When, in the path of a glacier, you built your town
You must have thought
You'd had 10,000 years
But 10,000 years comes before you know it
And anyways, things happen
To speed the course of events
(You couldn't have forseen, for instance,
Climate change, at the time)
I hope you understand
This isn't an admonishment
I have built my life
In much the same way.
You asked me
To wait for you
In my smooth, modal dress
The one, you'd always said, just shyly seemed to note the valleys of my body–
The dips above my hips
The curve of my lower back
You asked
That I wait for you
In our golden chair
Which made its way to me
All the way across an ocean
And a sea
All the while, the
Soft scarlet throw sent to us by my mother, still miraculously
Crumpled upon its seat
You want to know
If I'll wait for you, now,
As the evening sun falls- surrendered to the blackening hills of the Galil
And I will
I will wait,
Red lines, now drawn
Down the delicate pale of each arm.
So, I'm standing in the tortilla section at Shufersal, looking a little lost when a woman approaches, and asks, "&/'@&] tortillas?"
I take out one earbud, (ironically at the moment Joe Strummer is singing "I'm lost in the supermarket, I can no longer shop happily",) look at her and respond,
אאאם, סליחה, אני מחפשת טורטיות ללא גלוטן
She looks at me as if I've just asked her where I might find special vibrators for ducks, so I shake my head and explain,
"אאם, לא שמעתי מה אמרת, הקשבתי למוזיקה".
She nods, still looking at me as if I'm not someone she'd necessarily trust around innocent waterfowl, and repeats,
"?יש לך ויזה שלנו"
I respond,
".לא, ולא רוצה, תודה"
and quickly stick Joe back in my ear.
Finally done with my shopping, I make my way to the self-checkout. By now, my tracklist has switched to "Sandanista!" and Mick Jones is singing "Somebody got murdered", a little too cheerfully, I think.
I finish bagging my groceries, and am regretting having bought the 4-pack of 1.5 litre bottles of Schweppes on a day when I didn't bring my עגלה, when the woman who oversees the self check-out bay comes over to me, holding a pen. I figure she wants to check my receipt, so I hand it to her, but she doesn't take it.
I take out an earbud, looking at her quizzically.
"?יש לך ויזה שלנו"
she asks.
".לא, ואני לא רוצה"
I respond, demonstrably annoyed, struggling with my heavy shopping bags.
She steps in front of me, and in Russian accented Hebrew says,
"?למה את לא רוצה"
"!סתם, ככה, אוקיי? אני לא רוצה"
I respond, and replace my earbud, before struggling towards the escalator like an aardvark, trying to do the job of two packmules who are out sick with mono.
Later that evening, I'm sound asleep, when I suddenly wake in a cold sweat. It's pitch dark in my room, and I reach out a probing hand, looking for my phone.
Squinting, I see that it's 03:43. I sigh in exasperration, and allow the hand holding my phone to drop back onto the bed, but in the midst of its arc, there in its blue light, I see something that instantly terrifies me; peering at me, out of the dark, is a face.
Panicked, I turn on my lamp, and as soon as I do, I see that there is not just one, but at least 16 older Russian women standing around my bed. They're all wearing Shufersal uniforms, and holding clipboards, and in a perfectly timed, heavily Russian-accented chorus, they speak as one:
"?יש לך ויזה שלנו"
That's when I blacked out.
My lover comes
Uninvited
Unannounced, and
Always for an indeterminate stay
And I– good hostess that I am,
(Or hungry, if the truth be told)
Put fresh linens on the bed
Caress her face
Search her eyes for the stories that she won't tell
I tell her how she's the
Only one who truly knows me,
Ask her if she's planning to stay this time
Swear eagerly, promises I don't yet want to keep
Just to know the body that lies with mine
This familiarity,
A little longer
But as usual, she says
"That's up to you."
We both know this script by now.
I bury myself in sad poems
Sleep too much
In days
(Or weeks, or maybe even hours,)
Again, we'll go our separate ways, and still,
I fall asleep in her arms,
My head on her breasts
This heart that I've known as long as my own
Throbs, strong against my cheek
And when I wake, she's already gone.
I take my morning pills.
Make my strong black coffee.
I know as well as she, that
The day will come
Neither of us knows when
When I'll invite her to stay
And I'll mean it,
but until then
I've so much to do.
So much to do.
What then
To be when you easily see through the mask of this world
That purpose is a scam
Fulfillment, an empty promise to keep you hard at work?
What then
When you've examined it all and found
The columns just don't add up
They can't
(Their values were lies all along)
And what then
When you've reduced your old life to a
Pile of soft ash on a yellow sheet what then?
What then, when old demons return with warm arms to embrace you
Now that you realise they were
Friends all along
What then?
What then.
Do you know what it's like to be
in love with
a place and its people?
And I don't mean any mundane,
Ordinary kind of love, but
The kind for which you'd willingly lie down your life
At any given moment
Or perhaps, even more bravely,
Persist in enduring it, despite all the pain.
