There’s Something To Be Said For The Nighttime Hours

There’s something to be said for the nighttime hours, the hours after midnight when things are dark, when there’s just a few noises coming from the street that’s blanketed in the orange glow of street lamps.

It’s been this hour that I’ve come back from the club with a boyfriend or lover, giggling, elated, slightly toasted and collapsed with him on the couch as we progressed to the bedroom or just fell fast asleep wrapped in each others arms.

It’s also been this hour that I’ve come back alone, with streaks from the corners of my eyes that I would never admit were there…knowing full well that it was the end.

It’s the hour that you can look everything straight in the face because there’s nothing but you and your problems sitting in an empty-ish room and your problems have all the time in the world to sit and stare at you as you make coffee…and your problems don’t like to use coasters.

It’s the hour when you can sigh and say “well, at least it was” the phrase of anyone who knows only how true the phrase “better to have loved and lost, and loved and lost again” really is. The negative thoughts progressively creeping and then racing through your mind with wicked words of ‘biological clock’ and ‘age’ as you wonder if the fates have strung out through their hands another ‘loved’ without a ‘lost’ attached to it.

It’s the hour when you can look at the empty spaces after your apartment’s been ransacked – again – and you realize how cheap what you own actually is and you wonder why you’re living one-kilometer from the Gaza Strip instead of in the Boystown area of Tel Aviv, Philadelphia, Chicago, Toronto or New York enjoying life as you stare at a damaged tie that you inherited from your Grandfather and wonder how all of those twinky twenty somethings are managing to pay their rent…the thoughts that plague you as you head into the shower…

…The shower where you find yourself when the Air Raid sirens go off again, cutting your cheek while shaving the blood drips into the sink, and like Taylor Mali’s broken glass shards…this, at least, we know is real…and you pray to God that everything you’re fighting for will really be worth it in the end, every sacrifice of time of money of food of love, every menial job, every humiliation, to earn the street cred necessary to become an expert and start a career when you’re 35 and far behind on savings when you compare yourself to so many (mostly boring) people that like working nine-to-fives.

These hours are good…these hours are necessary…these are the hours where you can face what goes bump in the night without having anyone around to judge you…these are the hours that you don’t have to explain or justify to anyone on any time sheet anywhere.

Children are afraid of the dark because it separates them from the warmth of their family and sounds are strange at night and it’s hard to see…but when you learn humility at the hands of someone nowhere near accomplished enough to judge you and you come home after a day where you’ve faced someone who’s been your judge, jury and executioner – regardless of the evidence – and have barely managed to walk away with your skin (to say nothing of pride) and you can throw your messenger bag on the floor, your jacket on your chair, and you inhale the sweet, acrid taste of a cigarette (which I gave up only for the love of my mother) you look out at that street tucked into the orange light and smile in the nighttime hours.

I’m almost done cleaning the room on the kibbutz from the disaster that I found when I came back from course. I’m almost done cleaning the room on the kibbutz from a year that no way met my standards (not that it was lacking accomplishments), a year that wasn’t healthy (mentally, nutritionally or physically) and I’m looking forward to wrapping up this next month before my move to Ashdod in what will close one chapter on this adventure and open another.

Now…time to go make some coffee and throw out a table with stains from a problem that didn’t use a coaster.