A Room of Their Own by Rakefet Yarden (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📕

having a tough time living, feeling all of these emotions − that’s what he’d say. Then what are our options? We situate ourselves in life, and eventually die − but what about the in-between? If I get sucked in along with her, then I won’t be able to help her, as Eyal keeps reminding me. “You’d just become another noodle in her soup.” She’s knocking on all of my gates, wanting them to open so that she can come in and direct everything towards me, but then how will I help her? I also can’t just remain on the side, cold and distant.

Yochai. Six months after we broke up, he committed suicide. He’d called me over and over again, and I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to anymore, and that was it. That’s it. That’s the story. I don’t have the strength to elaborate any further. That’s the essence of it. I’m ashamed. Ashamed of myself. I know that it’s all connected. I had no more energy left for him. His fragility, his neediness. I didn’t want to be with him anymore, and more than anything, I was scared of having children with him. In a bond made by pain encountering pain, and with such a gene pool on both sides, what chance would a child have?

I thought that I was a monster. I thought everything bad about myself, but I couldn’t handle it anymore. I didn’t want to. It was my prerogative. It wasn’t like he was a child that I’d decided to bring into this world and that I had to stay with him no matter what. That’s how I’d persuaded myself each and every night. After the funeral, I upped and left for New Zealand, as far away as possible, in order to forget. Forget him and forget his mother’s eyes fixed on me, penetrating two pairs of dark sunglasses − mine and hers.

I took El Al to Bangkok. On Khao San Road, the backpackers’ sanctuary, I bought a Malaysia Airlines ticket to Auckland, with a stop at Kuala Lumpur. I spent the night there at an airport hotel which came with the flight ticket, because Israelis can fly with the company but they can’t formally enter Muslim Malaysia. A friendly flight attendant woke me up for a meal. She was excited to find out there was an Israeli on her flight.

“Are all Israeli girls as pretty as you?”

I looked around to see if there were any other Israelis on the flight, but the seats next to me were unoccupied. She was definitely talking to me. Linor Abargil had just won the Miss World contest, and the flight attendant told me that I looked like her, after noticing my baffled expression. I never thought of myself as pretty.

Once in Auckland, I sat on the edge of a lake for an entire Saturday watching people bungee jump. Reaching the water again and again, the rope going back up freely and connecting to the next jumper. I was scared of jumping myself, and I was still Sabbath-observant at the time, so I just watched them all and thought about Yochai, jumping without a rope and crashing onto the rocks. That night, I dreamt about a totally empty apartment with conjoined rooms. There was a young girl with me, and I was sheltering her on the floor, in a room without curtains, waiting for the noise that would rattle everything. Waiting for death. Knowing full well that afterwards, I’ll no longer feel anything.

Today I woke up from a tiring night. Again. I dreamt about Eyal. I dreamt that I was asleep in the armchair across from him for a few hours until he woke me up and said, “The therapy session’s over.” I walked out with a sour feeling of having missed out.

I got up quickly and dressed in front of the mirror, putting my jeans on, taking them off and trading them for black pants. I gained four pounds, and I don’t wear them well. If I could only transfer those pounds to Dani, who is eating herself from the inside. It’s no wonder she can’t get anything in her mouth. She’s protecting herself from the world. Trying to get validation, trying to appease her father, the world, me. I tried not to worry, but the concern grabbed me tightly from within. Dani was nearing a BMI of 13 at a worrying speed, after having dismissed two dieticians and one psychiatrist. Now it was only the two of us left. She made sure to do it herself, before they dismissed her.

“If you tell me that I have to be hospitalized, then I’ll do it,” she’d said to me.

“You need hospitalization in order for us to continue,” I told her. Then I added in my mind − it’s only a small hurdle on the way, Dani. We’re sticking together for the long run.”

“But that’ll mean that our therapy has failed,” she said quietly.

“That doesn’t interest me in the slightest. The only thing I care about is your health. And anyway, that’s not true. Our therapy is what enables the hospitalization. You’re not available for anything when you’re this underweight. We can’t process trauma or work on your relationships. Anorexia may be your defense from all of that, but it’s also killing you at the same time. That’s precisely the aim of therapy at this stage, to prepare you for hospitalization. No one will hospitalize you if you’re not willing and fully cooperative.”

I saw her shrinking further and further into herself, flickering, vanishing, and reappearing like the flame of a candle. After fainting numerous times, she finally agreed to be hospitalized. It’s difficult to be in the unit. A lot of patients there return again and again, dealing with a disorder that isn’t conquered. It reappears at various stages of life, when the need for control arises, and when the already fragile support system doesn’t manage to provide the necessary warmth.

A burst of color. Someone had planted bulbs in a