Old Friends, Sitting like Bookends

It's been a crazy two weeks, completely unconducive to writing for pleasure. Things have started to settle down the last few days and my brain is starting to clear- the insomnia induced fog is fading and my to-do lists are consolidating. The move into the new apartment was far more trying than I expected. Those around me don't seem much surprised by that, but I was hit out of the blue. For months I have looked forward to having my own space and my own home again. I didn't expect the air of finality that would accompany this move. Moving into my own place means that I am truly single and living with my sister in Utah, at the age of 28.

Obviously, I knew this before the day we went to pick up the moving truck. I guess that is why I was surprised to find myself crying as I packed up my books to move them from my mom's house to my new place. Books to me are like friends: there are some that are clearly associated with specific times and phases, and others that have stayed with me and become a part of me and my character and I find myself reassured just by being near them.

Several of my books are associated in some way with Yuval. They are gifts he gave me, authors he introduced to me, or the first books I owned in Hebrew. I found to my surprise, not only that I was crying, but that I was crying as though for someone who was dead, and had been dead for a while. My Yuval is dead, because I was in love with him in the past and in love with who I was certain he would become and in love with the life that we were going to build together. That Yuval, with that future intertwined with mine, doesn't exist, nor does the potential for that future together. It was actually nice to cry without longing. I have spent so much time the last year longing for things to be different- for me to be different, for him to be different, for our circumstances to change, for time to speed itself up and rush me into the future where the pain is already lessened.

After a week of turmoil, moving, working, setting up house, buying furniture, changing light bulbs, etc. I found a lovely bookshelf and prepared myself for unpacking my books. This time, the sadness didn't come. Instead, I found myself laughing over the homemade book my friend Larkin made me in Sweden, "Chicken Soup for the Swedish Soul: For those two bunny and a moose days". Two bunny and a moose days were the days that were so gloomy that a single stuffed animal just didn't cut it. They were the homesick days, the break up days, the sick-of-a-foreign place days when Larkin and I would cry until we had to laugh at ourselves, and each other, and life. Whenever we got to that point we would create toilet paper banners and wave them and dab our eyes with all the melodrama we could muster and declare that we were "going to write a letter about this!"

I found the children's books that my friend Kim has given me over the years. Each one has a dedication to me in her beautiful handwriting encouraging me on my journey, to continue bravely in whatever new direction I had been heading at the time. It's the idea of a continuation that is so powerfully reassuring to me. I had been mourning "starting all over". But we are all still here, my books, my friends, and me.