I started wandering pointlessly, crossing several streets, and then I suddenly saw someone I knew. I immediately recognized him because he was drinking ice coffee and his mask was just below his chin. We had grown up together in the same town until he decided to leave.

He is many years my senior. He is a poet, a journalist and a curator, or at least he was all this. He changed. His hair is long and white. When we met last, over beer 14 years ago, before I left Israel, he had short brown hair. He was working as a bar critique and invited me to accompany him to one of the bars. 

When he immigrated to Tel Aviv he changed his last name to that of a well-known Israeli poet, at least known to those who know Israeli poetry. "Israeli poetry is all about restrained bereavement, but also about love. Because you have to f-ck before you die," he said. We sat at the bar he just went on and on, talking bout politics and poetry, two things I knew little about.

The poetry was reserved to memorial days in school. The words, like headstones, represented something that no longer exists. And politics? Well, it is a fata morgana, appeared for a fleeting second and then disappeared in one hot November night.

"Metaphorical love affairs," he stressed. "TO f**k a Palestinian is the exact same thing as fucking someone at a bathroom stall in a bar." That is how he talked at the time, and wrote critiques.

A whole host of characters, anecdotes, political musing and literary references. I read his pieces and even made a cameo appearance in one of them as the "emigrant" in which he recounted how our conversation unfolded that night. We had not met since. 

I took off my mask. We shook hands virtually and he asked me what I was doing these days. I told him I moved to the US and that I write on politics and literature. "I have still not the slightest clue in poetry," I smiled. "What about you," I continued. "It is unclear," he replied. "Yes, the coronavirus destroyed everything," I said. "Yes, the coronavirus," he said and smiled to his girlfriend with that same smile that I recalled from that bar. From the look on his face, I understood that he didn't mean the pandemic, but perhaps he didn't want to tell me what he had endured over those many years. 

We parted ways, and I continued to wander around the streets. It was as if there was nothing really concrete that had emerged from that meeting. It was as if it was some song that I have never fully understood before I emigrated, moved forward, toward the future. An immigrant is not supposed to go back to where he has come from. There is a danger that if he returns, he will discover that his old place was just a fata morgana, an echo from the past that had a fleeting moment in the future and then disappeared in the burning sun.

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I arrived in Israel in order to get some respite from the news and statistics in the US. I could no longer hear the words "serological tests" and here I am in Israel trying to figure out who qualifies for the 750-shekel government stimulus check. I don't even have a bank account in Israel, and I am here on vacation. Why have Israeli politics drawn me so forcefully like a magnet? 

I remember how there used to be a time in which I would try to sever ties from Israel but just couldn't do it. It was after I had arrived in Iowa from New York for a writers workshop. In the open air, with the sweet smell of corn and the chirping of cicadas in the afternoon, I was enjoying every moment. In the evenings, after dinner, I would sit in the back yard and read under the lamp and the fireflies. This was the first week.

But during the second week, the Israel Defense Forces entered the Gaza Strip. In a flash, the light of the fireflies was replaced by the light of my cellphone, and the moon was replaced with a computer screen. The updates, the news, and the nightly arguments on social media prevailed. 

One evening I walked into a bar, just so I could feel alone for a moment. Country music played in the background. There were the regulars, and then there was me, the only foreigner. "Where are you from?" the barwoman asked me. "Israel," I said. I stretched my back, preparing to present the case for Israel that I had prepared mentally. To my amazement, she just smiled and said, "oh, cool," as if I had just told her some factoid, that watermelon is actually a vegetable.

She wasn't even excited on an anthropological level ("I heard that Tel Aviv is great," would have been an example). My shoulders converged out of insult. "I am from Israel," I shouted in my head. "And there is a war going on. And demonstrations! And the tv screens are inundated ad nauseam with analysis, experts and vitriol!"

But then I realized that Israel was an Archimedean point for me, the prism through which I observe the world. It is there that my compass points to, the same compass that I had received in my Bar Mitzva. To paraphrase Rabbi Yehuda Halevi – my body may be in the West, but my heart, mind and soul are condemned to be in the East. 

Before I could blink, the barwoman had already begun serving the other customer. This is the beauty in America, the land of the huge expanses. This is not just physical space. You can drive 12 hours in Texas and still be in Texas. It is also a space in which you can reinvent yourself, disconnect from your previous life. In America, reincarnation is a practice you perform before you die. 

