It is Saturday night in Berlin. I’m in a bar with my friends Normal Slavic Girl (formerly known as Unicorn Creature), Closety Gem and Privateman. Sina is also here. I’ve been at his place all day working on The Project. I’m making a movie in which I investigate the true purpose of art. In doing so, I’m making my own life subject. Sina is my collaborator and mentor on The Project. He’s a 42 year old ex-artist turned comedian from Iran. He’s got a mullet, a dubious reputation and many haters. Sina understands my artistic vision like no one else though, and he’s been showing true dedication to The Project and myself. After a day of working, we decided to go out and meet my friends for drinks. They’re all not very fond of Sina, but they’re trying to understand The Project and my reasons for letting him mentor me. In the bar, I’ve been preoccupied for the past ten minutes, trying to help out a random, seemingly very drunk Indian dude, who’s kept turning up next to me on the couch, asking for my help. I’d taken him outside for a minute to catch some fresh air. That’s when I realised that he’d been playing me. He really wasn’t that drunk. I went back inside to rejoin the group.

“I could have told you that guy was playing you”, Sina says with a drunken, vicious look in his eyes. He’s sitting across from me on the couch, next to him Normal Slavic Girl is sitting looking back and forth between Sina and I. Closety Gem and Privateman are both high on keta, cuddling in the corner. “Don’t judge me for my good heart”, I say and put my hands to my chest. “It’s not a good heart you have. You just have an idiot brain, that’s all”, Sina says to me and laughs. I look around the group to see if anyone else heard it. It doesn’t seem so, or at least no one is reacting. Everyone’s just starring at me now. I grab my bag and get up to go to the bathroom. The bar is full of wasted tourists, the music is loud and I have to push my way through the crowd of sweaty bodies. “Ronja”, someone yells behind me. I turn around and see Sina on the couch, making a gesture that I should bring him back a beer from the bar. I give him the middle finger and disappear into the bathrooms. 

In the toilet cabin, I take out my Tupperware box from my bag and place it right next to the toilet. I then pull down my skirt and underwear, and sit down on the toilet. I look between my legs to locate the blue string coming out of my vagina. I fetch it and slowly pull it out. My tampon has been in me for about three hours now, the maximum time before I start leaking. I raise it by it’s string so it’s hanging right in front of my eyes. It’s big and juicy. I watch the different textures of red colours swing back and forth before my eyes, mesmerisingly heavy content. I then tilt my head back and let the tampon hang down right in front of my nostrils. I inhale. I love this smell. The little cotton bullet is bearing witness of my own, vibrant insides. Middle earth. I have a feeling of ultimate closeness with my own body in this moment. What’s more satisfying than that? I carefully place the tampon on the sink next to the toilet. I need both my hands for my next step. I reach for the Tupperware box on the floor. The box is made of black, hard plastic, about 12 centimetres long and 3 centimetres deep. Probably intended as a snack box you can fill with cucumber -and carrot sticks. And it’s got an extra safe lock-mechanism to ensure it doesn’t open under turbulence. I unlock the box and open it. There’s already five used tampons in there. I’ve placed them next to each other in a neat order, making sure that the strings don’t interfere with one another. There’s space for exactly six used tampons in my box. I reach for the newest addition to my collection on the sink, and carefully put it next to the others. I’ve made it, the box is yet again complete. I close the Tupperware and put it back into my bag, carefully. I then pull out an unused tampon from my bag, wrap it open, and insert it. 

“I want to leave”, I say out loud, as I arrive back at the table where my friends are still sitting. Everyone immediately gets up and start putting on their coats and grabbing their bags. “What are you doing? Where are we going?”, Sina says, emerging from the crowd with a whiskey sour in his hand. “We’re leaving. Now.”, I say, “But I just got this drink”, Sina says, “Who cares, you can drink it on your way home”, I respond, and Sina then also starts putting on his coat. 

“Are you okay?”, Closety Gem asks me outside in the cold. “No I’m fucking furious, Sina’s drunk and rude and stupid again and I don’t want to be around him anymore”, I say, “But aren’t you staying at his place?”, Privateman asks me, “My stuff is at his place, yes, but I’ll sleep elsewhere. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out”, “Are you sure? It’s three o’ clock in the night?”, Normal Slavic Girl says, “Yes, I’m sure, see you soon”. We then all hug goodbye and I turn to drunk Sina who’s spilled half of his drink on his coat trying to sneak the glass out of the bar. “You owe me half a whiskey sour”, he says and takes a sip. “Shut up Sina, I don’t owe you anything”, I say and order an Uber.

