'I no longer wish to travel to the past'.

Byline: Mahrukh Murad

Until a few months ago, if someone had asked me which historic event would I want to witness first-hand I would have said, 'The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989.'

Why is that you ask?

Sumaira, a childhood friend of mine, became a victim of child marriage at thirteen. I met her after five years of separation. Her familiar face retained its warmth and childish charm. But her smile had changed. It had become careful as if her muscles now have to think before stretching. Memories rushed back with ease. The dolls we played with. The evenings we spent chasing each other around. While talking, we tiptoed around each other's life, unaware of how to navigate the boundaries that have sprung up. Despite being near, I felt a tangible distance between us. She had changed so much that I could barely recognize her. The change in her dialect.Her malnourished body with signs of poverty showing through. There was an alienation between us that neither was able to mask.

I imagine that such complexities of uprooted relationships must have existed within Berlin in 1989. I wished to observe the tangible descent of fear as the Berlin Wall was demolished and the first embrace between relatives who were separated as children but reunited as adults. I wondered how those divided by the Berlin Wall dealt with the sentiment of familiar strangeness that accompanies knowing the person but not knowing who they had become. I wanted to understand how reuniting relatives reformed bonds after decades of separation. How did they combat the fear of being ripped apart from each other again? Did they simply catapult themselves into a conversation or was it an awkward exercise of small talk?

In my time in Berlin, I would have looked for the presence of cracks left by estrangement from family and friends. And how exactly did the German people fill them? How were awkward silences and unexpected pauses resumed?

But today, my answer is different. I no...