home world

Jet lag

Back in New York.

Every time I fly I feel like such an international success story or something, as if I do this all the time and am quite used to it by now and I loathe those overly excited Israeli cry babies who act as if this is the first time they are flying and everyone should be extra nice to them. I always thank everybody and try to be extra polite. I guess it’s just another way of acting all provincial.

Right now time measures in a different way. I took the lap top into the city, and I forgot the charger so now time measures by the length of the battery life. After trying, in vain, to connect to some Wifi connection in Starbucks and finished writing an e-mail I can’t really send to my family in Israel, I have 14 minutes (19%) to finish this.

Time bends, it seem, especially when traveling, somehow the distance multiply the time or vice versa and the distance between New York and Israel effected also the perception of time. The weirdest thing about Israel was how unweird it was to be there, how familiar everything was. The strangest thing about New York is its unfamiliarity. In the taxi, on the way to our apartment, l look at the buildings, the trees, the empire state and the Williamsburg bridge with the eye of a tourist, and with the eyes of a resident and with my own eyes. And it’s so confusing I just want to close my eyes and disappear.

I don’t know why, but I have the feeling as if this sensation, of calling 2 places home is unique to me, as if it’s totally unexplainable and ununderstoodable to anyone aside of myself, as if the finer points of this sensation are so alien, so against all human experience that there’s no word for it. Which is funny, because it’s just not true, maybe the reason I feel like it’s so alien is that it’s so new to me. Maybe it’s so foreign to my definition of what home is that I can’t really place it within my realm of experience and notions.

We sit in that taxi and we talk, he missed me so much, and I missed him, of course, but it’s different living in our home without me as opposed to being somewhere else. He’s so beautiful, that always catch me by surprise and the way our apartment smells like him, everywhere. We talk, and I mention how different it was being in Israel, how much, even after a year and a half of New York living, it still feels more like home. And I see him cringe and hurt for that, as if it’s some competition he needs to win, a war waged against a whole country for my heart.

It’s odd how I can mark this specific date of making choices, a harsh line between past and future, and still, to feel like I’m stuck on that line, somewhere on the air between 2 continents and 2 different lives.

4 minutes and 6% of battery left, I get one of those “please save your files or you might lose your work” massages on the bottom of the screen. Trying to ignore the bad Starbucks music, on the table behind me a mother and a daughter speaks in Hebrew, I turn to look, they have H&M and Filline Basement bags, the daughter have a bag I saw the other day in a store window in King George  street. They talk about shopping, I think, it’s hard to follow, over the sound of other conversations and the music. They look at a small map of Manhattan, the laminated one I used to carry around when I just moved here.

I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worst.