A Breach

Eliyahu Hanavi has a white beard, rides a white bike, and wears a white cap with the brim torn.

“Never have I seen anyone who so wants to be alone,” he told me suddenly. I hadn’t seen him arrive on his white bike.

Startled, I glared a fuck-off at him, but he caught it in the palm of his hand and examined it closely.

“Never have I seen anyone so content in their own solitude,” he told me again.

“Please let me solide,” my curt nod responded. And now I scowled daggers at him.

He seized one deftly, flipped it around, and stabbed me on the middle finger that I’d foreborne from holding up. I started back in surprise, and flipped it up to examine the wound, while he rode off along the seashore, whistling.

I add it to my list of injuries. 
For I am bleeding from multiple places:

A hangnail,

A blister on my left ankle,

A nearly-cured scab on my right knee,

The place I flossed too hard last night,

And a million other wounds, invisible now, but quietly opening me to the world.

I tell a student, “don’t cut,” but sometimes I am claustrophobic in my own skin.

Sometimes when I have stumbled

Or walked into a wall again

Or crunched down on my own tongue

So that it cannot give me away,

I examine the breach with pleasure—

Now, now, the world will know me and I, it.

Even prophets can be mistaken.

The Best Day Ever

Are you okay?

Are you guys okay?

I saw him, he pulled over by CVS.

I’m calling the police.

ARE YOU OKAY?

That’s all right, honey, you just breathe.

Put it in neutral—we’ll push you out of the intersection.

Neutral, not park.

Oh, it is? So why won’t it move?

You’d better get out of the car, there’s something leaking from the bottom. Was the air conditioning on?

Put your hazards on.

He just took off, but it’s all right, I got his license number.

You guys should come over to the side here.

Are the police coming?

See right here? The wheels won’t move because they’re both facing in—the right one got hit by the other car—that’s why. Was the air conditioning on? At all? Because… I know cars—I do cars. Oh, you’re so welcome.

Are you okay? Nobody hurt?

There come the fire truck.

You all right, ma’am? You both all right? Do you want me to check you? You sure? Where’s the other car? He’s gone?

Hey! Hey, Wengers! Do you guys want a ride home? I can pull around into the parking lot. You sure? Okay, take care!

Have you called a tow company? Good. We’re going to park the truck right next to you and place flares so nobody hits it twice.

Are you both all right?

Ah, here come the police. That’s all right, it was my pleasure. You just focus on the positive energy inside you.

What exactly happened, ma’am? And may I see your license and insurance information?

This has today’s date on it… Right now? You were on your way back from the BMV? Well, that’s funny. Well, not funny, exactly…

I wish that guy who just yelled out of his window had honked, too. Then I could have ticketed him.

Have a better day!

As the policeman pulled away with a wave out the window of his squad car, I thought about the phrases he must use with great care. Often, I’m sure, he can’t say, “have a good day.” “Have a better day” is a safe bet, in his line of work.

But as he rolled off, I wrapped my arms around my sister and thought that I was already having one of the better days of my life. My sister was fine, and had come through that terrifying half second when another car was heading into her side, a half-second in which I’d frantically thought, “Quick, we have to switch sea—“ She’d emerged with nothing more than laughter at the hysteric intensity with which I asked her, again and again, if she was okay. I was fine. Our car was even mostly fine, despite a severed tire rod that wouldn’t let it move.

In fact, it was one of the best days ever. A day of might-have-been gone fine. A day of pure appreciation for humanity, as I watched Columbusers filled with grace trying to help total strangers, a day of hugging my sister and loving her body for housing her spirit with such care, a day of touching base, in probably very incoherent ways, with the people that I suddenly needed, urgently, to touch base with, a day of deeply grateful conversations with G-d. A day I didn’t die. One of the best days ever.

______________________________

My sister just called me a drama queen for writing the above. Here's her take on the day:

You get into a car crash on your way home from renewing your license and about ten different Ohioans of every age, gender, and race converge around your busted vehicle to offer unsolicited love and advice. Somebody got the plate number of the dude who hit you, someone else is recommending “positive energy,” a homeless woman is giving the bemused cop testimony even though she didn’t see the crash, the Donatos pizza man is hugging your hyperventilating sister, and three skinny guys are trying to push the car out of the intersection. A fabulously hot fireman offers to “check you out” for injuries, and when your sister says no need, you’re like, “Oh, but… Okay.” 

Never change, Columbus.

Home is a Series of Habits

Yesterday I saw my baby sister for the first time in half a year, with no certainty about when I’ll next see her again beyond our 6:30 am breakfast date this Thursday, and naturally our conversation turned to our travels.

Here’s the thing about landing in America one year after making aliyah: I’m not really sure, I’m never sure anymore, about where I am. Or who I am.

Every time I walk off a plane, the shifting nature of my selves catches me by surprise. The first thing I want to do is stop, catch myself, sit alone until I remember all my truths. But no, one must live, one must shove one’s selves into a loosely fitting skin that hugs long-ago friends and try to maintain some coherence before the world.

At passport control and customs, American officials asked if I’d brought anything back from my visit to Israel. “I’m on a visit,” I told them. “I live there now.” (No, of course I didn’t—one doesn’t interrupt the flow of customs officials to discourse on identity. When I didn’t move on quickly enough from one, he repeated, “have a good day, ma’am,” with a polite insistency that startled me in its meaning of “move the hell on.” You have a good day. I am going to have whatever kind of day I want, and at least four more seconds of it will be spent right here, shoving my passport into my backpack).

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says that home is not a place, home is a series of habits. I like that line. I’ve carried it with me from the US to Norway to Canada to the American South and back to Israel. I’ve carried it with me as I craft a running route, take out a library card, attend (or don’t) my weekly shiur, and find the one place in the city where I can be alone with nature. I wonder whether my craving for repetition stems from my tiny insistent feeling of perpetual displacement. 

Do you remember who you were in high school? 

What about people? Reuniting with childhood friends in the US reminds me how unmoored I am in Tel Aviv. Even if the Ohioans don’t know the extent to which I've chosen my life, we’ve plunged the depths of growing up together, and nothing ever replaces that intimacy. One of them always jokes with me as I move away from a city: “so, which two people are you taking with you from here?” It’s true—I rarely have energy to carry more than two friendships with me from any given period in my life. But childhood friends overwhelm that, flood me with nostalgic joy, and we settle into comfort that I briefly regret—this solidly rooted existence could have been mine.

Then, on my way to the airport, alone again, I remember my freedom abroad. The independence of touring Montmartre on my own schedule, of hiking Ulriken in silence so deep I can hear the ice crack beneath the lake, of writing in Tel Aviv squares without interruption or agenda, and settling deeper into my self, into the sense that whatever is here, is really, truly, me. Me without performance, me without audience, simply my self and a chance to get to know it. I have lived in many places, and it has let me find many goals to be conquered and love to be given and beauty to make my own.

Sometimes, I walk around dazed and confused by the lives I seem to have already lived. I catch a brief scent of Paris outside the new boulangerie on Allenby, or a runaway cloud above the Tel Baruch beach looks like a patch of West Virginian sky, or I bump into a TFAer in Jerusalem, and I have to pause, to reorient myself in a map, to jump into living here, wherever here is. 

Sisters carry sisters through the Louvre when their bad leg gives out

And then, of course, yesterday I saw my sister, one of two constants in my ever-shifting life, and went whirling back up the rabbit hole to lounge beside her on the bank, to talk about books without pictures or conversations, of snark-hunting, of ships and sealing wax. We constantly flip the ground out from under our own feet, in some odd effort to know things that we think we can’t know otherwise, but together we remember who we always are.