A Love Letter. Move to Borsum. My first YouTube channel about philosophy and poetry.

2012. One afternoon, I decided to try my luck with Clara. Most students had already finished, and the empty hallway was filled with silence. The warming sun rays penetrated the large windows of the hallway, where I stood anxiously waiting for Clara to appear in this passage. The longer I stood there, the faster my heart beat. The school bell startled me. She must be coming soon. The first students passed by me; probably heading home. Then came Clara.

“Hey, who are you waiting for?”

“Actually, I'm waiting for you. I knew you'd be done soon,” I replied. “I wrote something for you,” I continued.

She took the letter in her hand and wanted to open it.

“Wait! TOP SECRET! Better open it at home!”

“Alright, I have to go anyway. See you later,” said Clara, looking at me skeptically.

I couldn't sleep that night. I stared at the ceiling in the darkened room and kept thinking about whether Clara had already read the letter with my confession of love, and if so, how she had reacted.

The next day during break, I waited for her on the bench and ate my packed lunch. When she entered the hall, she didn't even come to me; instead, she joined the other nerds. She pretended not to know me at all. I already suspected that it hadn't turned out as I had hoped. When I confronted her about it, she just said she wasn't interested in a relationship.

Since that letter, she only hung out with other guys. She didn't even greet me anymore. Alexey wasn't always there, so since then, I mostly spent breaks alone, while various groups of students, the nerds, the cool kids, and the regular ones chatted incessantly about something or other.

I got along well with all these groups, but it still felt like I wasn't really on the same wavelength with anyone, so a friendship might develop. Nevertheless, I tried not to stand out too much as an outsider. I didn't sit too far away from others, especially to avoid attracting the gaze of the supervising teacher roaming the hallway.

Most of the time, I pretended to be reading a book and therefore didn't have time to chat. Meanwhile, I just stared into the open math book. But in my thoughts, I was with Clara, who was a few meters away from me, talking to other guys and laughing from time to time. It felt like she was laughing about me.

Sometimes, when I discreetly lifted my head to briefly glance at her, our eyes met. Then I quickly turned my face back into the book. Sometimes my gaze also met the gaze of the supervising teacher. He probably noticed my outsider status. So it was best to leave the school and take a walk around the block until the break was over.

While strolling through the city, I stopped in front of the display window of a tobacco shop. The wooden smoking pipes reminded me of Albert Einstein, who always smoked a pipe. I decided to go into the shop. When I opened the door, a bell rang, announcing my entrance. No one was at the cash register. It was quiet, and it smelled of some aromatic tobacco.

Suddenly, an old man emerged from behind the counter.

“Looking for a good pipe?” In that moment, I thought about how cool it would be to smoke a pipe and feel like Einstein.

“Are you still there?” he asked me again while I was lost in thought.

“Yes, I'd like to have an inexpensive pipe first. I'm still a beginner at this,” I blurted out spontaneously.

He recommended a black pipe for fifty euros. Along with it, filters, pipe cleaners, and cherry-flavored tobacco. I felt a bit sorry for spending so much pocket money at that moment, but the experience was worth it. Besides, pocket money was piling up for me anyway because I didn't know what to spend it on—except maybe for a chocolate bar or a cheese roll.

On the next school day, instead of sitting around in the hall during the break, I went outside the school, where over-eighteen students and a few teachers were hanging out and smoking. From my backpack, I pulled out my new pipe, already filled with tobacco, and lit it. After a few puffs, a huge white cloud, like a mushroom cloud, formed around me, overshadowing all the other smoke clouds. This drew the attention of all the smokers to me. For a brief moment, I was suddenly in the spotlight. Somehow, I liked that.

“That's pretty cool, can I have a drag?” asked a smoker standing nearby.

“Sure.”

It was always easy for me to grab the attention of others with crazy activities if I wanted to. But building and maintaining good friendships or a romantic relationship, that didn't seem to work out for me in Germany.

• I should never wait for something that interests me to be taught in school. I should learn it myself!
• The knowledge of how to create and build a website will later help me become financially independent.

Borsum

The reason for the move was a conflict with the previous landlord, which arose due to an accident with the dishwasher. Its connection had come loose, and it had flooded the entire kitchen with water, resulting in damage to the apartment that led to a legal dispute. A deep black mold spread in the storage room, which kept coming back despite our attempts to remove it with various means. No one would have believed me, but the stains reminded me each time of cryptic messages whose meaning I could never decipher.

A few days before this incident, Mascha and her friend Antonia asked me how to summon the Queen of Spades. They wanted to spend the night in a tent on our courtyard with Lauri and experience something spooky. I remembered vividly what we did back in Azov to summon the Queen of Spades into this world. I explained to them what they needed and warned them to remove the drawing on the mirror immediately if anyone felt uncomfortable...

