Down There
Akerman
I don’t feel like I belong,
and that’s without real pain, or without pride.
Pride happens. No I’m just disconnected
from practically everything.
I have a few uncles and sometimes I let them go, or they let me go.
And I drift. That’s most of the time.
Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds.
Then I let go again.
I can have the look, I can have the hair.
Semi-blind? Semi-deaf?
I float.
Sometimes I sink, but not quite.
Something, sometimes a detail brings me back to the surface,
and I start floating again.
I feel so disconnected that I can’t even have a house with bread, coffee, milk, toilet paper.
And when I buy some, I feel like it’s a heroic act.
Basically, I don’t know how to live or go anywhere.
When I take the bus, it’s a state of heroism, too.
And this all has to do with that, with Israel or not Israel.
Of course not real Israel.
Within Israel where all of a sudden I would belong.
But I know that’s also a mirage.
Something in me has been damaged.
My relationship with the real, with daily life.
How do you make a life in a non-rarified air?
It starts with bread in the house.
A minimum of order,
a minimum of life.
And besides all that, I lose everything; my keys, my glasses, my notes, my sister, and almost my mother.
My notes on Israel, too.
Because after months of non-reflection,
but reflection nonetheless,
I finally accepted Xavier’s offer,
and I started to take some notes.
I lost my notes in Spain.
A big blue and white checkered notebook.
I either let this big notebook at the movies.
That was the first time I had gone in months.
And I went with my niece, otherwise I would have stayed in bed at the hotel.
I either lost the notes at the movies or at the fast food place we went to before the movies.
I didn’t go back to look for them out of laziness out of boredom.
But mostly out of lack of desire,
or out of parasites of desire, disrupted or worse.
Out of a feeling that if I sing, well, then I should just sing.
I should just deny myself, like I usually do,
except sometimes in spurts.
That’s what I generally do,
except for my notes or work
when I still manage to work by refusing to let all the best get near the surface.
Sometimes, and it’s getting harder and harder.
