Water droplets run down the car window. Shivering in the wind, they race each other. Some merge and then continue together. I run my finger along the tip of the little streams and try to influence their path through the window with my warmth. I am five years old. Every journey feels long.
The beauty of the sound the rain makes on my roof window is endless. I lie in bed and look at the sky, whose gray is so blurred that it offers no point of reference for the eye. My girlfriend lies next to me. The comfort of the rain brings some calm between nervous uncertainty and excited anticipation. I am 16 years old. Little happens, nothing is missing.
From the fifth floor of the building, I can see the opposite facade of a brick street in Hamburg Ottensen. It always rains here, and whenever it rains, someone down below gets soaked. Everyone here is always soaked, and in the evening they wash away the water in a small pub with beer and cigarettes, only to walk back to their caves through the rain. I'm in my early 20s, and the city feels very big to me.
Two friends have built themselves a small wooden house overlooking a valley. Through the window, I watch the rain fall in slow motion on the forest and meadows. I am in my mid-forties, and my life requires a lot of energy. That's why I stand for a long time. A few days later, I spontaneously record an improvisation on the piano, an instrument that has always remained foreign and intangible to me, but I am delighted with the sound. As I do so, I think back to my friend's house. In the weeks that follow, I sit down at the piano here and there. And the melancholy that has always accompanied me takes on a quiet beauty.
