A diary entry

Lately everything has been bringing tears to your eyes and all you have felt like doing is filling a glass of water and picking up a paintbrush. They seem to go together, crying and painting. Perhaps painting is the closest you can get to the fantasy of crying at the appointed time, at the perfect moment where somebody sees you and lets you bury yourself in their shoulder. 

You went to go and buy the right paper for watercolour, finally. Now it will be a little easier to express yourself, you think. But why was the interaction with the man at the till so emotional? Why did it make your day, just that little bit of gentleness? 

You paint the bright orange deck chairs on the beach in Tel Aviv. You couldn’t bring yourself to paint the people. You paint a card for your friend who moved back home: a tropical bird swooping over the surface of a lake. You pretty much write a poem inside: you probably overdid it.

You finally tell your therapist you are a Pisces. Sun and moon. As you speak you can suddenly hear yourself. The sound of your voice makes you want to throw up. You can’t even look her in the eyes, so embarrassed are you of how much you will believe. 

A Saturday afternoon. You walk into a park and lay down in the middle of a deserted amphitheatre. You swear you could probably stay there for a thousand years. You only leave when you start to shiver.

Every morning, the news. The waves of death. The making of your bed. 

Some mornings, the actual knife to your heart. Monday, you learn that a village in the West Bank has been all but wiped off the map. The village is in Masafer Yatta, the region south of Hebron, where you work. All the houses, pretty much all the houses, have been demolished. The people are still there: you can practically see their faces in front of you. You were there, two years ago, with a camera. You swear you must still have the pictures somewhere. The view of the mountains from inside the house: you close your eyes and you can see it. What is all but gone now. Not even the words painted onto the walls, LET ME LIVE MY LIFE, could stop the person controlling the bulldozer. And then, once they were done with the houses, they filled the village well with concrete – this is the detail that you cannot integrate. 

The drive down from Jerusalem the next day, nevertheless. A day at work. You concern yourself with controlling the music, with finding something appropriate, something sensitive, nothing paralysing. And then the scream from your friend in the driving seat when a dog runs out into the car before us and, no exaggeration, is sent flying into the air. She pulls over, and has her cry, and her scream. You console her; you have to stop yourself from saying something unnecessarily excessive, like all civilisation everywhere should never have been.

When you arrive, there is a new litter of kittens. A little boy wanting to show you them and everything else. He places a baby rabbit in your arms – the face you make!

Also, about a month ago, you touched the hump of a camel. You could barely believe how soft it was, far softer than you would have imagined.

Another day at work. You wonder what you are doing there, with your bloody grammar exercises, with your godforsaken vocabulary sheets. With your insufferable belief in the power of language. 

Nevertheless, you could repeat all the names into the night: the South Hebron Hills, the South, the Masafer, Masafer Yatta. Who told you that Masafer comes from sifr, the Arabic for “zero”, in reference to the aridness of the landscape? You must be wrong: your friend makes a face from across the sofa. The soft “s” in Masafer, she says, is an entirely different letter to the “s” that is used to suggest nothingness. Of course, you should have known, the softness changes everything.

Your friend has hand rolled an entire platter of grape leaves for you to eat. How you never fail to be overwhelmed, you think. Each leaf is more delicious, more full of flavour. As you are eating, a little girl keeps throwing herself into your lap. She is soaking wet for some reason, and so immediately you are too. And why is it objectively hilarious? Why are there actual tears in your eyes?

Afterwards, another little girl yanks you by the hand into a whole other room. Now why does that yank just a little bit break your heart?

By evening, the sky is somehow so pink, and also purple, it turns you truly, genuinely sentimental, has you incapable of just sitting there, saying nothing. When this is the world! When this is it! You can’t cope! You simply can’t! ▼

Kate Greenberg is an editor at Vashti.