Things I'm not writing about

A few weeks ago, I met with a friend whom I hadn’t seen in several months. She said: “I read everything you write and I really like it, but I can also feel what you’re not writing about. You keep writing around and around the wound but never into the wound. It’s like you’re distancing yourself from it by force.”

That hit me right in the stomach. Because she was right. I’m not writing about the wound. Or at least I’m not writing about it the way it screams to be written about.

I’m not writing about how a year ago when the families of the hostages marched from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem, they passed through my town, and I saw a woman without a face.

Someone’s mother, I knew right away. Gaunt, grey skin, hollowed eyes seeing and not seeing. She was moving, ghost-like, at the front of the procession and carrying a portrait of a young man whom I later recognized as Matan Zanguaker, one of the 250 people kidnapped on October 7th and one of the 70+ still in Gaza.

I’m not writing about how every morning when I take my dog out for a walk, we walk past a giant poster showing 100+ smiling faces, Matan’s and other hostages’. People that I’ve never met but that by now feel like family.

I’m not writing about how on our longer walks we pass by another giant poster hanging right by the neighborhood school: it shows a non-smiling face of an elderly man, gaunt and pale, a screenshot from a Hamas video, and a sentence in large letters that reads: “What if it was your father??”

I’m not writing about how every week when I go to Tel Aviv to an illustration workshop, as I wait for my train back, I stare at the wall on the platform full of stickers with faces of young people, some in army uniforms, with quotes under each face: “Keep smiling” and “Your smile they couldn’t take away from you, brother” and “I’d do everything for my country”… and the dates: 2003-2023…. 2004-2023…. 2000-2024… 2001-2023….

It’s the dates that I can’t wrap my mind around. In 2003 I was a full grown adult, I was 22, I was married…. And these kids were just born and now they’re dead? So they were born and died and I’m standing here, still alive, with my stupid art portfolio, harboring stupid dreams about learning languages, writing books, and illustrating picture books “when I grow up”?? How does that all add up at all?

I’m not writing about how one time when I came to pick up my daughter from her acrobatics practice, I saw — among the clothes and shoes and bags and phones strewn on the chairs at the back of the gym — someone’s smartphone, covered with a sparkly girly transparent phone case, and at the back of it was a photo of a young soldier, with a quote, just like the ones at the train station.

I looked at the swarm of sweaty chattering girls in their leotards and wondered who it was. And who she lost. And how many more others here did, and still somehow come here to do backhandsprings and handstands.

I’m not writing about how my niece who finishes high school this year and is going to the army right after, has recently informed her mom (my sister) that she wants to be in combat units (unlike boys, girls usually have a choice.) How my sister blurted out “I want you to do something not dangerous!” and how her younger daughter — aged 13, and a typical teen, all TikTok and make-up, looked up from her phone and answered for her sister: “And what if everybody thought that way?”

I’m not writing about how a friend’s son who went on an exchange trip to the States in his last year of high school, before the army, was struck by the vastly different experiences of American and Israeli teenagers.

“They’re so…. carefree there….” he said to his mother, wistfully, upon his return. Then added: “At first I was jealous that they can go to university and focus on themselves and do whatever they want in life, but then I thought, at least here we get to do something meaningful, something that serves a purpose bigger than ourselves.”

This kid who is not yet 18.

I’m not writing about how desperately we all wish they didn’t have to engage in this kind of meaning-making, but how they’ll probably have to.

It doesn’t mean we’re raising bloodthirsty monsters. It just means that these kids grew up in a country and are coming of age at a time when they feel they simply have no other choice.

Nor does it mean we’re all indifferent to the suffering of innocent people on the other side, but the way I see it is that both sides are suffering from the same evil that large swaths of the Western world simply refuse to call out.

And I wasn’t going to write about it this week either (I was going to write something about how I’m slowly finding my way back into Arabic) but then I saw the face of Eli Sharabi, one of the three hostages released on Saturday and I didn’t recognize him as one of the 100 smiling faces that I pass every day on my dog walk.

I didn’t recognize him because his face had changed beyond recognition: he looked like he’d just come out of a concentration camp. During the ‘release ceremony’ he said into the camera: “I’m looking forward to going back to my wife and daughters” and that’s when the whole country knew that he had no idea that his wife and daughters were murdered on the 7th.

When I saw that, everything else seemed stupid.

I did go back to iTalki last week to find my way back into Arabic and I talked to Sam again. Sam lives in Beirut. I had talked to him a couple of times back in December.

Sam said it was raining heavily in Beirut. I said it was raining heavily in Israel as well.

I wondered (but not out loud) if it was the same rain.

I told Sam I take a train to Tel Aviv sometimes. (I forgot the word for ‘train’ and he reminded me… katar… Hebrew has this word too but in Hebrew, it refers to an old-fashioned ‘locomotive’). He shared that in the 1960s Lebanon had trains too. Before the civil war, before Hezbollah, he said, there were trains and a good public transportation system.

We started talking about how nice it would be if there was a train from Beirut to Tel Aviv. Imagine that. Maybe even a train from Beirut to Gaza, through Tel Aviv.

“Fish Hamas, fish Hezbollah,” he said, meaning “no Hamas, no Hezbollah” (fish in Arabic means ‘there isn’t.’ Fi “there is” + the negative marker sh). Fish.

Sam always gives me hope.

---

Meanwhile, I finally finished this very un-hopeful illustration. It was inspired by the war in Ukraine (because ours is too close and too raw? because I’m not ready to draw ‘into the wound’? because this is when the world broke for the first time…) If I were to give it a name it would be ‘The End of an Era.’

Friends with Words takes many hours a week to create. If you enjoy my writing, consider making a one-time or monthly donation ☕

If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending Friends with Words to your readers. (Go to Dashboard>Recommendations>Manage>Add recommendation)