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.