Politics is not just a practice. It is a language. And my language is the Israeli political system. In America, political language is foreign to me. It is still something that I have relegated to television. Most Americans would never get to see the White House in their lifetime. I saw Gilad Erdan eat at a Thai Restaurant. Us Israelis dream and talk and eat politics with our Pad Thai. 

Perhaps I was too naive to think that I could just disconnect from the turbulent place in the Middle East. On the other hand, it doesn't matter where you go, I will always feel its burn on my flesh.

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"I think you should properly say 'picket the Prime Minister's Residence," he said.

"Ok, what does it matter how we will do this," I brandished my knife.

"That's totally fine," he replied.

"And no excuses, ok?" i said. "You cannot just complain all day and just not do anything. This time you are not going to get me off track, ok?" I placed a banana slice on the peach and wondered what the judge on the show would have ruled. 

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"Me?" He looked at me with bewilderment. "Yes, you," I replied, as I sat next to him on the couch.

"You are the one who last week told me that you don't feel like going because of some crap about how this was a political protest and that this cannot be a non-political even if you are protesting a man who is charged with criminal conduct."

He answered, "Yes, it's true I said that," and then he silenced the presenter in one of the ads on television for an air conditioning device.

"But I also said that if you really want to go we will go, and you said that you were afraid of the crowd because we live with your parents," he continued.

"Yes, that does sound like me," I said with a sign of embarrassment. "At least we honked when we passed under the bridges waving the protest flags," he tried to comfort me. "We are true freedom fighters," I quipped. 

"That's all water under the bridge," he said as he increased the TV volume. "Now there is a feeling of a national awakening, a real one. If you think this is what you really feel, then ok, let's go. It's important." 

"I totally mean it. Why do think I might be faking it?" I said, annoyed, as I thought about the judge at that cooking show that said she was willing to go to prison if needed because of her protests, or on some other celebrity who finally spoke out along with the thousands who flooded Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and were countered with water cannons.

I also thought to myself that I was the only who was sitting on his behind in search of excuses and only resorts to armchair speeches on the perception that has developed over the past 50 years due to the occupation and other measures, a perception that has made it possible for the government to adopt such a detached policy toward the coronavirus, replete with military metaphors and doctrines that all but ignore the plight of the people. 

"Scratch my back," I heard my father saying after he had emerged from the side of the couch. "What?" I asked. "Scratch my back!" he continued, reprimanding me for not complying. "More upwards, left, stronger! Yes, with your fingernails, you wuss." 

"Stop insulting him," my mother cried out from the couch. "He is not that sensitive," my father replied. Ravid increased the TV volume. The judges on the cooking show were just arguing over some dish that had been prepared unsuccessfully, and I just leaned by and imagined myself storming the area of the Prime Minister's Residence with gloves and a mask. 

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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. 

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I took the train to Tel Aviv. I even reserved a seat as if this was some rock concert. Yes, indeed the train has a theatrical feature to it most of the time. The scenes that change as the ride continues through my window, the people, looking at each other or walking in the car, make this feel like this was a movie documenting a journey.

This was not the case in my ride. Inside the car, I realized that I was alone. The car, which is usually bustling with activity and noise, had become a sterile box, a waiting room. I got captivated by the low-key view until finally, the train reached the Hagganna Train Station in Tel Aviv

I decided to walk to the apartment nearby despite the news being filled with reports on how this was a coronavirus-infested neighborhood. The area, which even without a pandemic looks like it was the place where people send the ills of society to die, had this eerie feeling of suspicion to it. The unseen people were even more transparent.

When I arrived in the open-air market there, there was finally some energy in the air. The street was bustling with vendors and shoppers, people were sitting on plastic chairs, drinking coffee and beer. This is the Tel Aviv I wanted: A fusion of hipsters and old merchants. 

In the 15 years or so that have been living outside Israel, I have become used to being a tourist in my native land. In every visit back home, I go to a coffee shop to write and read, browse the shops and galleries, the street food stands and visit friends' apartments.

In the evenings I go to bars, restaurants and parties. Summer after summer I have seen Tel Aviv flourish and grow. This time, when I sat down one evening with a friend over beer, I realized that there was a feeling inside me that had been distilling for many days, with every walk on the street, with every meal at a restaurant, with every perusing of old books: I am the only tourist in town. 

