I am skimming my way across the German countryside, going on ICE 515 from Köln to München (Cologne to Munich). Small towns nestled around churches and surrounded by fields bordered with yellow wildflowers, split unevenly by old forests with bushes and trees tall, short, gnarled, and straight. Green and uninhibited growth abounds and occasionally waves at the passing trains.
The sky is grey and the air feels cool and light, at least it did the last time I was outside of the train, about three hours ago in Köln. When we pass through rain at 245km an hour, small raindrops slide unevenly, patterning the window next to me.
My guitar is in my lap, a guitar I got for €60 in Sudlöhn, a town near the Germany-Netherlands border. The man who sold it to me was very kind and when I tried the guitar, he realized I wasn’t just getting it to play Wonderwall in some shitbrained attempt to get laid, that I actually played and didn’t want to lose practice while I was travelling. I got a case with it for a total cost of €80. I found the same guitar in a window in Köln for €129. This felt like an accomplishment.
The guitar has afforded me two friends already. There was a Grecian-German man and a British-German man in the the hostel we stayed at (I would write more about the hostel stay, but the only thing I can say on hostels is: imagine a hotel with bunk beds and dorm-mattresses and no A/C. They aren’t bad for sleeping and are good for meeting people). They were wonderful guys. I’m a little biased because they liked my music and kept asking me to play more, but I think they’d be nice to anyone. The guitar is already beginning to pay for itself in consideration of the amount of whiskey they gave me and Kevin when they found out we were from Tennessee (the Grecian-German man excused himself shortly into our conversation, I assumed to use the restroom, but came back a couple minutes later with plastic cups and an unopened bottle of Jim Beam and was very gracious with his serving-sizes).
I am now less worried about feeling alone. Though I am keeping the idea of pain and what havoc it wreaks on my emotions in mind, I don’t believe I’ll ever bike 125km (~80m) in two days again, so that’s comforting to know about myself. I think a healthy understanding of one’s mental health is deeply important when there is a history of even relative instability, and so I have to understand myself and what being alone and in pain and scared does to me, but as Kevin and I shook hands and hugged, right before I got on the train and he began walking to his platform, he told me to call him if I ever needed anything at all, and there’s nothing more comforting than having that sentence said to you with absolute sincerity by someone who has proven themselves to be nothing but kind.
Along with the Greecian-German and the British-German men, I made a friend in the Köln Hauptbahnhof (the main train station) as well. While waiting for the train, I asked a woman in pantomime if she would like me to scoot over and she nodded and sat next to me on the bench. Her and Kevin conversed in German and I sat in between them smiling and looking back and forth as they spoke as though I understood anything they were saying (I think in all situations it’s best to at least look like you’re making an effort). Though, as it turns out, she speaks great English.
She was going to Stuttgart, a place Kevin said was a shame I wasn’t stopping in, and was on the same train as me (München is the final stop of the train). Kevin, before we departed, told me to follow her if I was lost and I jokingly apologized for putting that burden on her but she said she didn’t mind. We sat together on the train and talked about music, travel, university, my issues with the U.S. (that was a long bit of the conversation), how she had never been to the U.S., etc. We talked for two hours or more. We talked like two people on a train talk when one of them offers the other a seat in pantomime at the train station, and it was really nice to make that kind of human connection. I showed her the song “Sober to Death” by Car-Seat Headrest and she at least pretended she really liked it. I would advise you look it up too.
I will never exist without fear. In fact, I think fear can be healthy when there’s danger around. But surrounded by so much sincerity, from the man at the guitar shop in Südlohn, the two men at the hostel in Köln, the woman at the train station, and a dear friend who wants mothing more than for me to have a good time and to know he will be there if I need him, I’m finding it difficult to be as scared as I was when I got here, when I felt alone a few nights ago. Humans need connection, and I’m finding that often, we find it. Even when you are scared and feel lost, whether in the nebulous sense of lost-in-life, or the literal sense of you don’t really know where you are or where you’re going.
The grey skies have cleared and I am almost to München, my next stop on this strange and thus far wonderful adventure. Bavaria awaits my arrival indifferently, and I await meeting it with excitement and a little bit of comfortable fear.
-Daylon M. Phillips (08/13/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 