Ok, I have to explain the posting below. I have transcribed it from the notes I made this afternoon while I was in Tel Aviv without a notebook and a desperate compulsion to put my thoughts down on paper. I ended up resorting to the back pages of the book I am currently reading; The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work, and pulling it all together in your 30's. Edited by Andrea N. Richesin. Highly recommended gals.

I know that it’s near sacrilege to write in a book. It’s some form of minor desecration for sure. But I’m a desperate woman and these are desperate times and desperate times call for desperate measures.

As a writer, sometimes I worry what I would do without a pen and paper or my fingers and keyboard. As I left home this afternoon (well, actually my serviced apartment), I realised that I’d left my notebook behind. A sense of panic filled me and I spent over half an hour combing the streets of Tel Aviv looking for a shop that sold a cheap little notebook. Not much was open. It’s Shabbat. It proved to be a fruitless search. Hence after much deliberation and hesitation, I decided to write on the only surface available to me; (other than my body, but that would be weird in a café) this book. In some respects, this book is an interesting choice. It’s full of insightful, entertaining, often meaningful and very relatable stories by women in their 30’s. Women just like me.

I’ve been living in Israel for six weeks now. I’m sitting right on the border of my old life and my new life. The old life will be no more in a week or so. My Australian job will officially end. My work-provided (free) accommodation will also come to an end and I will be flung into a total state of newness. New job, new (empty) apartment…

For six weeks I have craved space, peace and quiet. Now that I have it I feel the total lack of noise in my head will drive me to distraction. Shabbat in Jerusalem for a largely non-observant, single girl is a bloody lonely place to be. Despite my earlier convictions that a whole day spent in bed in my pyjamas would be a fun and liberating thing to do, I soon felt like a slob and had to get up, have a shower, get dressed and clean my room (even though I am in a serviced apartment and there are people whose job it is to do that). It’s all about trying to feel normal. It’s all about my desperate need for some semblance of routine in my otherwise rudderless life.

I know that in a relatively short space of time life will be more structured than I would ever wish it to be. I’ll wake up, get ready for work, spend all day at work, come home, make dinner, watch TV, go to bed and repeat ad nauseam.

But right now, right this second as I sit in a café in the middle of Tel Aviv on this very cold and wet winter’s day, I feel lonely and so very far away from everything and everyone I know.

There’s an easy escape route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. A maxi-cab service that runs round the clock, 7 days a week. For a mere 20 shekels (or 25 on Shabbat) you can be in the City that Never Sleeps in less than an hour.

Shabbat attracts an unusual crowd of people on the sherut (the shared maxi-cab). Today’s journey was shared with three Filipino foreign workers, three Arab Israelis, two monks in full habit complete with rope belt (although who the hell knows why they were going to Tel Aviv!) and me.

So anyway, back to me feeling sorry for myself. Ok, so it probably didn’t help matters that I rang my ex-boyfriend in Sydney and spoke to him for over an hour this morning. The truth is, we only broke up because I chose to board a plane to Israel. Had I not… well, let’s not play the game, “What if…?”

The thought of moving into an empty apartment in a week or two completely devoid of furniture (bar the sofa I hope to purchase tomorrow) also fills me with fear. I wrote some time ago about possessions and our natural human instinct to want to be surrounded by them, protected by all that is familiar to us. I know that feeling. Oh, how I miss that feeling.

We all make choices in life. I have made mine. I made the choice to leave my home, my family, my friends and a man I had huge feelings for to live in a foreign country with not much more than an unusually (some might even say unhealthy, but whatever…) large dose of optimism.

I might be a bit lonely, a bit rudderless today, but I am not unhappy. In my heart I know I did the right thing. You can’t expect to make such a huge life change and not experience some kind of emotional fallout. I am, after all, only human. A human girl of infinitesimally heartbreaking proportions.

I am glad it is cold and wet (and now dark). It suits my slightly melancholic mood today. I know I am not the only lonely soul in the world. I am sure that there is at least one other desperate person out there vandalizing a perfectly good book all in the name of literary therapy.

Labels: Diary