nürnberg, of nürnberg trials fame, is the place where i was born.

i made my first friend here: our mothers had met in the hospital, and she was born just a few days before me. now, i can't even remember her name.

i left with not many memories but an ability to count to ten in german. i have only been back once, for a 2-hour layover between two buses when i was 18. the german they spoke was near-incomprehensible to me. the only other thing i remember is the group of punks with their dogs squatting in front of a mcdonalds by the bus station.

an idyllic childhood in a loghouse on a lake. we had our own forest and beach and a half-wild cat we named kiska.

summers were spent eating raspberries straight from the bushes in the woods, swimming in the lake, catching frogs, helping my mum garden, getting to sit in the riding mower with my granddad, finding magical clearings among the trees to play in with my friends.

winters were for skating on the lake, which got so frozen people would take out their cars and go drifting on it. sometimes, the snow would be so deep we would be stuck indoors for days.

i learnt to swim here. one time, my uncle took me out on the lake for fishing and i insisted on letting the fish back into the water. the wounds in their throats where the hook had pierced them bled into the lake. my uncle said they would die anyway.

one time a duck got stuck in the chimney of our sauna. i remember this incident being very traumatic, although i never saw the duck and it was removed soon enough. after that, i couldn't go to the bathroom on my own for a while and the sauna terrified me.

this house is where i first became obsessed with horses and the beatles.

horses: i accidentally stepped on a bee outside and got stung on the sole of my foot. to console me, my mother had me sit down on the living room sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and put on a new vhs she had just bought. "spirit: stallion of the cimarron" changed my life. from then on, i spent all my time outside galloping around, neighing and trying to eat grass, and all my time inside drawing horses and rewatching my new favourite movie. it still is one of my favourites, and i love the excuse to rewatch it every year or so whenever one of my friends tells me they've never seen it. something about wild horses running across a landscape gets me. could a human ever experience that kind of freedom?

the beatles: there were always cds playing in our house, and my parents had good taste. our one beatles album was the red album, a compilation of their greatest hits between 1962-1966, and something about it must have resonated with me because i remember obsessively listening to it, sitting right in front of the cd player, lyric booklet in hand, singing along to every word. that obsession faded over time and was replaced with others (such as avril lavigne and jedward), but i eventually found my way back to the beatles and actually listened to all their other music as well. i consider them my first and forever loves.