Untitled Part 1

Too late I’ve discovered the one fundamental truth.
Life never turns out the way you expect it to.
In the dimly-lit, disinfectant-scented room I have come to known as well as my own apartment, I sink down into the hard metal chair and lean my arms on the battered desk. A moment later my head follows them.
“Bitte setzten Sie sich gerade hin.’’
“Sit up straight,” murmurs the interpreter somewhere to my left. Having studied German for six years I don’t want him and I don’t need him. Whatever. It seems petty to complain when I am eighteen years old and being charged with two counts of murder.
Murder. Mord. It doesn’t seem real. None of it seems at all real. My head feels like it’s caving in on itself. This is not how I expected to spend my autumn.
After a while they bring the sergeant a mug of tea and me weak coffee in a plastic cup. It is lukewarm and tastes like dishwater. I swill it round my mouth for a while before turning away surreptitiously and spitting it back into the cup. I cannot bring myself to look at any of them. I lean my cheek on my hand, turn away as if to hide myself from the torrent of words I know will soon be fired relentlessly at me.
Then comes that click, like the safety on a gun being released. The red light on the tape recorder is blinking, a demon eye. I can see it even through my closed eyelids. The sergeant says the date and my name. And then-
“Tell me about your connection to Stefanie Eberhardt.”
I look him straight in the eye then, a cold, blank stare. It unnerves him.
“I don’t want to talk to you about her,” I say, as I have said every time I have been asked this. And then I refuse to say anything more. Twenty-seven minutes later Sergeant Lehmann sighs and turns off the tape recorder. I can tell I am beginning to wear on his nerves. He shuts his notebook with a brusque snap and I am led back to my cell. The door shuts and is locked with a sharp click.
I have been in Berlin for twelve days, in police custody for five days. I can’t tell them what they need to know in any language, can’t even make it real in my own head. The grey walls, the ominous silences, the constant scrutiny- the whole thing terrifies me, fills me with a panic bordering on hysteria. And the officers can see it. Not only do they see as some mythomaniac teenage murderer, they are also beginning to question my sanity. As am I.
Pressure pounds in my head, my fingers cling instinctively to the edge of the bed; I feel like throwing up. Curling up gingerly on the narrow bunk, I knead my forehead with my knuckles until the sickening spinning feeling stops.
It is snowing outside, minute feathery flakes which dance but do not settle. For some reason the photo of my parents’ wedding which used to stand on the mantelpiece appears unbidden before my mind’s eye. It was a winter wedding, planned in a hurry. The breeze whispering in the weeping willows pulls back my mother Elena’s veil so that it is a streak of fluttering white, contrasting with the lustrous darkness of her hair. One beringed hand rests unconsciously on her stomach. Back in the days when she was still there for me, still wanted me. Another person I have lost to-
Tell me your connection to Stefanie Eberhardt.
I have to grit my teeth and bury my head under the pillow until the air runs out to stop myself thinking of her. It’s pathetic, but all that fills my mind is how I wanted, one rose-tinted day in the future, to take photos just like that; to make her Stefanie Lawrence.

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The officers are at a loss.
Not knowing how to continue, they begin again, in what seems to them a logical place- the very beginning. They attempt to look into my past, digging up files I never even knew existed- old school reports, medical records, exam results, notes taken by a counsellor I was forced to see twice a month when I was thirteen after a teacher saw cuts on my arms. That makes me uneasy. I wonder what was written. I wonder how they will interpret what they read. More than anything, I wonder if it could have been different. Maybe if…?
If what?
If she had stayed? If he had not loved her quite so much? His loving her any less would have spoiled the few years of my life that were purely carefree. A happiness here cancels out a sadness there, and vice versa. Like an unsolvable equation.
I could waste my life away meditating endlessly on ‘if only’s, but it will never change a thing. Not now. Not ever.