Photography by Yoav Rahamim
You could hear the neighbor’s violin strumming from the end of the road. He was always playing at this hour, just as the sun was setting, The quietest part of the day. The usual chatter of Modiin was long dead. People were crawling back into their crevices.
I stood on the living room balcony watching the sunset. It had been a few weeks since we got here, and the suitcases stood in unceremonious heaps on the deck. The sky was beautiful. Haunting. The air was cold. The violin’s shrill sent a shiver down my spine.
“Where are you – oh. There you are.” Emily walked out onto the balcony, sliding the glass door behind her. She sat down on the flimsy plastic chair next to me, which shuddered under all that wind. She didn’t ask if she could sit down. She just did it. In these weeks of knowing her, I got the sense that she just did things without asking.
It was what attracted me to her. It was also what worried me.
“I wanted to get these few moments in before the streets darken,” I told her. I couldn’t hide how annoyed I sounded. And I didn’t even have a real reason to be annoyed. Emily was a stranger who liked me. She was drawn to me. Why was I frustrated?
“Why’s that?” She asked, with a hint of a coy smile. “You scared of the dark?”
“Only minimally,” I told her. She placed her deft hand over mine. “Well, I’m here now,” she laughed in my ear. It was barely a whisper.
The shiver returned.
We’d been flirting for over a week now, but being in an Orthodox Jewish seminary made it hard for us to actually do anything. And we couldn’t leave the house, either. Immediately after arriving, all seventeen of us were placed in a fourteen day quarantine; we had arrived deep into the COVID-19 pandemic..
There were too many people in that three-story house. And all of us shared rooms. For those first two weeks, we attended mandatory Zoom classes; our cramped living room replaced the Beit Midrash.
When Emily texted me one day from across the room, I instantly welcomed the attention. After all, I was bored from sitting in the same spot on the same couch for days on end. And Emily, someone I had seen around the house but never interacted with, intimidated me. There was something about the way she always answered questions over virtual classes that made me feel inadequate and jealous. But I admired how bold she was. How unafraid she was of the sound of her own voice.
I wished I was like her in that way. But I was quieter, only comfortable sharing things if they really pressed on me. In those moments, words would fly out of my mouth, and I’d always look over to gauge her reaction. I felt like her validation mattered, though I didn’t even know her. The control a complete stranger had over me was infuriating. I felt like a scared little girl again. I hated it.
“Do you have a brother named Adam?” She had texted me from across the room.
“No,” I texted back. I almost wish I left it at that. But I didn’t. A few minutes later, I added, “why do you ask?”
“Oh, I just know someone with a similar last name, but looking at it now, I think I’ve made a mistake. Hope we can still be friends,” she attempted a joke.
She wanted to be friends with me? Why? Did I somehow manage to impress her in the spare moments that I spoke? I felt giddy, like maybe I was smart enough to have gained her approval.
Within a few hours, those few texts turned into a personal and emotional conversation. She told me the story of her ex-girlfriend, the first person she ever loved, and I told her about my father.
She asked me if he was the reason I was always so quiet, and something about her bold imposition intrigued me.
I told her that he always called my mother stupid, and that I was afraid of anyone saying the same to me, so I generally kept quiet.
“You’re really able to intellectualize it,” replied. “That’s why you seem so good at philosophy.”
After that, when talking about her ex, she said “talking to you makes me forget her.”
There was a lot of emotional back and forth. Too much of it. Too confusing.
But on that particular balcony during that particular sunset, I felt I finally had the power by rejecting her advances, even if that rejection happened only in my head.
I also wanted my alone time, which had been scarce since arriving here. Most of all, her conspicuous flirtation scared me because I’d never kissed anybody before. What if she was expecting me to kiss her? What if she was expecting me to know how to do it?
She let her hand linger over mine before pulling me into a hug. “What if we went to a field, just the two of us?”
“Like, on a date?” I asked her.
“Why not?” She asked, a mischievous smile dancing across her face.
“Okay,” I whispered so quietly I almost hoped she didn’t hear it. But she did, and she grabbed me by the hand. I tried finding an excuse to let go — blaming it on sweaty palms — because I was too scared of the immediate intimacy. I’ve never felt another body this closely to my own. Never in this way.
She didn’t seem to notice. We walked down the stairs and out of the house. Our neighbor had stopped playing the violin by now. I felt relieved that he wouldn’t see us, because that would mean that whatever we had was real – witnessed. I didn’t want to put a label on anything yet.
The Modiin streets glowed a haunted brown under the street-lamps. Those very lights guided us away from the house and the street it stood on. Eventually, we came to a roundabout with a lone tree which we dubbed “The Tree of Life,” because something in me came alive that night, and something in her did, too. Something changed between the both of us when we started to run with the wind down the winding streets.
