Arriving

This morning. So loud, those 8’s and 10’s and 12’s of Orthodox children, it felt like they were all in my bed, jumping, yelling in Yiddish and Hebrew to get up. I was slow. It was a religious weekend in the city of mystics. 20 minute uphill walks, 40 minutes downhill, 20 more up. Impossible on the calves.

I went to my well. I drank. I ate with a midget and her giant children in a secret hole in the wall. She fed me many forms of flour. Flour with apples. Flour with jam. Flour with flour. I had a stomachache walking 20 minutes uphill, 45-degree angle, home to my room with the orthodox reverberating children.

For moments, in mystical cities in the mountains where everything is quiet bar children, and everything is holy, for moments you might think you are home. But by the passing of the Sabbath life resumes and cracks reveal themselves. This is inevitable, even in the concreter marble mansion. Once they left, I saw the unfinished edges. Nothing is completely what it seems.

I left after breakfast. A one-breasted sage and a Canadian religioso tried to save my soul. Whether they succeeded is to be determined. I left quickly and overwhelmed, relaxing more and more as we left the epicenter. They took me to a tomb the night before. Women wept before the grave of the author of the holiest mystical text, the author of “light.”

Then they fed a tour group pizza and told stories of why war is bad and then my stomach, more flour, no nutrients, continued to grumble. I walked home alone to my room, through naked shuttered streets that are thousands of years old. Like Florence or Venice only everyone is orthodox. I walked and there were stray cats and a crazy-looking lame dog that could have killed me but walked right past. Between the tomb and the pizza I was haunted. Through and through.

I dreamed of rooms and drawers and a plane and packing wrong and forgetting bags and sitting with cool kids. I woke to more raucous ortho-brats. I left after the sage. I sat next to a musician on the bus. I slept. I got home. I got agitated. I left home. I walked to the beach. I walked. I didn’t care that I was hungry and dehydrated. The beach was alive and I was blessed. Mountains and holy cities and beaches in one day. My mind was quiet. Something happened there, in the city of angels.

And then I walked and walked and walked and I found the medusa heads and I found the stones and then the Herzliya hermit’s house. He changed it. It is more wonderful, more glorious than I remembered. I wanted him to come outside. “I have been waiting for you, Miriam.” But he never did. I imagine he is my soul mate. I imagine living with him in the sandcastle baby the sea. I wanted to bow, to supplicate myself before his home. I am in love with his choice, the patterns in the wall.

But he never came out and we aren’t soul mates and I didn’t get invited to see the inside. He didn’t come and tell me the secrets of my soul and I was still on the beach in rare beautiful form, the beach. And so I walked and then lay flat on my back in the sand. I could lie there forever if my body and mind didn’t have so many needs. I am in love with the ocean, even if its boundaries and borders terrify me. This country is unreal in its beauty and treachery.