"So what are going to do now that you have emerged from isolation? Do you want to come to Tel Aviv for coffee?", my fashionable friend Dita stood next to me in our meeting at my parents' back yard in Herzliyya, and to my horror, I could not figure out what her sunglasses brand were through the microscopic writing.
"We can have coffee," I said, taking two steps back as her gaze wandered off to the little kitten who was browsing the yard.
"Brilliant. So tomorrow at the Buke?" She said as she took two steps toward me in horrifying messiness.
"Yes, tomorrow, great, but perhaps we should sit on a bench on Rothschild Blvd.?" I said, seizing the opportunity to take another step back as she checked her messages on her mobile phone. "I have decided not to go into closed spaces until we fully figure out what the infection rate is; I have to be vigilant because of the parents."
"Sure, honey, whatever rocks your boat," she said, once again closing the gap between us without noticing, and her hand placed on my arm with an intimate move that was designed to calm me down. My gaze was locked on her furbished fingernails that were resting on my hand.
After four months of not touching anyone in London other than Ravid, even the fancy manicure she had gotten at that parlor in Tel Aviv felt like a skeleton that from a zombie taken right out of The Walking Dead.
Shaken, I sat down at my isolated back yard right after Dita had left back to Tel Aviv, where (according to her incriminating testimony), she will kiss and hug everyone as much as she wants.
I don't want to sound paranoid, but I have been convinced ever since my arrival that Dita and the rest of our good friends, Tali and Loly, are talking behind my back. "This is completely nuts," they probably say as they express amazement over the "elbow handshake, no hugging" policy that I have adopted with great fanfare since my isolation. Due to their indifferent approach as the corona cases mount, I am convinced that they consider me some messy-haired Miss Havisham who has escaped her mansion.
"The numbers here are almost nothing; we barely have severe cases," they try to calm me down in our conversations, and I reply that in my experience living in the UK, the number of dead is a lagging figure that would become clear only after two weeks.
"There is no way of knowing anything with all these contradictory studies and the irresponsible leadership," they continue, and I respond that I because of this confusion we have to be extra careful, and as I say this, I try to figure out just when was it that I had transformed into a mother.
"Above everything else," they conclude, "we cannot let the fear of the virus control our lives, and the real danger is the economic crisis."
I tell them in response that they are right and ask myself whether I am Cassandra, who is sounding the alarm over Agamemnon's imminent death while the other characters look with bewilderment at her, or perhaps I have just become insane.
"So how is it in Israel," my friends from London ask me. And I answer that I have been living outside Israel for the past 13 years. But this is the first time where I feel like a new immigrant in my visit back home, as someone who cannot figure out the locals' ways and anguishes if he has to abandon everything he has learned overseas.
