NEUROTICA: Part 6
// a moment at the end of the year
today is my last day in Israel.
this trip surprised me from every angle: in religion, in personhood, in family, in physical self. I was not prepared — in the positive, should we call it open-minded? I came here open-minded. I surprised myself with a well of articulate thought. I met people, some of whom I’m glad I did because otherwise I never would, and others that I don’t love yet but could see myself loving someday.
I have been surprised
surprised in a blanket of being, a blanket that I didn’t know I needed as if I ached myself to numbness, discussion over an entrenched commonality between our fingernails and our cuticles, our questions and our cloudy breath.
Is this where I merge with the outside world? As if this time were the first. A marriage, not to Israel or to Judaism, but to conflict. To realizing conflict.
Maybe it doesn’t serve me to talk about the people, though I do or will love them all, but discussions. Zionism. Nationalism. Tribalism. A primal sense of belonging. This place is not my country or my home or ever real in the way in which I saw it, a tourist
home, I realize that I am alone in the rain and my hair is curling and wet and damp and my muscles are curling and wet and damp and these past months have had an emphasis on: time and what is: time and good time
why do I think about pomegranates? I have been thinking about pomegranates and now they are stacked in storefronts in aggravated families.
here has been a discussion of dreams and nightmares that transcend politics and delve into the subconscious and conscious defense, of moralism, of conditioning
and I must remember how it feels to move my muscles, to send empty words to the people I love and to make great and swiping movements through atomic thought; poetic language amounts to little action presented as
my grandmother who told me not to cry for her when she dies but my grandfather who wants to live forever — tell me what it is who made you who you are — he begs, unable to burn my face into his memory wall;
imprint the sun, bright and ferocious (an advanced English word, Gal says). Dani is slumped across a wicker chair to my right, her feet wrapped in orange-pattern sandals in Jerusalem on Saturday.
I have been surprised
that this is a year, an entire year; I have not held a job or a breath, I drank too much and have gained and lost several parts of myself and I am at a loss for what I should do for years to come, that this dirt moves around me, this debris moves around me, until I climb to the hilltops
where a breed of air exists; these cities on mountains exist; that for every infuriating hypocrisy and contradiction, these homes on slopes looking into each other, exist and
when you — me — feel parched of magical moments while also feeling jaded by the impossible reality of magic itself, remember the wind and the surprise and the black shadows on the west-facing side of all standing things.
