Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the wall coming down in Germany. To celebrate there was a symbolic wall of white helium balloons put up all along where the wall used to be. They were lit up when the sun went down and then released to fly up to the sky lightless and with little messages written on them. The messages were for a select few but we asked someone with a message tag if we could write something for the voyage. She let me write on hers. I wrote a message for divided Cyprus. Maybe they will see it is possible to reunite. It was very moving for me. It felt clean and healthy. Nothing like the emotional constipation I feel when I think of the 40 year old Cyprus Problem.
I went to the Cypriot Embassy today to pick up my reissued Birth Certificate, as my original one, among every memory of my childhood, school times and adolescence, is in Nicosia. I can’t even fathom how much I have left behind. I hardly took anything with me. A suitcase. It’s like my mother’s stories from the war. I divorced everyone and everything. It is all new now.
Since the UK is making a great deal of noise regarding their EU status, demanding double standards and being racist (in my humble opinion), I have decided to get a Cypriot passport. I suppose I had to leave Cyprus to decide to become a citizen. I lived there as an alien (British) as a child, and an EU member as an adolescent. The reasoning was that if there was a war flare up in Cyprus and I was not exclusively a British citizen, Britain would not step in to offer protection. That no longer applies, as I live in Germany now. I have never lived anywhere where things work so sanely and efficiently. It is the polar opposite. I grew up in a divided capital. Now I live in a united capital. Good things CAN happen.