In my many months of not posting, so much has happened and yet it all happened so quickly that entire entries never seemed to materialize quickly enough to keep up. Sometimes I felt just like posting a photo and maybe one line. This was Purim, who knew it was such a party in the streets? I wanted to make some eloquent commentary about a Reuters photograph that was in the paper here of a little boy in Sderot dressed as a Palestinian militant, complete with a fake Qassam rocket, the same kind that real militants launch at this little boy’s southern Israeli town near Gaza. But nothing eloquent seemed to come, the picture already spoke for itself. A trip to Los Angeles and New York offered perspective and the welcome company of old friends, frutas in Echo Parque, a world of glittery palm trees and then snow and cold and favorite restaurants. Coming back meant more work, and with it the kind of stories that have gradually worn away at the easy optimism I packed with me a year ago. It got warm enough to drink iced coffee again and now it’s hot enough that there is no going back.
But most of all, what’s kept me away from the internet in the evenings and prevented me from even snapshot, half-baked musings is that I met a new love. Class is over but he is still trying to teach me Arabic. When people call from Gaza I can never remember how to say -Call again tomorrow, or -Call back in ten minutes. But I will never forget how to say -The humidity ruins my hair, and at least one useful thing –Mai isn’t here now. With the new love in my life, I am no longer thinking of green lines and red lines, but about how to negotiate the space between us. I am amazed at how I can argue so efficiently in Hebrew even when it displeases me so much that we are fighting. He bought me plastic, magnetic Hebrew letters that he put up on the back of his front door so he could teach me to spell. One day his craziest friend came over and used every single letter to write a long soliloquy I could barely read. Yesterday I came over to the door, looked at all the letters and picked out three to spell “sun” – which, like in English, is composed of just three little letters.
In Sinai I thought about peace. The consensus in the Israeli subconscious seems split in just two when it comes to Sinai (the furthest Israeli citizens can get in Egypt without a visa, and within spitting distance of Israel’s southernmost tip, the Red Sea city of Eilat). Sinai is now thought of either as a hotbed of potential attacks (at any minute, we are always being warned, Israeli packed pool sides and beach front promenades may be targeted) or it is thought of or rather described by a near ecstatic sigh followed by an “ooohhh Sinai” – almost painful-like, it’s that good. I was happy to finally extricate myself from the first category and find myself settled in quite nicely into the second category, filling myself up with sunshine and watermelon and feta cheese. I could have spent many more days contemplating my feet padding around in the Red Sea and doing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted because that’s apparently what Sinai is “all about.” Peace is good, was the simple thought that kept coming to mind, especially when you are the one coming out on top of it.
