02/05/2025
An hour before we landed in Israel, there was a rocket siren in the center of the country due to a missile launched from Yemen. How symbolic and absurd to receive such news just as you're landing.
The first thing we did after landing was to be interviewed for the Haaretz travel section — honestly, that wasn’t on the schedule.
So, while Guy was climbing on me and shouting “Maaa!” in my face to get my attention, I managed to sneak in a few words that made it into the newspaper. It was a surprising and pleasant experience to kick off the next four weeks of our visit.
I really wanted this visit to be a kind of healing experience from our previous ones in 2022 — the first of which began with a funeral and continued with a COVID wave that kept us from seeing friends, and the second was mostly a work trip, so there was barely any time to meet people.
This time, I designed a schedule in Canva, color-coded to show whose plan it was and where we’d be sleeping each night — which is so important when you have more than one home to return to.
Cleaning out our storage room wasn’t in the schedule either, but we found time to do it in the first few days after the flight. While flipping through an old school binder, I found a small booklet titled “It Makes Sense That We’d Leave.” It looked familiar, but I didn’t remember actually making it.
Inside was an in-depth literature review with quotes, poems, and images that illustrated the dissonance of living in the State of Israel. At the end, there was an inspiration board for a video I had worked on all semester for a course I ultimately failed — because the lecturer wasn’t satisfied with something.
I looked through the booklet a few times, and rewatched the video (which was insanely detailed — I worked on it night after night), and thought to myself how unfortunate it is that there are art professors today who don’t look past the tip of their own noses and fail to try to understand the deeper emotions a student brings to their work.
The booklet and video were created a little less than a year before I met Tom, and before I knew what the future held for me — but the question “Why live here?” sparked a curiosity in me. And that’s exactly what my lecturer back then didn’t understand.
To tie this little history lesson and set of sliding doors together — if I hadn’t appealed and asked to at least pass the course to finish the semester, I wouldn’t have created my flagship project, probably wouldn’t have met Tom, and certainly wouldn’t have ended up being interviewed for the Haaretz travel section with him after three years away.
