The old rabbis say we must put salt on our challah before we say the blessing on Shabbat, to remind us that the world is built on longing. When Hashem created the earth, they say, they split the heavenly waters and the earthly waters. Before that, all was just an endless lake above and below and within. But bringing things into being required a separation.
Shira had been texting her best friend for a long time. Maybe this will be forever, she thought. This imperfect, one-sided conversation. The world is built on longing, she remembered as she pulled one end of the gum out of her mouth, stretched it out, and stuck the end back in and pulled to make a loop. It snapped and again she chewed, and pulled, and waited for the screen to light up with the little Virgo emoji and ladybug next to her best friend’s name.
Shira had for a few weeks been putting all her friends’ zodiac signs and personality animals next to their names in her phone. She told herself that it was so that she wouldn’t miss anyone’s birthday or forget the creatures that delighted them. Perhaps it was also so she could have an excuse to speak to those whose signs she needed, but this did not feel like a worthy problem to examine. She tasted salt and copper in her mouth where the inside of her lip was raw from the little bites her teeth took out of her flesh when she wasn’t focusing hard enough on stopping them.
The heavenly and earthly waters grieved at their breaking. They asked Hashem, how am I to exist without a half of myself? And Hashem, the all-knowing, had no perfect answer for them. This must be done. They were rent one from the other, and they grieved the absence like a lover, like a mother, like a friend, like a limb torn off.
Josey and Shira, once long ago, had pressed their faces together and tried to synchronize their breath. Shira felt her best friend’s eyelashes flutter against her cheek. They pressed the palms of their sweaty August hands to each other and breathed in, out, in, out, though Josey wasn’t able to slow their breathing down enough no matter how much they tried. And when Shira giggled, she felt the shaking reverberate through Josey’s whole body. It was a trick they’d seen in a movie once: if two people were able to line up perfectly, to breathe as one, they would enter a trance state. Then, Shira thought, she and Josey would be able to see the whole universe. In the movie, the characters lift up and float through a void, and part of Shira was at this time still young enough to believe that if she and Josey put their minds to it soon they’d be floating away too. As long as they didn’t let go of each other’s hands.
Shira remembered how Josey, after their first year in college, had come back home with short hair. Their face seemed naked and fragile without the dark, precise eyeliner they used to paint on each morning before they left the house. They would even sleep in it, sometimes, and wake up with smudgy pits around their eyes like they were collecting the ash from back when the fires were burning down California. Josey’s eyes were little memorials those mornings to places that they remembered but no one else did.
When they came back that first year, those memories were all gone, replaced by shiny soft skin and cleanliness. Shira still worked at the Starbucks, and couldn’t get the smell of coffee and the stains out of her clothes no matter how much she scrubbed.
“I feel like Lady Macbeth, you know?” she told Josey. They sat down for a conversation at a different Starbucks, the one that Shira didn’t work at, after weeks of unanswered texts and one half-hearted “sure. when r u free?”
“It’s like, will these hands ne’er be clean? But I didn’t even get to kill anyone! All I get is the cleanup!” Shira wished she could make Josey laugh, but Josey just picked at their cuticles and focused on the difficult business of drinking their cardamom iced coffee without a straw.
The earthly waters cried out in pain as the heavenly waters were lifted away and they felt themselves sinking. For the first time, they felt the constant pains of gravity and knew that this holding-down was part of them now, and they screamed with the hurt of it. They witnessed half of their self and all of their love disappear into the sky into a place where they could never reach now, though moments ago they were close as breathing.
Shira stared out the window as Josey told her about the Saudi Arabian princess. She said that this girl Noora, in her freshman class, was able to live off campus first year, which was unusual, because no one has the money for that. Shira wasn’t sure what that meant about Noora, but Josey said it made them curious enough to google her. She showed Shira pictures: Noora laughing, with a mane of dark and curly hair, Noora at fashion week, Noora on an island somewhere. Turns out Noora was a Saudi Arabian princess, daughter of some guy who liked to post polemics about homosexuality online. Josey said they matched with Noora on Tinder but never did anything about it. Shira said, if it had been her, she’d have a princess girlfriend by now.
“And a death warrant from a foreign country,” Josey said. “You know this is serious, right?”
Shira wasn’t sure what serious meant in this context, but her friend was looking in her eyes again, and the light through the Starbucks window was soft and forgiving, and maybe the rhythm of their breathing even matched.
The bottom of the ocean is the darkest place on Earth, but outer space is darker. Yes, there are stars everywhere, but there is so little light compared to the vastness. So, Hashem asked the earthly waters, why complain? It’s darkness, either way. But the earthly waters sobbed. The heavenly waters, they said, at least got Hashem’s company. They were allowed to fly. And what consolation prize did the earthly waters have? Bound down in darkness, they were forced to support all the life and all the death on Earth. All the refuse, all the bodies, all the sunken ships. The earthly waters cried and felt themselves becoming little more than a graveyard.
