intimately knows our present that the tension between them manifests, not in the architecture but, in our minds.

“And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.” – Giovanni’s Room

Living in both the past and future here often feels like drowning but there it just felt like life. And yes, I was on vacation, but I wonder if there’s a way to achieve such a feat in my day to day. Thrown between history and its consequences without the tension of American despair but rather a traveler’s curiosity.

The way the people of Berlin look like they’re actively filming The Matrix, the way Italians treat their meals and their wine like something so essential to being human that it can’t just be about surviving. As if doing something to survive is exactly what makes it special. Though unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to the survival necessity of pooping or peeing– a toilet seat was rarely found in Rome, they do not want you to cherish those moments.

Being somewhere else absolved me briefly of the lens I wear around New York of looking for what needs to be fixed. It became much easier to see people as people instead of people as a reflection of systemic and cultural incompetence.

But that is the beauty of knowing a place too well, its flaws are not just visible, they are melded into my being. In a new city for just a few days, its flaws can hide but mine do not and as I senselessly and soberly cried our first night in Berlin, only that was obvious.

Surrounded by beauty and its people, I was reminded of how my dad was insistent on taking a tour around Europe only a year before he died. There wasn’t much of a possibility that he would make it that far, especially as it became increasingly difficult for him to move around the house, let alone the world.

But I’ve made it that far. And looking back it feels strangely just as impressive as his hope at the time. To have the world encompass its whole size in front of you is far different than feeling like your own emotions could overtake the world. Being somewhere with so much history is a duty for the living but causes such a reckoning with death.

Why the Italians can eat so much pizza and be so fit and why I cannot go on vacation without crying…it must all be ancestral, right?

Currently Listening:

• vampire by Olivia Rodrigo
• Sold Out by Hardy
• Most of the Time by Bob Dylan

Currently Watching:

• The Bear!!!!!!

Currently Reading:

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• Tokyo Euno Station by Yu Miri