We didn’t know where we were going, and we didn’t care. The moon was blue against the brown sky. Her eyes reflected its light. I’d never felt this kind of freedom before — of running into the night with open arms, with someone else’s hand firmly pressing into mine.
“This looks like a movie set,” she marveled.
The streets were pristine. Clean and symmetrical. It felt artificial in the best way. Right then and there, a switch flipped in me. I decided that this night was ours. That the city was also.
“Come, lie down here with me,” she said to me, tugging my hand again. We lied down on the open road, in that dead street. It was so quiet I could hear my breath escape from my mouth in cold shudders. Her coral sweater looked burnt orange under the lamps.
I could see that her nails were unevenly cut. Nail polish peeled off the sides of her fingers like chipped paint from walls.
She played Frank Sinatra on her phone. “My parents used to play this in the house before they got divorced,” she said.
“Something Stupid” played through her speaker, and when the chorus came, she looked over at me. “I could see myself falling in love with you,” she told me.
“I can see myself loving you, too.” I told her, against my better judgment. I didn’t know what it meant to love somebody like that at eighteen. But I knew I felt something new.
We spoke for hours on that open road. We had given up on finding that field the second we laid down. “Do you feel like you know yourself?” I asked her.
“I think I do, and I’m scared I’m a bad person. I’m scared of being a bad Jew.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m scared of being like my father,” she told me. “After the divorce, he told my mother she wasn’t really Jewish because she converted for him. For a while after that, I stopped keeping Shabbat and kosher. I just couldn’t bring myself to belong to whatever he belonged to.”
“Do you believe in God?” I asked. “Do you feel guilty because of that?”
“I do,” she said. First, hesitating. Then, firm. “I do. I didn’t after they got divorced, but I do now. I’ve almost got it figured out,” she finished.
“Almost?” I asked, a quizzical expression lacing onto my eyebrows.
“I don’t really know how to feel about the whole gay thing yet. I mean, my parents are religious but they’re super conservative politically. They’ve accepted me. But I’m not sure if I fully accept it yet.”
“Both because of God and politics, I’m imagining?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Do you think you’ll marry a woman?” I asked her.
“If I ever get married, it will be to a woman,” she told me resolutely. “What about you?”
“I like boys and girls. I think I like boys more. I also think my parents would kill me if I ever married or dated a woman. They hate that kind of thing. They’re very traditional.”
“They’re immigrants, aren’t they?” She asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, that explains a lot,” she said. I laughed. Then she laughed, too.
“I don’t know where I see this going,” I told her. She knew I was talking about the relationship that was quickly blooming between us.
By the end of the night we were so drunk on each other and that blue moon.
“I think I love you,” she told me before we went to sleep.
I was trembling, either from the cold or the unfamiliarity of my own feelings. “I think I love you, too.”
The next morning, I regretted saying it, because there was nowhere to go but that house. I felt that I loved her, but I couldn’t fathom loving someone I’d have to break up with. It felt like torture to love someone just to leave them. Instead, I quietly avoided her.
Our seminary took us on a week-long trip that day to celebrate the end of quarantine. We’d be spending that week up in the North, the teachers told us, and we’d return a few days before Rosh Hashanah.
I tried to avoid sitting next to her on the bus. This was the time to meet some of my other classmates and really get to know them. Like my roommate, Anna, who I had hoped to become closer friends with. We really hit it off at the airport.
Emily sat with her roommate, Tamar, who was tall and quiet and deeply introspective.
Both of our roommates knew what had happened between us the night before, and both — I later learned — cautioned us to take things slowly because dating someone in seminary can be disastrous. We’d all heard the stories of people in previous years dating and it going downhill. I was scared of continuing an uncomfortable pattern.
Emily, who was sitting across the bus aisle and a few seats down, noticed that I was anxious and uncomfortable. My phone buzzed with her name. “You ok?”
I didn’t know. But I texted her again saying that I was scared of “this whole relationship thing.”
She motioned me to come to her. Tamar asked if I was okay. When I shrugged, she told us to write down where we wanted our relationship to go and show each other.
I wrote down that I didn’t think I wanted to be in a relationship. “I’m scared of commitment,” my Notes app read.
Hers, though, said that she wanted a relationship. “I’m scared,” I told her again. “I’m scared that we don’t want the same things and that we’ll hurt each other because of it.”
Emily’s tan skin started glowing red. She looked so hurt. She told me she needed time.
The rest of the day, we didn’t speak.. By the time we settled into our rooms at the kibbutz, I felt terrible for how the day went down.
