An Open Letter to My Friend
I know you don’t understand me or my chronic illness. But I want to tell you that I’m doing the best I that I can.
Dear — ,
Before I return to Tel Aviv, there are things I want to tell you, myriads of unspoken conversations crowding my mind. I wish we could sit together and I could show and share with you parts of my world, and listen and learn about yours in return. Maybe in another time.
For now, I will write — the voices in my head grow impatient, demand release.
We are very different, you and I, and yet beneath it all I know my soul knows yours. I know that my life path, my work in this world, is bound to you. Does that make any sense? Not to the mind, there is no rationalization to this statement. It is a sense that goes beyond what words can say, and yet I wonder if a part of you knows what I mean…
I read the short story you wrote, and I felt part of me, my heartsoul, hum in reply. I feel that you are disappointed in me, and with this my heartsoul contracts, pained.
When we went for a walk together, you told me there is no use in talking about certain things, because people won’t understand. You are right, people won’t understand, and they don’t need to; people will judge, as they judge everything, and why keep talking about things?, it doesn’t change anything, go get on with life.
This is all true!
But I want… I don’t know.
To be a child again, for a moment.
To tell you that I am doing the best that I can. That I am working, every day, and sometimes it is work I can point to and describe, and sometimes it is the daily act of living.
Waking up with my nerves trembling and weakness and pain and, in the words of Mary Oliver, choosing to keep my mind on what matters. On my work, which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes.
These body-clothes of mine, they can be oh so heavy. The heart beat-beat-beating rapid. The mind clumsy and slow.
I am not my body. I am not my emotions. I am not even my mind.
I am a being of Light, and I came here to sing the song of creation, of wonder, of Thanksgiving.
Modeh Ani.
I listen to the music playing all around me.
And I know I will be dancing, spinning with it until the end.
