D. canceled her flight at the very last minute. She was supposed to arrive in Israel to meet her parents and friends and to have a staycation during the global pandemic.
Three days before the flight, when the US government announced a whole host of steps to undermine the status of foreign students in the US, she realized that it was too risky. She could not return if she arrived there, that's what she said, and she would end up being stuck in Israel.
Of course, the main reason for my visit in Israel was that I wanted to see my family and spend time with my nephew. Until now, I had only seen him as an image on a screen, my face making weird noises to make him laugh.
I wanted to create a continual sense of time that would anchor my role in his life. Meanwhile, the expectation for a temporary semblance of normalcy gave me and D. new energies after months of lockdown in New York. The plane left without her and turned the tables: I was now stuck in Israel.
A big part of any vacation is the routine. Even though every day has its own set of adventures and activities, there is structure. A vacation has its own daily life. Without a routine, you have to rebuild your schedule, but now that the country is once again on the verge of a lockdown, it is hard.
I joined a fitness center and the very next morning it was shut down; I wanted to go visit my parents on Friday, but the train stopped operating; I arranged to meet a friend on Saturday evening, but we could not communicate because he was demonstrating at Rabin Square and he did not have cellular reception.
What's left to do other than work? I sat next to the computer to continue working on my novel. It was hard to concentrate. In a vacation, writing needs structure and routine even though it is anything but a routine thing.
There are two ways to create routine. The first is to create habits. There are those who wake up at the very same hour every day, who run every morning or curse at the newspaper after they see the headlines.
These habits create a defined reality for you. But my habits are in a different place, in a place seven timezones away, with a different kind of running course, with a newspaper in a different language.
The other way to build a routine is through interaction with people. This is how the big gap is created. Yes, the more the self-isolation continued, the shorter my patience had become toward D., and vice versa. A great chunk of the time, me as a writer and she as an academic, is dedicated to "me-time". The routine depends on the knowledge that there is another person that shares with you so much and that you have a continuum of time and experiences that anchor your characters in each other's lives.
My flight to New York is in a month. I hope that I will manage to create temporary habits that would give me space and allow me to work and have fun. Even though space has been shrinking fast between my visit to my parents up north, D's mother even farther north, a sister in the Sharon and another sister in south Aviv. I hope that I won't get used to this reality so that once again share the space with the person with whom I spend my daily life.