“Why the fuck did you have to insult me in front of my friends?”, I ask Sina, as we’re both sitting in the back of the car. “Let’s not talk about it now. I don’t want to discuss such matters in a fucking Uber”, Sina says, and starts humming a song I don’t know, probably a Persian one. I then go quiet and take out my phone to text everyone I know in the city if I can crash at their places. Sina lives very far out in Berlin. In Schöneweide. Horrible location. No matter who’ll get back to me, if anyone even will, it’ll take me forever to get there. Ugh. I’m fucked. 

Having arrived at Sina’s place, I go straight to his living room to pack my suitcase. I throw all of my stuff in there, then grab the roll of tape I’ve brought with me from home. I hear Sina turn on his radio in the kitchen and open his fridge. I check my phone. No notifications. “If none of my friends answer, I’ll just go back to Leipzig when the first train leaves in the morning”, I think to myself as I take out the tampon Tupperware box from my bag. “Cookie come to me, let’s make peace”, Sina yells at me from his kitchen. “Fuck off Sina, no peacemaking tonight. Just leave me alone to sort out my stuff”, I yell back, and fetch out my disposable camera from my bag. With the camera, the Tupperware box and the tape in my hands, I look around Sina’s living room. His paintings are everywhere: On the walls, on the floor, on the couch, in the window frames. There’s even one nailed to the ceiling. They look like enlarged pages from a notebook : obsessive strokes, random colour scheme, his full name written on the front of each one of them, along with a few words here and there, small, catchy phrases, like “Sina Khani did nothing wrong”, “Help”, and “I hate my friends”. Sina has told me they’re all unfinished works, but still signed, in case he dies. He gave up painting a few years back to start his comedy career. That career ended well before it took off though, cause he apparently told a fatal joke on stage once, which got him cancelled from the comedy-scene in Berlin. To this day, he still hasn’t told me what the joke was exactly. “Which one of his paintings will it be tonight?”, I ask myself and walk to Sina’s bedroom, which is also full of his unfinished, signed paintings. I see a small one standing on the nightstand next to his bed. It’s new to me. It’s depicting a face painted in black, thick strokes, on top of a sort of abstract, chaotic landscape. In the middle of the face, it says “post woke”. Bingo. I go to Sina’s nightstand and put down the Tupperware, the tape roll and the camera. I then lift up the painting and turn it around. I can hear Sina in the kitchen, babbling along to that Messy-song by Lola Young, without knowing the lyrics properly. I start whistling along myself, as I carefully place Sina’s painting face down on his bed. I then open up the Tupperware box and look at my fine collection of my own, used tampons. “Which one for the post-woke painting?” I think to myself and look closer. “And then I’m too clever, and then I’m too fucking dumb. You hate it when I cry unless it’s that time of the month. And then I’m too perfect, till I open my big mouth, I want to be me, is that not allowed?”, I hear Sina turning up the volume of the radio, still attempting to sing along. I look at the colours of the six tampons. The dry ones are the darkest ones. The one from the bar is still moist and now has a sweet scent to it. The one from yesterday is special, I was bleeding rather heavily as I was on my way to Berlin from Leipzig. The tampon is completely dark, almost black, big, dead and beautiful. I fetch it out by it’s string, and place it neatly on the back of the canvas. I then take the tape roll and rip off a piece, fix the string to the back of the painting. I take a photo of the arrangement with my disposable camera, before putting the painting back where it came from. I then close the Tupperware again, and look around Sina’s bedroom. I’ve lost track of which paintings hold the bloody, little secret. Only my camera knows now. I leave the room and go back to the living room, put the tampon box, the tape roll and the disposable camera back into my bag, close my suitcase, and go to the kitchen. Sina has fallen asleep on his chair in the meantime, his head bend forwards, saliva dripping out of his mouth. The radio is still playing, and the sound of Miley Cyrus’ raspy voice fills the room:“I can buy myself flowers, write