I walked outside in my PJs and flip flops, and found her sitting on the rocky kibbutz ground..
“How are you feeling?” I asked her.
“Terrible. I don’t know. I felt like we really had something.”
“Me too. I’m just scared of going too fast. I don’t think I can meet the expectations you have of me.”
“What if we went slowly? Started off as friends.”
“Okay, but no pressure,” I told her. “Just friends.”
“For now,” she said, smiling.
“No, no. Just friends.” I smiled, too, relieved that this didn’t have to be anything real yet.
She walked me back to my door and hugged me. It was a charged hug. “I wish I could kiss you right now,” she whispered into my ear.
“Emily, no! This isn’t how friends behave.” I laughed.
“Okay, goodnight. Love ya!” She said in a sing-song voice.
“Goodnight!”
“Say it back.”
“Alright, love ya too.”
The kibbutz was beautiful in the morning, and we learned it was established by Holocaust survivors.
Those next few days were pressure-free. We were laughing with our friends and each other. I didn’t feel like I had to be anything or change anything. I felt I could still enjoy the company of my friends without worrying about not paying enough attention to her.
One night, our seminary teachers hosted a craft night. I sat there for a few minutes before growing bored. Scanning the room, I found that Emily’s expression matched mine.
“Hey, wanna get out of here? I’m so bored,” I smirked at her.
“Let’s go.”
We walked for a while along the kibbutz, which was surprisingly large. We heard loud music coming from the east and followed the noise. We stumbled into someone’s Bat Mitzvah and decided to stay and dance with each other. The hosts were gracious enough to offer us some drinks because the party was ending, and we each had a beer.
We walked some more until we found a bed of flowers and an open grove. “This reminds me of Brooklyn Bridge Park,” I told her. She was from Austin, Texas, but would be attending college in New York City in the coming fall. “I’ll take you there,” I told her. If I don’t mess it up by then, I thought to myself.
She picked a flower and tucked it behind my ear. “Wanna dance for a bit?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. She pulled me into her arms and we spun all across the empty grove. Soon, we’d return to seminary and have to abide by an enforced curfew, but for the moment, we were free.
Returning to our seminary boarding house a few days later was just as sad as I imagined it would be. I felt that I’d forever be looking back at those first few weeks when we were still figuring ourselves out. Those memories were now tucked away somewhere in my mind. The flower she stuck in my hair was now stuck between two pages in my journal. I wanted to keep my memories where I could see them; it felt more real that way.
Cleaning the house the next day in preparation for the holiday was a fun task. We split up the chores amongst ourselves. All of us spent the day cleaning, different music playing loudly in the living room, and chatter dispelling through the large house.
Emily and I hadn’t seen each other that day, but before she went to bed, she came up to my room and journaled on the floor by my bed.
She asked me what I was writing about. I told her I was having a hard time letting things go. She said she was writing about how terrified hope had made her.
“Hope?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hope that this can go somewhere beyond friendship.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to say.”
“That’s okay.” She touched my hand again. I let her keep it there.
“Where’s Anna?” She asked after a few silent minutes.
“She’s on the phone with her cousin right now. She’s planning on spending Shabbat at her house.”
She didn’t say anything, but she looked at me intently. I was terrified that she’d try to kiss me – that I would let her.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?” I asked, but it came out as a whisper.
“I’m just looking at you. I know what you said a week ago, but I really want to kiss you.”
“Okay,” I whispered again.
It started off slowly, then gained momentum. My mind raced: this was my first kiss, and it was with a girl. How would my parents react if they found out? I’ve never felt agency over my decisions. Even now, as she kissed me, I just let it happen. But I also felt comfortable in her embrace.
I don’t know how long we sat there that way, tremulous and holding each other.
Anna burst into the room. “Sarah, she said I can bring you if you want to come — oh, my god.”
We immediately pulled away and I hid my face.
Emily muttered an apology and left the room. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Anna asked me.
“Not even a little bit. I don’t know how to make a relationship like this last,” I said, my face still in my hands.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it’s not just about commitment. It’s more about my family and community. They would never accept me if I was dating a woman. Why would I put myself and someone else through that? Especially when it means so much to her?”
That night I couldn’t fall asleep. I was surrounded by every mistake I’d ever made, and this one seemed like the largest. She wanted something more than I could ever give her.
I decided I’d talk to her more thoroughly in the morning. I’d explain everything, but most of all I would apologize for leading her on like this. I never meant to make her think that our love – that we – could have a future together.
But I guess a part of me wanted us to.
That part of me still wonders what would have happened if I had let it bloom.