In the dead silence of the night, a loud bang pierced my dreams as the front door slammed shut with alarming force. I widened my eyes, hearing faint cries for help in the distance, barely audible yet so unsettling: "Help, help." My heart began to race wildly, and without hesitation, I leaped out of bed and rushed to the front door.

I cautiously pressed my ear to the wood and recognized with horror that it was the voices of my sisters calling for help. I hastily slipped into my mother's slippers and rushed down the stairs to the courtyard. The light of the lantern revealed how the neighbor and my mother were trying to remove a massive branch from the completely devastated tent.

The tent, defenseless against the cruel play of nature, was a field of debris. As I looked up in horror at the treetop swaying threateningly in the wind, I felt with every fiber of my being that someone was hiding up there, but their figure remained hidden in the impenetrable darkness. The cold of the night penetrated my bones, and I was paralyzed.

Only when my mother and the neighbor freed my slightly injured sisters did I venture back to my room, stunned, and into bed. In the eerie silence of the night, I heard only the ticking of the clock, indicating 2:15 a.m. I lay awake for a long time, while my hand involuntarily slid to my chest, where under the T-shirt lay Gogi's cross. It protected me.

A few days later, the accident with the dishwasher and the black mold in the storage room occurred. My mother had to bear the costs, and she didn't earn much. After unsuccessfully trying to start a tutoring company for young children, she started working as a nursing assistant. It was tough work. She constantly had to fill in for sick employees and work on holidays, even on Christmas.

When she came home from work and found something not where it belonged, my very temperamental mother suddenly turned into a roaring Godzilla. It was exhausting to endure, so I got into the habit of quickly tidying up my things, vacuuming, and emptying the dishwasher to calm her down again.

Afterward, I needed to let off steam, usually with loud music and a pipe. Disturbed, a band Alexey always listened to, was perfect to bring me back to my original calm state. If I was already feeling sad, I would rather listen to music from Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Gothic, or World of Warcraft while shedding a few tears. Afterward, I felt much better.

I was very emotional. When we watched movies like Romeo and Juliet or Life is Beautiful in class, I was always so touched that I had to try to suppress my tears. I found it odd to cry in front of the whole class – especially because I had learned to think that a man should never cry.

Once, I couldn't suppress it, and tears streamed down my face while reading a war poem in German class. With each verse, a lump formed in my throat. Swallowing became increasingly difficult. My voice began to break. Then the first tears fell onto the paper with the poem. When my emotional state could no longer be concealed, and the others noticed, I ran out of the classroom and to the bathroom, to wash my face. Shortly after, my German teacher knocked on the bathroom door.

»Alex, is everything okay?«

»Yes, everything's fine. I just sometimes get too absorbed in the story.«

»Take your time. If you want to talk, let me know,« she suggested and seemed to be gone a few seconds later.

My first YouTube channel

2012. During the summer vacation, I created a YouTube channel to complement my website. I struggled with the name of the channel because my website practically covered everything imaginable - from mathematics to politics, poetry, philosophy, and diary entries to imaginary physics experiments. It was very universal, so the first name that came to mind was Universal Philosopher. No, that didn't really fit because it was about more than just philosophy.

Then I thought of Wannabe Genius. That sounded stupid. I didn't like other ideas either. Finally, the idea came to me: »Universal Thinker«. It didn't sound too crazy and represented my content well. Without hesitation, I changed the name of my website to match the YouTube channel to universaldenker.de.

With a small camera I found in the living room drawer, I shot my first video, which contained my thoughts on racism. With a better video camera I later acquired with my birthday money, I filmed myself chatting about the meaning of life, reciting my poems, or Goethe's lyrics.

In an added notebook, I collected my thoughts and ideas. Some of them, such as videos about the concept of truth, the functioning of interpersonal communication, or the origin of knowledge, I worked out and published on YouTube.

The first people commented on the videos. Most of the comments were nice. Some made fun of my accent, which I found just as funny when I listened to the video myself.

The most depressing comments for me were those claiming that everything I produced was garbage and that I should stop wasting their and my time. I took every hate comment to heart and then felt depressed and unmotivated for days because I had put a lot of work into these videos. These people made me delete most of the videos and content.

To free myself from the depressing thoughts, I smoked my pipe and listened to the birds chirping on the balcony. That helped me calm down again.

After a while, I got used to the hate comments. I realized that it was actually just a few people who seemed to enjoy humiliating me or criticizing me unfairly. I decided to block anyone who insulted me. I reminded myself that behind the hate comments were probably people who had private problems and therefore vented their frustration on me under the cloak of anonymity.