When I went to bed that night, I didn't know what was about to change. I had a hunch. A nice day of having a friend over. Watching TV. Engaging in normality.
I didn't look up the video. I didn't bite on the articles.
It was Hank Green's YouTube posting that brought in the news.
I wrote a text that night, questioning my own travel plans for February:
I've read Hank Green's post about a second ICE killing. And it makes me question my travels to the US. If it is a home or a fantasy escape that gains its power by not being real. If I look at the facts, it feels like a terrible thing to go there. Which makes me sad. But not that much right now. Like a home that was never mine burning, but I liked it in my heart. Then again, maybe it was always about it being in my heart. An idea. Which it is, fundamentally. Kind of became something different, apparently. I feel conflicted yet strangely more convicted. But what exactly that conviction is about and for, I don't know. To myself? I can't even tell right now. It's a strange sternness. In my eyes. A grown-up face of a man I didn't know was there. Who looks into my eyes and reflects who I am. Maybe it doesn't matter which way is home as long as I carry myself wherever I am. Maybe the question of what is a home might already be answered. Maybe it's faith. Testing me. Or believing in me too. It's all too strange to describe what's going on. Realer than ever. More insane than ever. More powerful than ever. How tremendous the gifts of life are. If received. And honored. And shared. And paid forward too. There's a strange rightness within me that doesn't care anymore about what is going on outside, as long as what's inside stays true to me. And that with every experience I experience myself in a deeper fashion. And that is truly a gift. And so I gift myself too, and the life I live towards the big thing called life. With conviction that there is righteousness and love and virtue and adventure and endless wonder to be witnessed, seen and shaped. Felt and heard, bled and sweat.
There was an oddly familiar nothingness dwelling in the morning coffee talk the next day. An oddly familiar void. Clean and noticeably quiet.
It's the sort of quietness that sets in after a loud noise. When the last fight is done. The last words shouted. The last shot fired.
It's the fog that lifts, revealing the most familiar of all faces: death.
The 25th of January 2026 is not a particular day. It's an overcast day. The snow falls, unbothered by it all.
It's in this calm that America died.
When you meet death for the first time, you might not be aware of it. There's something ephemeral about people who met death early in life. A certain depth. Like a door that was pushed open by the wind. A door that cannot be closed no matter the cost. It opens you up to a different kind of experience life happens to offer. And it's only experienced by meeting the inevitable.
It's strange to say there lies beauty in it. It doesn't feel like it most of the time. More like a window into nothingness, an abyss that feels strangely familiar. Almost like a distant, long-forgotten home.
Sometimes it feels like it's whispering your name. Calling you back. And sometimes you feel that answering its voice, letting your tired body fall into the clouds of dark.
For the most part, my relationship with America has been difficult. And mostly one-sided in my head. I used to joke about it. The most expensive subscription, I've called it, mocking the taxation befuddlement most dual citizens call their reality.
There's a deeper part in me, longing for a life that never happened. And maybe a part that mourns the country that now no longer is. And maybe never was.
Amidst the violence and politics, there's something much more delicate yet real that died that day.
America was never a country as much as it was an idea. A glorious idea, a violent idea. A great idea nonetheless.
An idea that offered that bizarre delusion that whatever you dreamt could become something real.
Amidst the harshness, warmth grew tightly.
I never felt American from an idealist perspective. Never felt like a native. Never felt German.
Culture seemed to surround me, to never be absorbed by me. I tried immersing myself. Over and over, drowning in otherness.
Yet out I came as myself.
I don't know who I am, yet feel more me than ever before.
America, as it was, died that day to me.
I don't know what's happening next.
Irrevocably, the path forward is set ablaze.
On is the only way.
May the flames keep us warm.
Or consume us all.