It's weird writing the following text – I am supposed to be abroad, but I am now in the bed I grew up in Israel.
My heart has this feeling of deception, and my mind is telling me that I am in the wrong place. This is what I felt on Friday when I left my home to the airport. I was hesitant. On the way, I imagined the airport being deserted, with employees in hazmat suits dominating the place and taking everyone's temperature.
I imagined the plane empty, the people looking suspiciously at each other. But I was also looking with great expectations at the upcoming sense of liberation. For the entire week, I have had industrious thoughts in my mind on Israelis returning to the beaches and packing the bars and restaurants. The Promised Land had never been so promising to me.
During this episode of daydreaming, my cab was caught in a major event on Sixth Avenue, as throngs of people blocked the road during a demonstration marking the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a holiday that has taken on a new meaning in light of recent events.
I was beginning to think that I would not make it to my flight. At first, I felt relieved, because it would spare me this bizarre trip back home to the place that I had concocted I my mind. My family would understand because after all, we live in extraordinary times. But with the relief, I also felt sadness, because I would not see my family up close and I would have to return to my apartment and announce, "I tried."
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When I landed, I lunged out of my seat, eagerly expecting to enter the arrivals hall and take a coronavirus test that would allow me to see my sisters and roam the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa, or go the beach.
But as soon as I saw the light at the end of the journey, the world stopped. "We do not accept serological tests," the man at the desk told me. "You will have to stay in self-isolation until you get two negative results, or after two weeks had passed," I told him I had already been sick with the virus, but to no avail. I felt sad because even at the height of the pandemic in NY there was no mandatory self-isolation.
My father waited for me outside the terminal. We drove up the Coastal Highway, and I kept looking toward the sea all the way. I flew 10,000 km, but now two kilometers will have to separate us. Rather than crash at my friend's place, I now found myself at my childhood home.
I lie in bed, in my room, where I had dreamed about the future, the place I had left after I grew up. The time difference between New York and Israel is much greater than 7 hours, it is the difference between who I was and who I am today. It is the gap between who I am here and who I imagine myself to be every day. Where are you if you are in a place where you are not supposed to be at? Does the world stop or perhaps even start spinning in the other direction?
In the coming days, over the next two weeks, I will once again ask these questions. Right now I feel too exhausted to deal with them. It is 3:45 a.m. and the jet lag is killing me, in my childhood bed.
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