“I got my first tattoo,” Shira blurted out to Josey. “It was kind of fucked up the first time around, because it’s a stick and poke. But I’m going to get someone to touch it up someday. I mean, it’s fine, it’s just kind of, uh, pointillist, you know?”
Josey didn’t ask what it was a tattoo of. They sat in sticky silence. They said, “I can’t wait for this summer to be over.” Shira had forgotten that it was summer.
Hashem offered a consolation prize: each time their people burned a sacrifice in tribute — perhaps a plump goat or a lamb or a cow — the priests of the Temple were to place salt on the animal’s bleeding body. Not just because Hashem has a taste for salt. The all-knowing, after all, tastes all things at once. This was for the sake of the earthly waters. All salt, after all, is the product of the earthly water’s grief at separation from their love. But sacrifices are to be burned. So, each time the temple grounds fill with sweet smoke, some of that salt goes up to be reunited with the heavenly waters, and they cry out and embrace and dance in circles out of joy that some part of themself long lost has come home.
Later, Shira asked Josey if they remembered Aaron. There had been a third member of their group before, but no one had heard from him in years. The rumor was that Aaron’s father, a metrolink security guard, got shot in the head. Shira knew these things happened, but figured that Josey didn’t want to think about that kind of thing anymore.
Aaron had the softest hands in the world. He was probably still alive, Shira figured, but he didn’t talk to her anymore. Shira knew that sometimes people needed to cut off their old selves and the people that those selves were attached to, which meant maybe that Shira and Josey were Aaron’s sacrifices. Shira imagined herself as a limb gnawed off by an animal in a trap. There had been a couple of boys who lived in Aaron’s neighborhood who he was friends with, a long time ago. They played Overwatch and things. Shira hoped they still did.
“Remember how he’d put on his headphones, and suddenly he’s talking to his gamer buddies, and we had to wave our hands in front of his face to get his attention?” Shira asked.
“Yeah, and that one time I did tip his chair over, didn’t I?” said Josey. They were starting to lose that composed east-coast voice that they put on these days. The chair had tumbled down, and caught a cord, and taken Aaron’s well-loved light-up keyboard with it, his headset lost in the carnage.
Josey laughed, then Shira lost them again. “Hey, do you want to hear about my internship? I saved money all last semester because I didn’t spend any dining dollars, I just used my fastbucks, plus I caught rides on the campus shuttle for free because I knew the driver, because my friend got a job at campus po…”
Shira imagined her best friend in a castle in the woods, zooming around in a big shuttle bus from one end of the castle to the other, and maybe that’s why they were always rescheduling their video calls. Shira’s vanilla latte was cold. She wanted to rip that whole castle down, but her hands were tired and her mind was tired and all the exhaustion was somehow Josey’s fault. Josey was the one who made it out of town, not because they deserved it but because — Shira didn’t know why. Something about money, something about Josey’s staring eyes too close together, something about their quick hands and their speech that never tripped over itself these days. Something about college counseling and the ACT test and being just poor enough for the fee waivers but not so poor that they didn’t know to ask for them like Shira.
And Shira’s anger started to fall on her like the first few raindrops of a storm.
Perhaps we’ve forgotten the art of burning sacrifices. But the rabbis remind us that we must taste salt even in our joy. We bless the challah, and toss salt on it as we pass it around to our families. The world is built on longing, and without the yearning of the waters for its own completeness, we would drown.
“Hey, do you know where I could get a job around here?” Josey asked Shira, laughing as if getting a job or not getting a job was just a game, just a test, just something to get a score on, just someone to be charmed. “I mean, like, I don’t really know how it works back home, I’ve never worked here…maybe I could, I don’t know, just kinda ask the baristas if I could join them for the summer? Or write freelance, or bake bread and sell it online.”
“Uh huh,” Shira said. And she wanted nothing more than to leave. “Starbucks requires a lot of training, not that you would know. I mean. You know. It’s a real job.”
“Yeah, sure, of course.” Josey fidgeted, unpeeling one sweaty leg then the other off the chair.
“I’ve gotta go.” Shira suddenly stood up. “Work to do.” This wasn’t her best friend anymore. Maybe Josey wasn’t even a person anymore.
“See you later?” Josey asked. Shira couldn’t imagine anything she wanted less. She wanted her best friend back, but she didn’t want Josey. Shira got into her car, and skidded out of the parking lot. Once she got onto the road, she looked around for cars. Then, without taking her foot off the gas, she closed her eyes just for a moment and screamed. She opened her eyes and swerved out of the path of the pickup in the lane next to her. Shira bit the inside of her cheek, and the whole world tasted like salt.
