I wanted to love you the way you wanted to be loved: with precision, with patience, with respect for everything you'd built to protect yourself.
I understood why you are the way you are. Post-war trauma crystallized into administrative procedure. The brilliant decision to make power so distributed that no one could ever grab it all again. You chose paralysis over tyranny.
I can't argue with that calculus.
Yet after thirty years, there's a strange taste to us.
It's not falling out of love.
It's the fading sense of self-betrayal that what we had was reciprocal.
I think it might've been just me. Not seeing you for what you are. But what I wanted you to be. Desperately wanted you to be.
Well meant quite often seems to be the dire opposite of well done.
And somewhere along those lines, I found myself.
There's a fine line where being able to see opportunity becomes its own form of limerence. A strange cage, one I've built myself.
My own version of well meant.
We didn't start out on good terms.
It was more akin to an arranged marriage. Mother, sister and I. Being kicked out from the US. It might've saved our lives.
We'll never know for sure. It did tear us apart. The pain was real.
So you became my second home from an early age. Though I never quite felt at home.
I felt like an outcast.
Tolerated. An anomaly.
Too many names. Dual citizenship. Why don't you choose? Why can't you see? Can't you know?
How things work here.
In our perfect little world. Where everybody knows that the grass is never greener on the other side. Where perfection isn't quite good enough.
Where logic is infallible, absolute — not just a tool at your disposal. Where feelings are something from a book. Something strangely distant from another time. Something for children, women and romantics.
Where sausages and cars are your sacred cows. And work still makes you free.
What's not to love?
I've been self-employed on and off for years. Long enough to know what independence feels like when it works — that electric moment when a project comes together, when a client says "yes, exactly that," when you solve a problem so elegantly you surprise yourself.
Those moments made everything worth it. Almost.
This journey ends this year. Undoing my self-employment is, surprise, an endeavour on its own. One last form, one last interaction with the maze.
I chose self-employment because I wanted control.
I thought I was buying freedom.
I bought employment by ghosts.
A boss with no face, no name, no locus of control.
No one designed you this way. Everyone maintains you. No one can change you.
You're a beautifully dense coral reef.
And for so long, I wanted to believe that you were alive. An organism with the potential to evolve.
But there's no one home.
The reef calcified long ago.
Petrifying itself for eternity.
It's not malice. It's paralysis.
I wanted to do good work. Clean, honest, valuable work.
I wanted the freedom to build something small and excellent. To take pride in craft. To say "I made that" and mean it. To become part of something larger.
I've tried so many times. The German things. The things you said were truly yours.
Breaking myself to fit in what's there.
You promised free range.
Each centimeter covered in fairness, sliced so thin it becomes its own cage with a view.
I thought for so long that if I just tried harder, you'd become what I sensed was always in you.
A place where precision enables instead of constrains.
Where complexity serves justice instead of extraction.
Where systems learn instead of just process.
Where doing good work is enough.
But you're not that place. Maybe not ever.
Somewhere between the first form and the last Bescheid, there's a line.
Where belief turns to reality.
Where hope turns to acceptance.
Where love turns to clarity.
And falling out of love becomes inevitable.
It hurts.
For all the hopes I'd placed on you were never yours to carry.
Yet still, and strangely, you fueled them too.
Addicted to your own potential.
I really wanted you to be as excellent as you claimed you wanted to be. To be part of it.
But there comes a point when talk doesn't suffice.
Eventually you'll have to start moving.
Maybe that's just my failing.
I really wanted to believe that we could move together.