The pandemic has decimated tourism the world over. In New York, the disappearance of the throngs of tourists that clogged the city's grid has given the locals some space. The city, a melting pot of cultures, languages and food, and the epicenter of global civilization, has now become ours.

The newly opened space gives us the opportunity to experience this cosmopolitan city in its purest sense.

Meanwhile, tourist-empty Tel Aviv is much different. Part of its growth over the past several decades has been due to the low-cost flights from London to Paris.

The contemporary Tel Aviv culture is an effort to showcase the city to the tourists. The names of the stores are in English, despite being locally oriented. The fusion of Western and Middle Eastern atmosphere, an eggplant that is served as a narrative on close-far authenticity, a party that moves from hip hop to Greek music, shows that cosmopolitanism is a product. 

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Tel Avivians, like train riders, are extras in this movie set showcasing this product. In this not-so-big city, without foreigners, everything is now local again.

The eggplant no longer carries a narrative, it is just an eggplant. I sit on the bar, and the barman turns to me as an acquaintance. The cosmopolitan metropolis has become a small city at the Western end of the East. Every bar becomes a neighborhood pub in this neighborhood called Tel Aviv.

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According to protocol, I have to stay in my area. The food and all the other stuff will have to be left at my door. The thought of staying locked up for two weeks seems like a nightmare in which you have to escape but every door leads back to the starting point. 

But I had one exit point. A coronavirus official at the airport told me that I would be able to get out of isolation ahead of schedule if I got two tests that both returned negative, because I already had a positive result from a previous test.  "You do tests here?" I asked him. "Yes," he said laconically. "But I am not sure that would help you. You have to call the Health Ministry." So I asked, "Aren't you the Health Ministry?" He replied, "Yes" and left. 

I was left perplexed but after getting off a 10-hour flight, I just wanted to go home and rest for an entire day. 

My mother knocked on the door and asked if I needed something. "Coffee, thank you," I replied. I called the ministry and after waiting for a while on the line, a woman answered me. "How can I help you?" she asked. I told her about my situation. "You were misled," she replied. "You cannot leave isolation," she said. "But your representative at the airport told me that there is a possibility," I pressed. "No, I am sorry, have a good day," she insisted. 

I called the HMO that gave me insurance for my visit. Maybe they would be able to help me, I thought. "Yes, you have a health coverage policy, but you are not a member of the HMO, you have to call the Magen David Adom first=responder service," they told me. But the first responders refused to give me a test because I was a-symptomatic. 

My father knocked on the door. I told him about my situation and asked him if he has any good ideas. He said he knows someone at a nearby hospital and will consult with him. After an hour he comes back and knocks on the door. The official said I had to call the regional doctor. I called him and explained to the doctor what my situation is. He answered laconically: "Call my deputy." I called and explained: "I think there is no way out," he said. "Unless you get permission from your doctor in NY." 

Another knock on the door. My sister arrives back from Pilates class. She asked me how I am. "It's good to hear you," I said. I sent an email to a doctor in New York and after several hours he answered. I forward his response to the regional doctor. "This is a serological test, we cannot accept this," he said. "In New York, we don't carry out tests to rule out coronavirus," I said. "I know, but there is nothing I can do, I am sorry." 

I walked to the sliding door, and I heard my parents and sister talk. She talked about school, about how she was having fun and looking forward to the end of the course so that she could start giving Pilates classes. I went back to my room and lied on the bed. Perhaps I will just have to accept this, I told myself. Perhaps I will just have to spend two weeks of being in limbo.

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My heart has this feeling of deception, and my mind is telling me that I am in the wrong place. This is what I felt on Friday when I left my home to the airport. I was hesitant. On the way, I imagined the airport being deserted, with employees in hazmat suits dominating the place and taking everyone's temperature.

I imagined the plane empty, the people looking suspiciously at each other. But I was also looking with great expectations at the upcoming sense of liberation. For the entire week, I have had industrious thoughts in my mind on Israelis returning to the beaches and packing the bars and restaurants. The Promised Land had never been so promising to me. 

During this episode of daydreaming, my cab was caught in a major event on Sixth Avenue, as throngs of people blocked the road during a demonstration marking the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a holiday that has taken on a new meaning in light of recent events.