I mean
the kind of love where you can't bear to be away
Even for a month
And when life makes such demands
Even if only for two weeks,
You spend every moment in
Longing, dream every night
And each day of returning.
Despite all the ways
In which she breaks your heart,
And sometimes your back,
Or even your soul.
And while the world,
Those who've
Never belonged to a place
Who've no idea how to belong
(Only to subdue)
Bay cruelly from all outside corners
Taunt you and mock your pain
You know something that they don't:
You could never be torn from this place
Because you are this place
And she is you.
I don't know if it's a cruelty that only once we reach the second half (third third?) of our lives do we learn how precious and special it is to be alive. I don't know if it's a cruelty, because there is so little left to enjoy, or if this is a necessary requirement for this appreciation to spring forth. I know that there's no way to convince the young of this truth, (is that the cruelty?) and that it's something all who experience it must arrive at of their own volition.
This week while cleaning, I found my "suicide stash", the bag of narcotics I'd horded, and had once upon a time intended to ingest, ending my bodily experience of this world.
Rather than secreting it into one of the boxes that are even now heading towards my new home, I discarded it. There wasn't even a sniff of hesitancy.
While a time may yet come where impossible circumstances rear their head once again, forcing me to consider my options for a peaceful exit, at the moment I'm coasting on the fact that rather than give in last time, I chose to be brave and do the scariest thing I've ever done. If I did it once, I believe I can do it again.
As I said, life is precious.
For fuck's sake, live.
As I prepare to leave this apartment again, (now, for the last time,) a stone sits heavily in my throat. This entire time that I've been here, that stone has been with me, but I've done everything within my power to distract myself from it, to ignore it lest it cause me to stumble in my tracks, but I'm afraid that today, as I close that heavy, grey door behind myself for the last time, it will grow out of all control and break me apart.
I'm thinking right now about that meme I posted, twice I think, that warned- "when you leave a place, leave in the fastest way possible". I'm paraphrasing of course, and I can't even remember who it was that had said it, but it was deeply cathartic and seminal at the time, and at the moment I appreciate the sentiment more than I can express.
I won't miss this stale, suffocating place. What I'll miss is the life I once had here, and it's easy- through the cataract of nostalgia, to mistake one for the other, and already, although my brain is resolved, my heart is a little confused.
Inevitably, I'll invent regrets because that's what I, gluttonous emotional masochist that I am, do; I'll invent them and torture myself by blowing them out of all proportion, because what I truly miss is something that can't be recaptured- that sense of safety, and warmth, and completeness that I had with Carrie. I'll pepper myself with these unjust regrets because regret suggests control surrendered, and control surrendered can theoretically be recaptured, but this is a lie. The past is gone. Nostalgia is- not only blind, but treacherous and misguided.
My new life- my new imperfect, insecure, exciting, warm, wanting, fulfilling, beautiful life, is waiting for me, and all of it is on the other side of this apartment's door.
The first time I landed in Israel, I dropped off my enormous duffel bag out of which I'd live for the next 14 months or so at the moshav, changed into fresh clothes, and "tremped" my way out to the main road where I could catch a bus to Tel Aviv.
As we left the more rural areas of agricultural fields and got closer to the city, I began to see more and more signs in Hebrew.
Maybe it was the exhaustion, (I hadn't slept in over 24 hours,) but I began to sob. For the first time in my life, I was home, and I was in love.
This last April when I returned after all these years, I didn't cry. I didn't really have any powerful reaction at all. In fact, everything felt completely "normal" to me; I never encountered that blissful shock to the system that had once felt like the liberation of shedding old skin.
It's late December, and that moment still hasn't come. Everything is still just normal, almost boringly so. And yet, as I sit outside on a grey, blustery, Haifa winter day, my face gently lashed by the harbour rain, I can't help but feel that this... THIS, is incredibly special: this normalcy that I can almost take for granted. In fact, I've never felt this normal before.
In the centre of Haifa, on Horev Street, there's an old, abandoned Bauhaus building. I think it's a house, or at least it was at some point. It lives on a hill above, and removed from the street behind the privacy of a rough stone wall.
She looks like she's silently witnessed a hundred-million moments, notable, mundane, and everything in between.
There's something I need you to understand, since you've never been here before: on these dark, cool nights, especially the nights of the new or old moon, the softest black, velvet blanket lies over the city- freezing us all in this timeless space. If you find yourself here in these special moments, you might notice how we, (I'm including you in this,) become ghosts, maybe even haunting our own lives from a separated dimension.
I love to walk these dream streets, to hear the baying jackals and the rustling leaves‐ magic that even the occasional ambulance siren or revving scooter can't diminish.
I want to tell you why I've brought you here, to this spot, to stand on this sidewalk with me beside the busy boulevard, and stare at this house. Really, I want to tell you a secret; are you listening? This house terrifies me, but not for the reasons you might think.
