cutting great neck

the house is freshly naked, just as when we entered it. it's a reawakening of sorts, or a degeneration; like a man reduced to his birth, young, innocent.

or perhaps that is how i feel about how i used to be then.

i remember my first visit clearly: green foliage so profusely lathering the yard. wooden walls, red, peeling walls.

je lamais.




and our first week here. the birth; the beginning. sleeping in this room, in the one i'm currently writing, the "office", mattress spread on the floor, the darkness seeping in with the wind. i remember sitting in the den, watching some movie; that larger-than-life room like a saga of its own beauty, feeling more naked than any other place. the silence boomed through the wood.

and now each room is more naked the next, again, memories of the beginning more lucid than this rekindled history.



as we came, so we leave.

label me: home, moving

O, to be borne back ceaselessly into the past!

Morning Again.

nothing to have,
nothing to love,
nothing to think,
nothing to buy,
nothing to sell,
nothing to say,
nothing to hear.

only the dawn to feel
like a disease breaking out across your skin
in thick yellow webs.

Streetlights:
from my window like an ember in a field of ash,
its glow smoothed into a distant tip,
a peak, a white flash painted yellow.

how i miss
the highway ones
with bowed heads
in rows and rows
and the head against the window
how i miss
the trembling growls
that whimpered you into sleep.
sometimes the light
golden like a sun
would wake you.

this was years ago.
morning, again.

today
i fell back into the empty black womb of life.

if i try to find you
in the inner complexes of my mind
i will be lost.

if i try to search you,
each rising tide will only erase us
more, and mor, and mo, and m, and

each black night
will only fill our souls
to the brim.

like
a mug.

womb.

inside
i will not remember you.
i will not find you, i will not search you.

i will not need to.

i will forget you.

in the darkness,
putrid,
calmly cavernous,
i will have my fingers to search for,
and my breath
and my toes.

even there
i can be lost.
but only in the darkness.

not trapped
but saved
from searching
for you,

whoever you are.

thank you
for letting me forget .

It's written in the books, in the songs, in the maps of stars/
What everyone is looking for, happiness, hoping/
And destiny, its color dark, deep inside/
Don't cry, little sister--it's not simple, you understand.

there's too much truth.



this song presents to me a divergent reality—of me, years ago, in israel, still 16 years old, still an average israeli male. it peels all of the layers that the united states makes you wear and rips them open to where that red-hot burning israeli core of mine yearns to return to normalcy, to a stationary life back home, where my family is, where my family’s friends are.



“return,
return.”

to my old home, in those rotten streets.

where i’m—new. in an old way. where i’ve lived my entire life. where i’m not different, or foreign, or clever. where i am what everyone else is.

such an impossible dream.

and no, it’s not as if i’m needing to be normal, to be average, to fit in—because my version of fitting in is different than that of israelis. i want to fit in there. i want to live there as a normal person.



i want to be transported back in time, to start in the late 80s, when the night was black and they sat on the roofs of apartment buildings and watched a city fall into the chasm of comforting home.

i don’t know what sprang this deeply-wound nostalgia in me. i don’t even know if it’s completely nostalgia—i guess, it’s more of a craving for a different reality.


an impossible reality.

listening to israeli songs.

sometimes i wish that i'd never have left.

again in one of those moods, longing for israel, reminiscing, engulfed by music, wanting to know what type of person i would have been had we stayed.

would i have listened to this music? stayed up hours trying to listen to it? to remember it? to remember the roughly pouring words that fit into one another like wooden blocks. to remember: the night, blacker than black, the white plastic chairs on the balcony, the balcony, the 90s, crumbling apartment structures immersed in age spots.

i know where i’m doinga my semester abroad.

label me: israel, melancholy, memory, miss, music, song

i’ve realized that i need more human connection.

perhaps it’s the frank sinatra single that has just rolled, or the fact that i’ve been hosting second cousins whom i’ve never met and yet truly enjoy spending time with. perhaps it’s thinking about this new world, attempting to take into mind every single kind thing that anyone has ever said to me (only genuine ones) and knowing that nothing could be genuine if it’s not part of a connection.

and missing that.




i need someone to swallow up the expanse of feelings inside me, to cause it and understand it. i need many people like this. i need to live in a community of people like this.

i wish i could go to the army, without the war. because—that’s what i think can make me feel belonged.




and it’s night. my favorite time.

great neck night.



i’ve never experienced anything like it. maybe it’s the black vastness of vibrating leaves, how each loose dark speck hangs over us and webs with all the others into a curtain of night. or it’s the wall of silence that separates the island from the city. or the peninsula, draped in the long island sound that keeps it so hushed.

fade into you mazzy star.



i remember driving around in the mountains in the desert somewhere, east of san diego, perhaps driving back from death valley or utah or big bear. a long black valley expands forward as you drive on the edges of its bulky red mountain borders, the road like some kind of ribbon that seems to slide into the mountain valley and the car just an infinitesimal speck riding on it.

it was sunset and the wavering maroon shadows of the sky pooled across the valley. we were alone on the road, the solitary witnesses of the purple dying fizzle of the sun. sometimes a car curved out into the road ahead of us from beyond a mountain; white orbs danced from behind us once in a while.

i love the desert, the mountains, the valleys for that reason. the pine trees glowed like embers. streaks of orange light corralled along the cliffs and died down into a blue obscurity.



and fade into you comes up on my zune.

--how can i say it? listen to the song for a moment: torched strings that peel away in the rural night, when only the cowboys hear 'em--the way they seem to fade infinitely away into the melody, into the clattering bells and into the hounding voice, the one that seems so, so resolved, so resigned, and yet it persists, it sings, it--it reverberates and echoes.

it's beautiful.

and the combination of me in the car, from this polarized window, all alone with the music looking out into the dying rays of the sun in this lonesome, empty green valley, with the haunting solitariness of this song...



---

i remember this because my zune broke apart very recently and i was just reminded of it after the song came up on itunes. and this memory has remained with me for no reason at all, one of those insignificant details of life that accidentally leaves a mark.

label me: california, desert, loneliness, memory, miss, nature, song

when old songs revisit me, so do old feelings, feelings that rise up in me and crash inside like a great big blue wave.



i am writing this at 12 am on saturday, june 13, 2010; classical gas by vannessa-mae is on itunes; i’m about to read the nytimes mag and atlas shrugged; on a word document because my internet’s down, i have no plans to revive it till i wake up.

i wait incessantly for the right darkness to settle into this room.

i already miss the winter. my first real snowy winter. i miss waking up in the night and letting the raw cold fill up the room, filtered by this window and kept away at arm's length by these walls. i miss the piano songs that ring in the ice. the way the blackness seemed to swallow one small yellow streetlight that blinked in the distance from my window like a star and made me miss summer.

i am isolated and insulated all at once. maybe this is why the words sound so similar?

label me: miss, snow, winter

these green trees greenest than green pour around my house like an insulating blanket. they're one solid dark green color that packs into this window like a thick liquid grime.




---



an old french song comes up on my itunes.

i miss a world i forget. i miss being five, traveling through europe with my family, those auburn stone-laden alleys, the blue july noons, so clear and distinctly airy, light.



i miss what i would never be able to do and be and have again. i miss those moments that seemed to wash away from me like water. i miss old friends, old houses, old lives; and the new ones that never came to be.

label me: miss, sad