As I lifted my hands to my eyes with two tea lights flickering in front of me and began to recite the blessing over the candles, my voice broke. Alone in my apartment, the soothing, earthy smell of tears uncurled inside my nose, and a wet, blurry heat into my eyes. Crying isn't easy for me, and my voice sounds so strange when it happens, like it's coming from a hidden chamber beneath my diaphragm. I keep choosing to reenter this cellar in the roots of my soul, rather than stand on the rooftop and listen: though I was about to meet Assaf to go to Shabbat services, I stood in the darkness of my cupped hands, doing my best to listen to these malachim, these divine messengers, as they explored my cheekbones and settled for my beard.
The next evening, I biked along stretches of highway to Petach Tikva, where I met Dafna, a friend of many friends, and an organic farmer. She showed me the park she grew up with, a refuge on days she ditched classes as a child, now a place to rest from working the land. And as we walked through its rose garden, I actually heard the sound of silence. A wild new sense of presence pushed through the white, delicate shell of absence: ma nora ha makom hazeh!
Last night, the roving headlights of motorists lanced the night with uncharacteristic violence. I
stopped to witness this. After a few moments, my eyes discerned the darkened street lamps spread out for blocks around me, like sleeping cats. The urban grittiness of shuk Levinski was a ghost cabaret featuring an exclusive line-up of exotic shadow dance: invisible objects, one after the other, suddenly threw out bold, rotating black rectangles, as the occasional late night motorist made her way through Florentine. Entranced, I continued biking right past my apartment. When I turned around, the soft visage of a young man greeted me at the edge of this rapidly spinning wheel of metal and concrete - a solid frame of light tracing an open door behind him as he took another pull from his cigarette.
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