I was beginning to think that I would not make it to my flight. At first, I felt relieved, because it would spare me this bizarre trip back home to the place that I had concocted I my mind. My family would understand because after all, we live in extraordinary times. But with the relief, I also felt sadness, because I would not see my family up close and I would have to return to my apartment and announce, "I tried." 

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When I landed, I lunged out of my seat, eagerly expecting to enter the arrivals hall and take a coronavirus test that would allow me to see my sisters and roam the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa, or go the beach.

But as soon as I saw the light at the end of the journey, the world stopped. "We do not accept serological tests," the man at the desk told me. "You will have to stay in self-isolation until you get two negative results, or after two weeks had passed," I told him I had already been sick with the virus, but to no avail. I felt sad because even at the height of the pandemic in NY there was no mandatory self-isolation. 

My father waited for me outside the terminal. We drove up the Coastal Highway, and I kept looking toward the sea all the way. I flew 10,000 km, but now two kilometers will have to separate us. Rather than crash at my friend's place, I now found myself at my childhood home.

I lie in bed, in my room, where I had dreamed about the future, the place I had left after I grew up. The time difference between New York and Israel is much greater than 7 hours, it is the difference between who I was and who I am today. It is the gap between who I am here and who I imagine myself to be every day. Where are you if you are in a place where you are not supposed to be at? Does the world stop or perhaps even start spinning in the other direction? 

In the coming days, over the next two weeks, I will once again ask these questions. Right now I feel too exhausted to deal with them. It is 3:45 a.m. and the jet lag is killing me, in my childhood bed.

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But as the weeks went by, the flow had slowed and the words had become fewer and fewer, and had it not been for the weekly Coronavirus Diaries input I would have been doing nothing more than do my other gig, in journalism.

But this is never fulfilling. Journalism, especially political news, is like spilling a glass of water on a huge fire: not only will the water not do anything to extinguish the fire, the water will evaporate as soon as they leave the glass. 

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This week D. asked me why I find it so easy to write on things that are foreign to me but have a hard time writing on things that are dear to me and so familiar.

I told her that my journalistic pieces are on something or someone that exists. Foreignness makes things smoother. When you are detached from the subject, you can see it in its fullest form. You can hold on to something.

In personal writing, you have nothing to hold on to other than yourself. You are both the subject and the predicate of what you write. You create your work and your audience, you are the architect who builds the theater as the play is being performed. 

The answer I gave her was not enough, for me at least. Everyone knows that creating something ex nihilo requires great inner powers and a heck of a lot of sitting down. But what are the elements necessary to reach such a situation? What has changed in me or in this world over the past two months? 

At first glance, nothing. The apartment is the same apartment. The office – likewise. The desk and office have not changed either.

But every time I have tried entering my study over this period, I have felt that it is jampacked, has no air, and that it has become a very pressuring cubicle.

The element that has gradually withered over the past several months is the space: not just the personal study, but the mental and emotional space, a private space in my head, where I could grow and develop ideas – beautiful, scary, crazy and sincere. A place in my heart where I can get the courage to express my ideas with words. 

I recalled that I started writing my novel during a different kind of lockdown. A year ago I was at an artist residency in Vermont.

I lived at a nature resort for an entire month. The fridge was stockpiled with food, the wine in the pantry never ran out, and my only duty was to wash dishes. But that can't explain why I managed to write. What explains it was that I was out of my normal routine: out of my apartment, out of the city, our of my daily chores.

A space had been opened up into which I could mold something new, personal and pristine. I understand that I gave too much space for coronavirus and protests, for Zoom meetings and twitter debates. I did not let my writing grow. All those months I was captivated by all that's been burning. 

Albert Camus wrote that in order to understand the world, you sometime have to turn away from it. I need to rebuild my own personal space. How can I trun my back on the world that is ablze? Perhaps the only way is to tell myself: Yes, it's ok to put down the glass of water for now. I will fly to Israel. America will continue to burn when I return. But wait, what about the flames in Israel? 

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We looked at each other with amazement. D. is Israeli, we have lived through many sirens and alerts, but this was the first time the two categories collided. We understood that the sad silence in our neighborhood's park is not indicative of the overall situation in other parts of the city. 

