Third-place winner, prose: 'German Day'

At seventeen, being squeezed, bumped, and jostled, I've been more intimate with strangers on a crowded Berlin bus than I have with anyone else.

I strain to decipher the driver's dysphonic gargle and miraculously land on the correct city street, clouded in hand-rolled cigarette smoke. Shuffling through the thick crowd, all breathing the same thin air, I board a thoroughly graffitied S-Bahn that I pray is the right one to carry me yet further from my warm bed that I so reluctantly abandoned in favor of a bitter, German morning.

I swat away the nagging, half translated Goethe poem that keeps tugging on my skirt and stepping on the back of my shoes and instead contemplate whether Rainer Maria Rilke could have fathomed that I'd be holding "Letters to a Young Poet" in his same city, but now on a train going eighty miles an hour.

As the vibrancy of the West turns to the gray of the East, I try to forget that I'm four thousand miles from familiarity. The buildings look like buildings, the people like people, but the discomfort of a hard train seat and the smell of sweat are universal, drawing me back into the S-Bahn car's singular slice of reality.

I think about one day writing something strong enough to provide respite to someone on public transportation but instead decide to take Rilke's advice and live a life worth commenting on first.

I'm suddenly shaken from this illusion by the sight of a 126-year-old church with half its steeple amputated by a bombing raid a couple blocks from a mosque built months ago - both with believers filing out staidly. Still stuck in the part of my rosy-cheeked haze that the harsh sights, scents, and sounds didn't quite wake me from, I walk the remaining blocks to Tempelhof Airport.

Inside, an elderly guide tells us that the airport, built in the '30s, was designed to emulate an outstretched eagle and takes us through its history as we traverse the massive, squat structure's wingspan. Where Berliners packed shoulder to shoulder hiding during air raids, where those Berliners whose homes had not survived, stayed, where POWs built supplies for their enemy's armies, where pilots of that country later landed minute after minute carrying supplies to feed their enemy's people, now has new life housing thousands of refugees.

With its illustrious history and hectic present, one wouldn't expect so many halls to stand empty. The further you go from the eagle's head, the more beige stone that didn't quite have a chance to be worn smooth there is.

After the hushed, echoey tour, I check with the frantic and kind people conducting volunteers like a cacophonous symphony, and am told to help the teacher corral little kids trying to learn phrases and colors in German that I myself had learned only a few months before.

After the lesson, I am redirected to sorting donated clothes.

It was conflicting. From speaking with the people at Tempelhof and my own school where many assimilated refugees attended, I, at first, felt connected to them as a fellow stranger adapting to Germany. I had found other people to laugh with about how the trains always arrive early, and I felt infinitely less lonely.

They showed me how to write my name in Arabic, that it's read right to left, and how to juggle a soccer a ball on my knees. I returned the favor by clarifying a few debates on how the words advertisement and squirrel were pronounced. However, with the perspective time brings, I soon realized how incomparable our lives actually were.

Living and learning in Berlin was a dream of mine for years. The want of change drove me from my comfortable life while they were driven by hope of the calm and comfort that I rejected. I had chosen this adventure and the adjoining discomfort of being in a foreign land, but, for many of them, it was the only choice they had.

I'm cautious of saying that these peoples' dire situation served as fodder for my own introspection. Recognizing privilege means nothing without the motivation to transcend it. Instead, what I believe is more important is that I felt helpful for the first time in a situation where I needed assistance doing the most mundane of things, like ordering at a restaurant or finding the grocery store.

I was able to support an endlessly inspiring goal; people dreaming of returning home, committed to reconstructing it. And this, in a city that had also been destroyed by war, rebuilt by generations of those now welcoming these refugees. I not only gained independence I couldn't have fathomed before, but I learned the value of that independence. I found purpose and comfort in surrendering myself as an aid to a cause I had no hope of solving. Above all, most importantly, I learned that it is OK to not always understand things in real time.

For all that I do grasp immediately, like a throbbing stubbed toe or compliments that redden my cheeks, there is much more to learn, like superpositioning or color theory, how electrons expel light, or why my best friend is angry with me, gravitational waves, the Iranian Revolution, or how it feels to lose a parent, the deep love in holding your sticky, crying child, the contentedness in growing old, or what it's like to be drafted for war, or taste Woolly Mammoth, or experience racial oppression-grow up in a war zone.

Most importantly, I learned there are places that don't need more voices as much as they need listeners willing to leave their warm beds and face the cold city air.