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

few years, but then I’d find myself on the recharging side, over and over again. Emptied out. We became very weak. He wanted a child. He thought that it would give us a reason to live, give us strength. A child isn’t a reason to live, I told him. Surely not before it even arrives. A child is out of necessity. You only bring a child if you absolutely must, because if not, the longing will never leave you.

Nothing could have prepared Yochai for what I had to tell him that afternoon. “I don’t want to live anymore. Not with you.” Nothing but the silences that became longer and longer with each passing week, and the heavy awareness floating around the dining corner for ages after he’d asked, “Can you pass me the bread?” and a minute later, “Rotem? The bread. The cheese, too.”

After Yochai killed himself, I realized that I did want a child. Only not with him. That I did want to live. Only not with him. I mourned the futile, exhausting years, when I had often been defeated by a weight much greater than me. The weight of my memories and yearnings, the weight of another person I had carried on my back, who had long become a separate entity. I mourned the belated realization, over and over again. And mourned him. And mourned us.

I went to New Zealand. Many months passed. Green nature and vast endless spaces slightly healed my soul, at least enough for me to be able to return. When I came back, I broke into the dance of life. Yochai had always encouraged me to study, and he believed in me. He saw me from the inside. He knew me from within himself.

Except I didn’t have the energy for anything back then. For anything else but this all-consuming love. The copious waters that couldn’t defeat it − simply because they had been trapped deep within me − suddenly erupted.

Two academic degrees, a vocational qualification, and then another one and psychotherapy school and a writing course and a child . . .

I’d suddenly wanted a child so badly − on my own, with no one else involved.

“I live for you,” I whispered in Yotam’s ear. He turned to his side and hugged Snoopy, who had joined us.

Thoughts

I was walking around the streets of Shikun Dan in North Tel Aviv. A warm, humid breeze caressed my face, signalling the beginning of summer, drying the little bit of sweat that accumulated. I thought about the old apartment I’d left before the hospitalization in order to save money, thinking about the length of the long hospitalization when the apartment would be empty, wanting to ease some of the financial burden I put on my parents every month. After all, one can’t really make a living from part-time dog-sitting. There’s a whole world between my apartment in the Florentin neighborhood and Tal’s apartment in Tel Aviv’s old north. Sickness versus health, poverty versus wealth, darkness versus light. But I’d actually loved my little apartment in the old building. I’d loved my colorful neighbors and the beggar on the corner, the stray cats with no one to feed them regularly − who managed to survive nonetheless, just like the rest of the neighborhood’s residents. I loved the cramming, which had a sort of inner truth to it. No masks, no costumes.

When I’d decided to sign myself out of the hospital ahead of schedule, without any plan or time for preparing, and after having consulted with Rotem, Tal and I thought that I should move in with her temporarily. I was glad for the opportunity to get closer to her, to be like real sisters who are there for each other no matter what.

The day that I left the unit, I found out that Rotem was away on some kind of retreat, far away from central Israel, and had left Miko with a friend of hers. I went over to pick him up, and I encountered yet another private and human side of Rotem. Not another cold, inaccessible therapist who maintains distance from her patients. Miko got so excited that he couldn’t stop jumping and squirming, and he began knocking things over and sliding across Yulia’s floor. She invited me to come in and sit with her, but I politely declined and just thanked her again and again for having looked after him.

I put his leash on and went back out to the street, utterly filled with the strongest conviction − the one that must have made me rush to discharge myself, I then realized. My reason for living. It wasn’t Miko, since I knew that one day he’d no longer be there and I’d still have to continue living. I’m not a little kid. But Miko represented something that I clearly understood during my time in the hospital: I realized that I found my destiny, that I actually had a destiny, and that the world would be a better place if I fulfill it − unlike everything I had previously believed.

I turned towards the beach and thought about the stomach cramps I used to suffer from. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had them, and I became filled with hope. Ailments can be remedied.

“That’s it, Miko. Let’s go home.” Unlike the endless nighttime walks we took until a month earlier, since I started living with Tal I tried not to disappear for too long late at night. I knew that it worried her, and anyway, maybe the feeling of having someone waiting for me at home, noticing if and when I returned, shortened my walks.

Almost two weeks had passed since my release. I hadn’t yet decided what I wanted to do with myself, but I knew that it wasn’t going to include starvation. I knew that I wanted to do something with animals. Something different, something that would open up a whole new world for me. I knew that Dad wouldn’t like it, so I kept avoiding