my own name in the sand. Talk to myself for hours. Say things you don’t understand. I can take myself dancing. And I can hold my own hand. Yeah, I can love me better than you can”. I turn up the volume to it’s max, which makes Sina immediately wake up and look at me, confused. He then dries off his mouth and shakes his head awake. “Hey cookie, let’s make peace!”, he yells out. I turn down the volume again, and look straight down at Sina on his chair. “Can you sit down please?”, Sina asks me, “It freaks me out that you’re standing like that”, “No”, I answer, “I don’t want to sit down right now. I’m on my way out the door, you know”. “Alright”, Sina says, looking at his beer on the table. “You know, I had a talk with Privateman in the bar”, he then tells me. “Oh yeah, what did he say?”, I ask, this should be interesting. “He asked me why I have to provoke so much all the time”, Sina says, “then I said my kink is to make stupid people angry”. “Yeah, that’s the only way for you to get hard, isn’t it?”, I say, and Sina nods his head, then grabs his beer to take a sip. He continues: “Yes, I told him I love to upset dumb people. It really is my kink, it turns me on. Some people like to be choked and pissed on and eat shit. I like to piss off people who are intellectually inferior to me.” Sina looks at me, the vicious look in his eyes is back now. “Privateman then asked me if I’m not afraid of getting cancelled” Sina says, “and you know what I said?”, I shake my head slowly in response, “What did you say, Sina?”, I ask, “I said that only God can cancel me!”, Sina bursts out and laughs at his own joke. I can’t help but laugh a bit myself as well. Sina’s an atheist. Sina and I look at each other for a little minute while Miley is still providing us with her words of empowerment. “Turn off the radio”, I then command of Sina in a sharp tone, still standing in front of him. He immediately reaches his arm out to press the power button, while keeping eye contact with me the entire time. Silence. I then say: “You know what? You are the perfect example of how one must learn to separate the art from the artist”. Sina looks at me with red eyes, then fetches out his phone from his jeans pocket and starts filming me. “I think you’re schizophrenic or something. Something rotten is going on with you”, I continue, “something deeply disturbing and rotten is happening inside of your psychological arena. And it’s serious. And I love it for art. Let’s make good use of it and see what happens, let’s admire your artistic brilliance! But you, as a person, suck. You, as a human being, suck. And this is actually really interesting to me. Cause in this moment I’m realising that it is true; It is possible to separate the art from the artist. This is what I’m doing with you. I am a very good example of that. Cause it is my belief that your art is good. And that your artistic vision is great. But you as a person, are a fucking asshole, okay. And that might have an influence on your art and your artistic vision. And thank God for that. Thank God for mental illness, and thank God for assholes, and thank God for whatever the fuck went wrong during your childhood. But I don’t want to be at the receiving end of it, and I don’t want to be a victim of it. I only want to make use of it for my own artistic purpose. So we can continue this collaboration, and it’s going to be great, I just know it. But I am not going to pretend that you are capable of having any other kind of relationship with me outside of The Project, cause you certainly are not, you fucking sick fuckhead” I look Sina straight into his drunken eyes behind his phone. He’s smiling a bit, “Good girl”, he then says, “I’m proud of you. Now get on your knees and give me one of your vanilla blowjobs”. Now I’m the one to burst out in laughter. “See you, you lunatic”, I say and leave the kitchen to go grab my things in the living room. As I leave Sina’s place, I slam the door behind me as hard as I can. Outside on the street, I inhale the cold, dark night. As I start walking towards the tram station, my phone buzzes in my pocket. Yes! I take it out. It’s Buggy Lover calling me. Thank fuck. I pick up. “So you need a place to crash?”, he asks me. “Yes, urgently”, I say, “but I’m very far away”. “Doesn’t matter. Take your time, I’m awake”, Buggy Lover says, “Are you alright though?”, he adds. I smile. “Oh definitely. I’m wet as a rain boot in a thunderstorm”. 

