Memories, Stories, Lives, and Years

Today I woke up tired (aka after a sleepover). I went to visit the Museum of Fine Arts with my friend and every time I heard the date, I knew there was something I should be remembering.

And when I came home, I realized.

A year ago today, I came back to America from Israel.

That's it, now it's been more than a year, more distance between me and that past. I don't know why the concept of the year is so significant to me in this respect. I don't know.

Part of me is a little bit sad. Part of me is just confused. It's odd - I gave my friend a notebook of mine to read, a notebook that included a chronology of the last months in Israel, and I haven't read it in a while, and I don't remember much from that part. Time goes by and I don't remember.

But looking back, perhaps Israel's changes were just as great in magnitude as the changes I went through this past year. A lot happened. I just - yeah. It's been a really weirdly crazy and wonderful year.

Really, I suppose I shouldn't try to attach additional meaning to certain parts of my life, because all of it is important. And sometimes I wonder - what if the events I don't remember too well affected me more than the times that are replayed in my mind?

A life, in my not-so-long experience, is like matter. Comprised of tiny bits that can be dissected into even smaller and smaller ones - and mostly empty space. The space between the molecules, the atoms, the hadrons, the quarks. And that space is important. It's what makes the matter hold its shape, what defines it. Because really, matter is just an exception to the vacuum (it goes the other way too - the vacuum is an exception to matter). A life is not just the memories. A life is all the spaces in between too. All the short, sweet moments saved deep inside a mind and all the stories.

We are little bits of improbability, floating in space, wanting understanding. I am not one to say what is or isn't in the spaces between. Perhaps it's things I don't believe in. I don't know. But that's what I try to find out.

Life is Long

It has not yet been a month since I left Israel.

Needless to say, it feels like forever.

Just over a month ago I was still in school. In this way of seeing things, a year seems so very long. Heck, a day is a long time. And six months? Well, that's damn long too.

It makes me wonder: what can I do with all this time? There's school and someday a job and everything, but there's always more. Extra hours. They're wasted so easily.

But we are so focused on the future that we don't think of now. Obviously you've got to plan some things, otherwise nothing would happen at all, but what about now? Often I forget about the now. Oh, in so many minutes or hours or days or months such and such is happening, but something is also happening now.

There will never be a moment again like this moment. That's what spurs me to do stuff.

In Which I am a Five-Year-Old Teenager

Today we had a meitzav, or a statewide test, in math. One of the easier things I've done. I think I got at least a 90, which I like, because normally on math tests I don't get too far over 85 or 90, sometimes less. So that's nice.

And it was my last test here, as a friend of mine took care to inform me afterwards, before I went to buy a bag of chocolate milk (yes, they sell chocolate milk in bag-type things) to rejuvenate my utterly fried brain.

Then, in English class, we were talking about our plans for the summer, specifically so the teacher could correct pronunciation. Obviously she didn't correct mine, but after I finished saying that I was going back to America, seeing my friends, going to some art and writing camp-things, and possibly going to New York, she said that it had been really nice to have me in her class and for everyone to hear an American accent besides hers. She said I'd contributed to the class discussions (which I do think was one of the high points of being here, especially the calling-out part) and that she'd miss me. Then everyone clapped and I just sat there in the back of the class, embarrassed yet elated, tracing the "love" that someone had carved into the desk just for something to do.

Then math class got cancelled, which was brilliant because it chopped an hour and forty-five minutes off my school day and I walked home with some friends, making fun of two of our other buddies who were walking about twenty paces in front of us and couldn't hear a word we were saying. All mockery, and all pretty much that old rhyme, "___ and ___ sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage."

I suppose, deep down, I'm not more than five years old. It's becoming more and more apparent now. Oh well, being five is fun.