A dry, gray afternoon. The air smells of bratwurst and beer, our team played a draw. The picture of my friend climbing over the barrier on the S-Bahn tracks. I hold his arm. Although it is still cool at the beginning of April, he is only wearing a thin jacket. It will be the last time I see him.
The crunch of the wire rope beneath his feet. The warmth of his arm through the fabric of his jacket. His stadium-roughened voice. Everything is still there. As if it were yesterday.
I now remember that he was unhappy beneath the chummy surface of our friendship. That he had stopped paying attention to himself and that he, who was usually clean-shaven and well-groomed, paid a lot of attention to his appearance. I now wish that I should have not only taken him by the arm much earlier to stop him from his daring climbing action, but also hugged him. I missed that. That remains in the past. What a shame.
What could your image description have to do with you personally?
For me, this picture is about care and friendship.
Some friendships last for decades, while others end. Sometimes abrupt and painful, sometimes gradually without us noticing it, and in retrospect it is just an image that remains with us. A picture that stores all the smells, colors and feelings of that time we spent together, when we were so close to each other.
I am grateful for my friends, and so I make sure they don’t become images.
David Rott is an actor and father of five children. He lives in Frankfurt am Main. He can currently be seen as one of four friends in the Netflix series Alpha Male
Pictures tell stories and every story says something about the person who tells it. Based on an old projective test, the TAT, we show a prominent personality a picture and ask them to interpret the scene. You can find more articles from the “One picture, two questions” section here.
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