THE RED POINT, Excerpt 4

I check my bags at the station and step through the revolving brass door
onto Kaiser Joseph Strasse. Outside of a new streetcar construction site,
nothing has changed.

Could this be the same city I left six months ago? The same streets which
I reconstructed in my mind night after night, which had come to acquire
in my time away an aura of escaped reality, the quality of a myth?

But the mythic element is gone now. This is Freiburg, West Germany, and the
streets are just streets. People pass by, but nobody pauses to stare in
amazement at how much I may have changed.

I am simply here.

