What the Light Does

In a few days, I will step outside an airport terminal, and the light will hit me.

I know it’s coming, and still I am never ready. There is a quality of light in Israel that exists nowhere else I have been to. It doesn’t just fall on you. It enters you. Bright and ancient and almost violent in its familiarity.

My eyes will struggle.

My chest will open.

I will feel something I don’t have a word for in English, and I’m not sure I have it in Hebrew, either.

And then the air.

Every city has its own smell, they say. But this one is mine in a way I didn’t choose.

It reaches something in my DNA before my mind has a chance to prepare.

It smells like every age I have ever been. It smells like longing and like home and like the specific pain of loving a place you left.

My parents will be there. Older than the last time. Beautiful. Their faces when they see me, I can already see it from here, from Brooklyn, from my apartment, where the suitcase is open on the floor.

We will cry.

We will hold hands.

We will laugh in the same breath.

And underneath all of it, the question I carry every time and never fully answer:

What will I find that has changed?

What will I find that I have lost? Who was I, there before I became who I am here?

I have lived in New York for twenty-six years. I have built a life I love, truly love. And even after all this time away, there are people in Israel who know me in ways I cannot fully explain. Who hear something in my voice before I’ve said the real thing. Who hold a version of me that doesn’t live anywhere else. That version isn’t gone. But she doesn’t have an address I can return to.

The suitcase is full of gifts nobody needs. I do this every year. I tell myself every year that I will stop. I never do. There is something about arriving with your arms full, the sister, the daughter, the aunt from abroad, that feels it is necessary in a way I’m still trying to understand. The gifts are not really gifts. They are something else. A proof. A way of saying: I was thinking of you. The distance was not indifferent.

I am still learning what it means to be a person whose belonging is split across two sides of an ocean, across decades, across two languages that increasingly feel like two different selves.

Tuesday, I am leaving.

The light is already waiting.