In time, my turn came for certain things in Berlin too, and I began working in places that fed my dream world in ways that felt almost boundless. Working at Fusion Festival was because of this, and it brought a strange feeling with it.

I am the kind of person who is deeply attached to the state of being together, of building something alongside others. So going there a full week before the festival, witnessing the construction of that world from the beginning, wandering between the small distinct pockets of time and space that people were creating in every corner of that place, being present at their birth. Standing to one side with our beers, looking at spaces that were becoming works of art, talking about the process. It felt so rare. I felt so happy.

Until people began filling the place and performing their rituals.

This group that had flooded into Berlin, of which I was perhaps a part, was coming not only from Berlin but from everywhere, running toward this place where there were no police, no definitions, no moral rules, to tear off their identities and throw them away. But this liberation, this revolutionary movement that sounded so exciting, felt to me, throughout the entire festival, like the saddest thing.

All those worlds built with such excitement, and at the end of it all, people lost in the spell of ketamine, the vibrations of enormous speakers pounding into their bodies. I always think that worshipping the sun seems like a more genuine liberation somehow. Or building the festival itself.

At least I had my friends, I would tell myself. The joy of being with them was real. Being able to build something with them. Fusion is a very special place. Until it is built.

The last night before those people arrive it is like walking through a living open air museum, a breathing art gallery. It reminded me of the nights my mother would come and lie beside me as a child in Gaziantep, telling me stories about her own childhood in Germany, singing the lullabies she had brought back with her. For a whole week at Fusion I felt like I was wandering between sleep and waking inside the very place where those stories had been built. A place neither of us had ever actually been to, a place that held none of our memories, and yet I moved through it as if I had found the factory where the most intimate moments of my childhood were made.

Fusion is exactly like the dreams I had lying in my childhood bed. Until the ones with no identity come to fill it.