On my way home I got messages from friends asking me if I went to the demonstrations, warning me of the large police presence on a certain street and a certain neighborhood.

At home, I watched the news. The images seemed to be taken right out of a movie: flames, tear gas, and clashes between protesters and cops.

It was as if the helicopters were hovering right over my home. And then I realized that the noise I was hearing was in fact from my window. This was the soundtrack of the disaster movies on New York I watched in my childhood in Haifa, New York of 9/11 that I saw from a friend's home in Tel Aviv. It was suddenly very real. 

The following day, the mayor announced that the curfew would continue until Monday, from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Life, which had already shrunken over the past three months because of the coronavirus lockdown, now seemed to become reduced to nothing.

During the day I wrote a bit, then at noon we went to rallies, and at 7:30 it was already time to go home. But it was hard not to feel that this was a clash of two events: The historic pandemic met another historic event, which people have experienced first-hand for many generations. The scare from coronavirus disappeared inside the rage, violence and institutional racism. 

Violence, rage and despair were converging on my home, or so it felt. Curfew followed a pandemic, and this all had the feeling of society unraveling. The days became suffocating and condensed. We opened the windows, but no air came in, only the blasting sirens of police. Is this the New York that have dreamed of as a teen, the New York of Woody Allen, Spike Lee, John Coltrane, and Bob Dylan?

A famous American author said something along the lines, "New York is not a city, it is an idea of what a city can be."

This is also how I used to see the city. It used to be the ideal city for me, the city of my imaginations that sits on real buildings and streets, a city built for me.

But the rage on the streets took off the veil from my imaginary city and showed its true colors, an actual city: a broken city whose rotten underpinning lay bare. New York has become a ghost city with shuttered stores, with battle zones, with swarms of people calling us to see reality as it is. 

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The public space is packed with people working on their laptops on a bench, families holding parties next to picnic tables, and yoga and fitness groups occupying the open fields.

I also saw someone using her sewing machine in public to repair a worn-out dress. It was nice seeing businesspeople share the same domain with teachers or delivery people. For a fleeting moment, I even began to think that it was true: Perhaps the virus has united everyone because it does not discriminate against anyone; perhaps a new society – or even a new world – can emerge. 

With great anticipation, I arranged a meeting at the nearby park with friends that I had not seen for two months.

But several days before the meeting, there was an event that shocked America: George Floyd, an African American man, was killed by white cops.

This led to unrest in the cities, which led to clashes and riots. The festive event that was designed to mark the return to normalcy was suddenly marred with bad news. The warm sun at the park could not compare to the burning flames all across the United States. 

Rather than share our experiences over the past two months, we talked about racism plaguing America since its inception; the virus that had reached every corner of the country, even in liberal New York: About a week ago, in Central Park, a birdwatcher asked a white woman to put a leash on her dog, and she chose to call the police and report him as threatening. The automatic, knee-jerk way in which she used the dark pigment of his skin as a chip in her favor shows that this is an ingrained thing, perhaps innate, to America. 

Only a week ago, it appeared that the coronavirus was everywhere, but here we are with something much stronger, even though it appears that it has always been simmering beneath the surface. The solidarity that the pandemic has promised was shattered overnight together with the display windows. 

We could meet at the park because public spaces were declared safe again. When we sat comfortably and safely, I asked myself, "Who is this actually safe for?"

There are some people for whom the public space is always hostile, with or without a pandemic. The very act of walking down the street poses danger because of the color of their skin or their status. There are also people who did not have the option of staying at home, and most of the deaths of the coronavirus were claimed among the weaker populations, in the suburban areas where people had to commute to and from work. Refugees, immigrants, cleaning crews, delivery people. The people who were already invisible but now became a statistic. 

After the sun had set, and people began to disperse, I wondered: Perhaps the solidarity was strong only so long as we were holed up in our homes, so long as we did not share the public space with someone different.

Perhaps the virus has taught us that every man can have a secret virus that may become symptomatic in the public sphere with all of its conflicts. Perhaps solidarity should not be dependent on the wishful thinking that we are all one entity, but on the difficult realization that we all have the potential to hurt someone else.

Perhaps, I thought to myself as I walked home, the ills of society can be compared to coronavirus: No single person is particularly to blame, but we all have the same duty to uphold. 

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