Societies

It’s time to speak about the war.

The war outside, the war inside of you.

You are a mirror, society is a mirror- we are only as many pages deep as the books assigned to us by cold curricula.

How can you live in a teapot, Alice, in an upside down world, with a tipsy topsy roof and raspberry windows?

How can you live inside the whisper of what was supposed to be, but could not?

Inside the story of your self-sabotage, dripping with doubt? The self-sabotage of the state of Israel is my self-sabotage.

We olim. Work. Silent. We write, privately. Rarely participate in public discourse

Inside the denial of your own dreams- and you have worked so hard to eat cheese before every bedtime. Shame.

A part of you is that sarcastic, wizard, little girl.

A part of you is an adult, scarred by war.

To the lighthouse, then?

No other English girls live on this street, in this neighborhood. You are the only Jew in the village, so to speak.

But you feel at home because the anger and resentment of losing one month of sleep as bombs rained without so much as an introductory note, one month spent squatting in the stairwell with your pale-faced neighbours- that earned you the right to call yourself at home here.

It’s strange, you had intended to write in the first person, about the moral consequences on the individual as a result of the collective refusal of a society to make peace.

But in a crisis, after a crisis-

I call it going to ground. I grab my pen. I write. I ground my everything.