The Geography of Letting Go

I placed all my emotions in a small bag, the kind that can be carried on a low-cost flight. I actually enjoy eating on flights, but my money had run out, and I had to fly, had to say goodbye. I wrote on a note that I left in the kitchen, "I'm traveling to leave my feelings in Barcelona and will return in two or three days without them. Sorry that your carry-on won't return with me. I'll buy you another bag there."

The taxi arrived at one in the morning to pick me up. Emotions don't seal in plastic bags or leak-proof containers, even though they can leak. For example, sadness - the most fluid emotion there is, did you know? I found myself explaining this to the driver. His name was Shlomi, and it had been ten years since his wife had thrown him out, taken their child, and flown to America. Since then, he had been driving people to Ben Gurion Airport, recreating that last, fateful trip.

We talked about God, I don't know why, and he talked about football, I don't know why. Then I suggested we talk about music. I think I suggested that because his radio was playing songs I didn't recognize the entire way. I used to know all the songs. The radio had changed. Radios change. I paid him without taking change, because there was only one shekel and ten agorot between the price and the bill, and he asked me to wait so he could bless me with a traveler's prayer. He placed the palm of his hand on my head, like a yarmulke, with a hovering lightness, and recited the prayer from a card the size of a business card.

On the plane, I was seated next to a family with a father, mother, and a child with blue eyes like the sea in Greece. The uncle, the mother's brother, also sat with us in the row. They were traveling to another brother's wedding. There were four brothers in total. One didn't speak to the other three, but the other three never stopped talking among themselves. I wrote in my diary that it was a classic case of a trio who didn't want to remember the one they didn't speak to. The youngest brother's wedding would be in Madrid, in a four-hundred-year-old church with excellent catering at a great price. Flights to Madrid were more expensive, they explained to me. I couldn't help but feel excited with them as they looked together at their old family photo albums, the ones that had been scanned into an iPad wrapped in white cloth.

The ten-year-old girl explained to me that although the wedding was not a Jewish wedding and the bride was not Jewish, they still considered it as establishing a Jewish home in Israel, like their home. She told me everything she knew about Shabbat. I asked her where her uncle and his new wife would live, and she told me that her uncle's wife was a real estate agent who had apartments all over Spain and could live anywhere she wanted in Spain. "I'll be a real estate agent too," she told me, "but in Israel. It's important to me that this is where my home is, where my houses are."

For a moment, I believed the girl truly wanted to become a real estate agent, but then, as they all talked about the cruelty involved in slaughtering animals and the need to be vegetarian and vegan, the girl said she wanted to be a veterinarian. Not the kind that gives lethal injections, but the kind that saves cats, dogs, and donkeys. I wanted to ask her why specifically donkeys, but then I remembered that this wasn't my family. That their happiness wasn't the happiness I'd be getting off the plane with. That it was a different kind of happiness, different emotions. That my emotions were above me, in the overhead compartment, locked in a run-run bag, but released.

The weather in Barcelona brightened my face. I called home to Israel but couldn't say anything on the phone. I prefer silence over a strangled voice. I knew everything would become easier once I left the bag with the emotions somewhere, found a bench for it, and forgot it completely by accident, like the Meir Ariel disc I once left in London and someone who found it found me because of a few words written on a note inside. It was bizarre. This time no one would return the bag to me. It was empty of words, empty of pictures, empty of anything that doesn't feel.

I sat down on a bench next to a café that sells Spanish food to people who speak thundering American English. I ordered orange juice, pita with tahini, salad, and memories from Israel. In this place, the waitress with black eyes and an apron painted with a hundred types of mustaches placed a cup of coffee and two biscuits next to it on the table. She began to cry when I told her why I was here. We cried together, and in the end, she drew on a map, which was actually a napkin, where there was a bench, not far, where you could leave bags like mine.

I got lost. It was close to midnight. I could see my hotel from a distance, but I wasn't sure how to get there. Or if I should get there. I went back to the bench. I sat down next to the bag that no one had taken yet. I lay down to sleep. One last night with old feelings.

Then morning came. There was a special meal at the hotel due to an event for the Germans. I ate a sausage with mustard that was the color of ketchup. In the evening, there was a flight back. The way home is always shorter. Twenty minutes or thirty minutes less. I asked Shlomi to pick me up. He mostly works nights. Ten years. I told him that the plane was half-empty and that I had never flown like that. He was silent. I asked him if he had flown a lot during those ten years... I mean... if he ever flew at all, to anywhere? He said that he didn't board planes, but only drove people who did. That was his role in this life.

The fare came out to be one shekel and ten agorot more than the meter. He let it go. He said he was glad to see me back safe and sound, and somewhere in his smile, it was clear that he thought it was also thanks to him. "Did you manage to leave the bag there?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "It's there. The bag is there."

I entered the house on tiptoes. No one was waiting for me in the living room. Darkness. A small light in the corner near the kitchen, but darkness. In bed was a woman I had married in a Jewish wedding a few good years earlier. She was wearing her bright purple pajamas, which I could identify even in the dark. When I got into bed, she turned to me, and without opening her eyes or turning on the light, she said she was glad I was back. We didn't talk about the bag I left there. Not the next morning. Not in the evening or the day after or at all. That's exactly how it happened.