Almost a Horse Girl
★ The Year-End Issue
YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO KETAMINE, BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT SNIFF.
You’re probably reading this at a weird time.
Not fully rested. Not fully hungover. Phone at twenty-four percent. One sock missing. There’s a text you meant to reply to yesterday and didn’t, and now it feels too late, even though it absolutely isn’t. Which you know. And are still not replying.
Berlin has been watching you do your thing. Not in a surveillance-state way. In the way any big city watches a million people perform this very specific version of fine while keeping the lights on.
You make plans you don’t fully mean. You cancel others and feel instant relief, followed by a brief, manageable guilt you ignore successfully. You learn which “I’ll try” means no, and which one means I want to, but don’t make me accountable.
Somewhere along the way, without ceremony, you develop preferences. A route you always take. A Späti dude you trust because he remembers your brand of cigarettes. An U-Bahn transfer you avoid because the lighting makes you feel like an extra in a movie about divorce. This is how the city claims you: through little habits you never announce and couldn’t defend in court.
Then, something goes wrong. Something minor. Your card gets declined at a bakery. The sourdough is six euros and worth it. A Frau at the back of the line sighs. You pull out cash you didn’t know you had, like a magician pulling self-respect out of a silky, slightly sticky top hat.
You finally check that message you’ve been avoiding and realize nothing happened. Just a New Year’s Eve status update. No confrontation. No resolution. The conversation didn’t end. It expired. It’s a ghost. Which is worse. And also fine. This is how everyone here lives.
2026 is the year of the fire horse. I don’t know who decided these things. Someone did.
I tried to get into horses when I was ten. Not passionately. Casually. My parents were trying to round me out. “Physical activity,” they said. Swimming. Karate. Table tennis. None of it stuck, sadly. At some point, I suggested horseback riding. No childhood dream. Just a thought that wandered in and stayed long enough to be taken seriously.
My mom and I went to a hippodrome. Asked at reception desk. Were told to go further down the corridor. The corridor seemed to stretch into infinity. The further we walked, the stronger it smelled. The unmistakable stench of something that’s very alive, and not especially interested in my personal development.
After one too many steps, we paused. We looked at each other, and turned around without saying a word. We walked, then practically ran back, half-laughing. Got in the car. Drove home. This was the end of my horseback-riding career.
I think about that moment sometimes. About how we didn’t push through. How we didn’t negotiate with ourselves. We just reached the point where the idea would have had to become a fact, and opted out. The story was never completed. But it was finished.
Berlin is full of these non-events. Things you almost do. Versions of self that get close enough to be plausible, then disappear without consequence. People tend to treat them like a failure of character. As if the goal of being alive is to close every loop and check every box. It’s not.
There is, in fact, a high-level power in the mid-corridor retreat. There is something deeply satisfying about it. The audacity of walking away before the climax. The freedom of leaving a trail of beautiful, incomplete sentences. Incomplete, but finished.
And yes, the sock is still missing. But the car is already running. 2026 is upon us. So, giddy up.
★ TYSM
If you’re still here, I’m touched. Not in the weird way. Or maybe in the weird way. In any case, thank you. Writing these is like throwing a message in a bottle across Torstraße traffic and hoping someone picks it up before it gets run over by a Lime scooter. You did. You read. That counts for something. Probably everything.
Ideas for the new year? Things you enjoyed? Things you didn’t care for? I look forward to all forms of respectful correspondence and light premonition. DM or email. Dealer’s choice.