To my thirty-year-old self

The ballpoint pen used up in the remotest corner,
The notebooks full of exercises hidden in the last mess.
The knowledge that was once imprinted fades more and more,
And what was once structure and content is now spent and empty.
Twelve years travelling on well-established tracks,
which at the final stop now point towards freedom…

…And I haven't the faintest idea how to deal with this new freedom
– I don't even know anymore who I am, where my
place is and where I want to go.
It was different at school, back then I still had answers to all
these questions:
Who am I?
A pupil.
Where is my place?
Second row by the window.
Where do I want to go?
In the "Flat Jokes" ranking of the school-leaving yearbook in the top three. (I even managed that.)
Life at school was gratefully well-structured and
unpleasantly uncomplicated; divided into lessons and free time and
if you couldn't be bothered at all, you'd simply stay at home
and skive, because it's still better not to go to school than to go to school
for the wrong reasons.
But otherwise I miss almost everything that was at least indirectly connected to
school: the sleepy glance at the supply timetable
in the morning, the smell in the gymnasium after the sweat of pubescent ninth-graders
dried on the blue
sports mats, the special elective subjects and school trips. All these things outside
regular lessons that made one forget that
education in the upper sixth is like a single gastro-intestinal effect, where
facts, formulae and recipes to memorise infect you like viruses
every hour anew – only to do with them in the A-levels
what South Korea did with the German
national team at the last World Cup: let them
be knocked out.
I want to be either 12 years younger or older, but not grow up;
don't want to have to think about Riester pensions at terraced house raclette evenings and it's enough for me to be able to cook as many dishes as there are varieties of frozen pizzas.
I want to be six years old again, when I had the greatest fear of my
life, after I had panicked with my set square after five episodes of "Willi will's wissen"

and measured my eye corners, because my
grandpa always said that eyes become angular after watching too much television.
I want to be six years old again, when I independently got the broken light bulb in
kindergarten to light up again by screwing it
back into the socket and only after my
nursery teacher said that despite this technical masterpiece I couldn't
appear in the next Saturn advert as a little assistant to Tech-Nick,
was my pride somewhat dampened and I was like
the light bulb from before: speechless.
I constantly look back nostalgically at the past, even though I
actually know that this nostalgia, like a filter, simply
blocks out all unpleasant memories. Perhaps life
was simpler, more carefree and less overwhelming back then, but
equally I was more naive, one-dimensional and sometimes just
plain stupid: I thought in primary school that the Cold War was
a war in which people froze very badly and during
PE I always voted against playing "Brennball"
because I didn't want them to have to set a ball on fire just for a silly game.
How naive all that was, I didn't know back then and somehow I'm afraid
that I still don't know it now and my current self
from the perspective of my self in 12 years will seem just as stupid as my
six-year-old self from the perspective of my current self.
So, dear thirty-year-old me, I have so many questions for you:
Tell me how stupid I am!
Tell me what I'm getting all wrong in life!
Tell me what mistakes I'll still make and how I can
avoid them!
Tell me how to flirt without seeming like a fool or an idiot or a
foolish idiot!
Tell me how to talk without seeming like a foolish idiot!
Tell me what's going on in your life: are you happy? Do you have
children? Do I know any of your friends? Where do you work? And
if the answer to that is "Siemens": what went wrong?
And as long as I don't have answers to these questions, I don't know
how to deal with my new freedom, but perhaps that's
exactly the point. Perhaps freedom also means having the freedom
to first find out who you are, where you belong

and how you should behave.
Perhaps I don't need to know or understand or have done everything straight away, perhaps I don't need to do everything just because I have the
freedom to do so – perhaps sometimes it's enough simply to accept my
current state and then eventually…
Then I'll fetch my ballpoint pen from the remotest corner,
Sink all the everyday worries in the very last mess.
I haven't found myself yet, but usually still find a rhyme,
And so I write my lines down and imprint them on myself.
I don't need others to show me the way,

Don't care what I miss, because I travel as if on tracks.
Yes, my train keeps going and if someone wonders
how I manage it, I just tell them: "BahnCard Hundred"!
And so I write my lines down and commit them to memory.
I don't need others to show me the way,
I don't care what I miss, because I travel like on rails.
Yes, my train keeps going and if someone wonders,
how I do it, I just tell them: "BahnCard One Hundred"!