I have a new hobby. I dance in hospitals. Not only hospitals: the street, the bus stop, walking through the security to the hospital. Walking out of the security back home. A home. These are my haunting grounds. I dance in all of them.
It started yesterday, as I was waiting for the bus to the hospital, after spending the morning touring the hospice. That was a day after I went to my mother’s grave on my own, for her 13th yahrzeit, and also scouted plots for my father. I took videos for him. That was a day after I woke up at 3am sobbing uncontrollably, sobbing like I was throwing up, my face doing a thing I did not ask it to. Once, when Ella was two and had suddenly thrown up, she looked up at me and said: why did I do that? It was like that. My face couldn’t stop for a few hours, and I watched it, curiously, from the inside. Eventually it stopped and I slept a little. But that was when I realized I had to let my face do what it wanted to during the day, so I could get some sleep.
That was a day after I spent the day organizing my father’s hospice, figuring out how he wants to be buried, how he wants to die, talking to him about his fears, reassuring him we would make sure he doesn’t suffer, that we would be with him, that I would miss him terribly, that he was my father, that I loved him, touched his aching lonely body, channeled my inner Ella and Mcgyvered his tablet so he could see without moving his broken neck, McEllaed a bottle for him to drink from, started editing his poems for his book–some of them full of anger towards me and my kin, some heartbreakingly beautiful–cleaned his glasses, spoonfed him like I never did my children, reassured him I could change him like I did my children, cyberstalked tattoo artists that could etch the scar that’s on my heart, the one that says, אור, onto my flesh. I want it, I need it on the outside too.
That was a day after I left the hospital in the evening after a long day, and found myself funneled by a rallying mob to the square of my youth, staring up at the apartment I grew up in, still furious that someone else thinks they can live there, crying and crying and crying in the rain. Then I got stuck trying to get home, a home, but there were no buses or taxis. I was soaked and cold and tired and lonely, and eventually I got on a bus.
That was a day after I landed in Israel in the middle of the night and had to ask an old friend to pick me up from the airport because there was no one who would just naturally do that anymore, and the thought of arriving in the middle of the night to a place that was once my home, that is no longer my home, that will always be my not-home, where my father is dying, was just too much. I got up in the morning and went to the hospital and couldn’t stop kissing his body, this body that would once hoist me over his shoulders but was now just skin and bones.
So yesterday I started dancing. It’s either that or crying. Most of the time it’s both. You will not believe how transgressive an act this is, how radical. More transgressive than my hairy legs. Dancing in the hospital corridor, dancing at the bus stop. Maybe you will–most of you spend more time amongst the normals than I do.
It’s not performative, I just can’t help it anymore. Not if I don’t want my face to do that thing at 3am again. It’s healing not only because it lets my body do what it wants, not only because of the repetition that calms my nervous system, not only because it lets my freak flag fly, but mostly because it embodies the dissonance between the normal and the abnormal, life as it continues on the Tel-Aviv street and this absolute nonsense of my parent dying in agony, again, of me being here alone, again, of time stopping while everything somehow keeps on going, again. I need it to show on the outside, too.
So I dance. I dance to this song that Tamuz sent me and I can’t stop dancing to. It’s only 2:30 minutes long, so it’s like groundhog day for my nervous system. I dance in short bursts while I wait for the elevator, when I get into my father’s room. I stretch into this new creature I’m becoming, my hair turning white in clumps. I feel each strand turning, I feel my skin tingling, I feel the metamorphosis. I’m a little worried my children won’t recognize me when I get back home. My home. That I’ve forgotten how to smile.
My sister says smiling is unavoidable. I take her word for it.
I am becoming something new. Something old.
All of the Worlds 