I'm terrified, because I want to go inside. I want to go inside and become part of its story, the soul that looks out from its black windows, but really, this too is not what scares me. What does scare me, is that if I get inside, I might discover that I feel nothing, that it's simply another old, soulless shell. I'm afraid of losing the gorgeous possibilities, the stories I've told myself in one awful, banal, wonderless moment.
Perhaps it's better to linger outside, to press my fingertips on the rough, stone wall. To continue to love her from this sidewalk by the noisy boulevard.
And when I die
They may say that I just
Never amounted to much:
I never sought fame,
Or won some big game, or
Caused new blooms to bud,
But I have saved lives as anonymous as my own,
And I have leapt– blind
Into frontiers unknown.
I have loved, and I have lost
And I've learned when to forgive,
But most important of all
Whether noticed by others or not
Not once have I ever forgotten to live.
Uch.
The sink is full of dishes again and I have no energy to deal with them.
It's not emotional this time,
Stam,
I have no energy.
I could really sleep all day if only
I didn't need to get to the Misrad Hapanim
And my manicure is chipped
(Only 5 days in! Can you believe it?)
And I've run out of food, and
I'm sick of all the offerings on Wolt.
I push down the switch on the electric kettle
Pour the coarse brown granules of instant
Directly from their jar into a tall glass
"too much", I think, and pour even more.
Outside, the bright cold light is still
As it lies across the silver surface of the sea
And if I crane my neck, I can see the white, snow covered top of Har Hermon.
The Haifa sky is roaring tonight, except
Neither rockets, nor jets, but the
Most delicious storm is rolling through.
My eyes burn a bit and I want to sleep, but I'm
Loathe to miss even a single crack or
Lash of rain against my window.
No matter what, it's always been too long.
In NY, maybe once every few years we'd get a windowpane shaker, but even those were
Nothing compared to those daily storms that
Marked my Florida summer youth.
Age twelve, I'd run,
Ill advised out to soggy golf course across the street
To twirl in the drops,
catch
As many as I could in my curls
My dad used to say I was a duck.
(He wasn't half wrong. )
But now I'm being silly
Drowning in nostalgia when right now
Right here —
The cracks and lashes already decrease in frequency.
Oh, now, regrets:
Already, it all sounds so much further away.
How many breaks can a bowl endure?
Even if beautifully repaired each time
With lines of gold
An elegant map of its traumas,
With each new fall,
And more lines added
How long before it
All breaks down?
A memorial cast in gold exists only for others to appreciate.
Already, I am a ghost amidst the ruins.
No one who even would have cared I'd ever lived remains.
My memories, sensations, passions, dreams,
Words –
All turned to ash
Already blown away.
On the edge of a drowsy afternoon nap
Rumbles– made softer by distance and water
And were this not August, in Northern Israel
They might even be thunder
(indistinguishable but for context)
I close my eyes, and drift off into them
Something like the sea: something
Bigger than me.
Not ten seconds
Past ten minutes
After the last audible blast,
Already, outside
Trucks beep as they reverse
Wolt scooters rev to life
(At first, I swear, they sound almost like azakot)
Horns blare, and
Impatient workers shout over the din
As if nothing of potential great consequence had just happened
As if all of this was completely normal-
Our fragile lives, dependent
Upon a technology that
Still feels like a miracle
And although I, a sceptic,
Do not believe in miracles,
Here I am, now
Showered and dressed
Legs tucked beneath me, hot
Coffee on the couch
And from my window
The bay looks particularly blue today
Stark Mediterranean contrast to the
White roofs that lay like low tables between us
And the red and white
Candystriped arms of the bay port cranes
Turn the world from my window into
"le Tricolore"
I pour a second cup from my Moka pot
And turn up The Beatles
To dance with myself
The small, white puffs
That had punctuated the sky
Have already dissipated
No longer distinguishable from
Ordinary clouds.
Inbar Frishman
Friday, 27 September, 2024
09:23hr, Haifa
Up here, on Carmel
Above Haifa Bay
The early Fall wind is a
Loud, yowling banshee
Poking long fingers through cracks
And cracked windows
Below in the street
And under the cars
Heat cats
Join in on her chorus
(Out of sync)
But Boisterous as Berlioz'
"L'imperiale" !
Just now, I ran to do my
Sink full of dishes
It's been building, and
Haunting me, this task,
For days, but
Having heard Al Adha through my bathroom's open window,
I thought, "Maybe a break in the uncertainty
Before the alarms might
Abruptly wail again
And I'd have to abandon my task, and run
To the place where I've done so much waiting of late."
But also,
It's a noisy task-
Doing the dishes.
Apart from the sound of the running water, there's the
Claques and din of wet dishes colliding
I've been afraid, you see, I'd thought
I might miss the alarms- they're not
Always that audible, but
Emboldened by the
Thought– "they'll be busy praying"
I set out to conquer my
Own Mt Everest.
Whoever would have thought that
Doing the dishes
Would become a task I looked forward to?
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