People I Love, People I Miss

I've got so much to say! I'm finding that the more I update here, the more I use this blog as my journal, and I'm less likely to write in this darling little journal I started in a notebook that Lauren Pringle gave me for my birthday last year. But it's also so strange to write here! This blog is at the same time a journal for myself--an account of my emotions and experiences abroad, a place to sort out some of the mess in my head and to catalog the story of this year--and a kind of multi-purpose letter to lots of people back home. Not only that, but a wide range of people are reading here--myself, friends from home, friends from school, my sister, my parents and grandparents, other family and family friends. This brings up a whole host of questions and possible problems. Does this kind of thing, this personal reflection, bother people who might log into my blog just to read about what I am physically doing in Israel? Maybe it's boring or uncomfortable. And what about myself? What do I lose and gain by transferring my journal from a private notebook to a public website? I've often been in this awkward, precarious position since I love to write, and I've always written about personal things and then sought to publish them. For now, I think I'm comfortable exploring this new type of writing/journaling. But feedback is certainly welcome, especially if something I'm writing about is uncomfortable or unclear--or fascinating or happy or sad, for that matter.

Last week I travelled to Tel Aviv to see some very close friends from Vassar. It was wonderful and sad to see them. Our time together seemed so short! I came after class one day, and stayed out with them all night and returned to the kibbutz the next day. Before seeing them I hadn't been missing them at all, but you know how it is. The next morning, standing outside the hotel, watching the other students from their birthright trip board the bus and knowing this was the last time I was going to see my best friends for months--that was difficult. Part of me still doesn't believe they will be returning to school without me in the fall. How can life at Vassar go on while I'm not there? What a naive, egotistical way to think of things! I am glad to be here in Israel, and I am glad to be studying away from Vassar for a year. And yet, and yet, and yet. Really, I'm lucky to be so close to friends whom I will miss this dearly. Maybe it goes to show how everything has more than one side; nothing is purely good or purely bad. Our world is not a simple place.

I saw my sister this weekend. She had her free shabbat on her program, and we both met in Hadera where we stayed at family friends' house. When they dropped me off tonight, it was the same. I had hardly missed her before, but there's a something that expands in your chest and wells in your throat when you hug goodbye a person that you love.

I guess part of what I'm trying to say is that I miss you, whoever you are, my reader.