Twin in Berlin
Finding love in a Scottish dorm kitchen
When I finished my mandatory military service in Finland, I wanted to leave the country as fast as possible. Finland and I have made our peace today, but back then our relationship was a bit rocky.
I had a flight booked to Brazil (I’m Brazilian-Finnish) for a month later, but decided to travel a bit in order to not just sit around counting the days.
I spent a few days in London and then took the afternoon train headed to Edinburgh. It was a Friday and the train was an experience in itself. The first three hours you can barely hear a sound inside the car, and you see a few people reading and others wrapping up some work. Then when it hits Newcastle, a bunch of drunk people get on drinking and screaming on their way to a night out in Scotland. It’s beautiful.
My days in Edinburgh were a bit unusual. On my last night, I ended up at an end-of-season party for an underwater hockey team — a sport I never knew existed — and watched them repeatedly proclaim their collective love for garlic bread. We also played some strange games, and I woke up the next morning wondering if I’d just had a weird dream as I headed to Stirling, a small university town, to pay a quick visit to a friend from Finland.
She showed me around campus and we hung out by the lake catching up on life, and then decided to show up at a dorm party one of her friends was organizing. The party was in one of these combined kitchen-living room arrangements that is common of dorm setups in the UK and had probably around twenty people.
At the party, there were two twin sisters. My friend had told me about being into one of them before we came, and, with a little help from yours truly, they got together again a few weeks after having had their first kiss. Coincidentally, I found myself speaking a fair bit to the other twin, and, having taken a liking to each other, we discreetly kissed in the kitchen towards the end of the night.
When it was time to say goodbye, I mentioned it was my last day in Stirling, and that the next morning I’d be headed to Edinburgh. To my surprise, she said she was also headed to Edinburgh in the morning, as she was only in Stirling to visit her sister. We found out we were on the same train and decided to travel together.
This girl was unlike anybody I’d met so far in my life. We spoke nonstop during the train ride, and I learned she was a volunteer for a marine conservation project in Mexico, worked in a botanical garden, and, despite being reasonably slim and not noticeably muscular, played rugby for the Scottish national team.
We spent the afternoon together, jumping from cafe to cafe and being tourists in Edinburgh. Through this, I learned yet another curious fact: for years, every time she left a cafe or restaurant, she would paint or draw something (usually an animal), and leave it behind with a thank you note.
My heart was speaking loudly — I needed to spend more time with her. And so, out of nowhere and within less than twenty-four hours of knowing each other, I invited her to join me on my trip to Berlin two weeks later. I was nineteen and she was eighteen, and to both of us that sounded like quite a wild proposition. To external eyes, we were still strangers after all. She thanked me for the invite but said she couldn’t really get time off work, and thus wouldn’t be able to come.
We eventually said goodbye for good, I left Edinburgh, and thought that was the end of the story.
But then a week later I got a text: “I’m coming”.
When the excitement passed, I wondered how her parents, to whom she didn’t lie about the reason for this impromptu trip to Germany, felt about this whole thing.
We met in Berlin and had a wonderful three or four days together, essentially pretending (fairly well) to be a couple. We both felt quite strongly for one another. Yet the fantasy soon came to an end, with me leaving to Brazil and her back to Scotland, never to see each other again.
Years later, through my friend, I found out that she got married.
To love someone is to want the best for them. And hearing the news made me realize how true our short-lived love was, because I wasn’t jealous, I was actually happy.
Well, and just a little nostalgic.