Dear Niko,

I’m sitting at my desk at home in the sun since a few hours. Last night I started working on a trailer for The Project, and looking through the large amount of footage from the past month, I went through many different emotions. I feel overwhelmed mostly, probably. I realised I need a place in my life, a secret island, where The Project doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong, it excites me that The Project is consuming my entire life, I invite this to happen with great appetite. But with that said, I really need a cave to hide away in once in a while, to breathe, reset, indulge in an entirely different reality for a moment. 

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Lena Dunham: 

“Romance was the only way I knew to completely forget about my obligations, to obliterate the self and become someone else.” 

And that’s it. That’s what I need in this phase of my life: Romance as a form of escapism. 

On Sunday morning as I was about to fall asleep after the Heartbreak Party, I thought about whether you’d felt sad during the evening.. When you texted me that you decided not to come to the reading, I felt a punch of sadness in my stomach, and I felt trapped and sort of paralysed in my response-options. I don’t want to lead you on, into a utopia where you will get from me what you’re looking for. And I also don’t want you to be stuck in a self-effacing compromise, stuck in a Ronja-cage that will become your zone of heartbreaking comfort as time passes, cause you think that what’s outside of it might be worse. Maybe the best way to describe to you what I mean exactly, is by letting you read an excerpt from the text I read out loud at the Heartbreak reading: 

“I feel like I’m going through a tunnel these days”, I start explaining to Niko. “I’m transitioning to some other side, and I don’t know what’s there exactly. I also don’t really care, cause I’m so in love with everything that’s happening in here in the tunnel”, I tell him, we’re still sitting in his kitchen, he’s wrapped his warm hands around my ankles now. He’s looking at me with eyes bursting with self-control: “Don’t fall. Stay at the abyss of reality”, they scream. “I’ve never felt more close to my work”, I continue. “Everything is possible inside this tunnel. I want to look at everything without distractions. One thing I’ve found in here is this photo. It’s black and white, rather old, but still sharp around the edges. It’s depicting flames in the shape of a female figure, in a sort of dancing posture. It’s my autonomous spirit. She’s got horns on her head, deep, dark eyes, full of thirst. She’s looking me straight into my eyes, saying: “It’s me. Don’t forget me again.” I look at TL’s shivering eyes, then jump: “I’ve come to realise that I don’t want a partner at all. And if you want to keep seeing me, you have to accept that”, I say and TL immediately scoff. “I don’t believe that you can really exclude the possibility of you being in a thriving relationship one day”. My autonomous spirit rolls her eyes. We’ve heard this before. It’s always the same. They never believe me when I tell them that I’m not the girlfriend they’ve been looking for. Cause I don’t want to be their girlfriend. And that’s really a part of the problem, it starts there. It’s not that I don’t know what I want, really. It’s that what I want is unacceptable to them. Cause what I want is not what they want. And they’ve got the societal norms on their side. And after a while of sleepless nights of negotiations and tears, one of us makes a heart-wrenching, deep-cut-compromise: Either he tries to fit into the almost invisible frame of the “Lovership” I’ve set for him, exerting all of his energy into fulfilling my ideal relationship-model, and thereby putting himself in an eternal position of dreaming and waiting, giving me so much power that I eventually start to feel bored and trapped by his hopeless devotion. Or I give in to the conventional girlfriend-boyfriend model, exerting all of my energy into adapting to this lifestyle of tedious twosomeness, while I loose track of my sense of self, the relationship an all-consuming, merciless vampire bite, and everything around me starts fading and dying. Including my art. Then the big disruption comes, the distortion, usually initiated by me, rehab, cheating, freedom, finally, again.

Of course my text should be seen as an example of how I turn my own life into an artwork, more so than a direct witness to what actually happens. But still, there is a lot of truth to be found in there. It’s a different kind of witness, maybe a kind of confession even. Confessions of an art whore.

So.. I’ve been thinking about whether it’s wise to see each other this week. Whether it’s wise to see each other at all. In this moment, I’m locating two big fears inside of myself:

I’m scared of trapping the both of us in something that might be very hurtful in the long run, especially for you. 

I’m scared of loosing people, good people, and eventually be trapped in the consequences of my own making, only left with bitter remorse and silent loneliness. 

It would be really nice to create a soft, warm, lovely lovership together, where we see each other once or twice a month, or every other month, when we want to escape our own realities and melt together in romantic sensuality. It would be nice if you could be my little island that I could go to, whenever everything starts to feel too consuming, and I need to let myself be consumed by something entirely different, to forget about my obligations, obliterate myself and become someone else for a moment. It would be really nice. 

But something tells me that that’s my utopia. Cause you’ve been very clear about what kind of life and what kind of relationship you want. So in the light of your honesty and my honesty, is seems that this fantasy of mine should stay a fantasy. Cause neither one of us should be making that big of a compromise. 

I don’t think it would be healthy in the long run.

I’m curious to know what you think though. Take the time you need to respond. And if you don’t feel like responding at all, that’s okay too. 

I brought the disposable cameras to have them developed. I’m especially looking forward to see the photos I took of you on our last night together. I think it will be special. R.