The rainy cold Ålandic weather reminds me of things I used to do in the past when my head was full of thoughts. No, I didn't have a magic pile of water, like in Harry Potter books to which I can extract my memories and thoughts, but I had a big white new canvas and a set of 5 oil-based paining colors - the 3 base colors - red, blue and yellow and 2 more - white and black.

I used to paint everything that on my mind, and I felt better afterwards.

I think now that I live alone I'll start doing it again. Just me, the music, the colors and the new white big canvas.

A new feeling, new sensation. I’m thinking about everything and nothing at all. My brain is tranquil, my mind is calm. No worries, no news, no bitterness.  My day consists of working and hanging out with him. Once in a while I’m taking myself to Stockholm.

Even though things are not clear (which once could have been a terrible thing for me – causing an increase in my emotional brain activity 100 times more then usual), I’m ok with it. I don’t mind, cause I feel good about it. I don’t really know what he wants, if he wants and how he wants it to be, but for now I enjoy just buying a bottle of good wine, crashing on his sofa with a good movie, he is close to me, and the calmness and tranquility just descend on me from above. I feel good, he makes me feel good. Stopping the movie once in a wile, he’s asking me questions. Maybe to test me and my internal world for his benefit, maybe just because of his interest. I don’t know and frankly – I don’t care. I feel good. Things are getting better now. I’m happy. And you – thank you for being like that. I’ve never imagined it would be like that. Thanks for your interest, thanks for being there. Thanks for crying in the middle of the movie because of the emotional scene, and thanks for not trying to hide it. It’s sweet, it’s what I've been looking for.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s too hot, too humid and too stressful, but it’s my home.

When I landed in Ben Gurion Air port, went outside to the terminal and saw my mother and brother waiting for me with balloons and big big smiles, hugging me, happy to see me after long time – I felt like I came home. And you know want, I needed it. I needed to come back, just for a bit, to my worm (very worm) corner in the world, where people know me for along time and behave like me – like an Israeli. We are worm people, sometime too worm and pushy, but this is our behavior. For Europeans, it may seem strange, a bit annoying sometimes, but our over emotional behavior runs in the genes, and we cannot change it in a second.

 

After 2 hard days in which I admitted my grandma to an old-people housing, which was a very traumatic thing for me (seeing her crying always makes my heart shiver), I found the time meet with Shiran, my person, my soul mate. Like always, I came to pick her up, cause she doesn’t drive. In the moment I saw her going down the stairs I went out of the car, she ran to me and we hugged for 10 minutes. She started to cry, and when I asked her why, she answered that she cannot stand the fact that I feel bad and I’m sad. And then, we drove to our usual hanging-out place – Rothschild Avenue. We took a long walk, stopping every once in a while to sit on the side chairs, to look at each other when I’m telling her all the stories of the previous year, everything that sits like a stone on my heart, all the breaking points that crashed me. We talked about love and disappointments, about good and bad decisions, about the up coming future and about the army. Then we went to our favorite restaurant – Moses, we took our usual dish with our usual beer, facing the avenue, talking and talking and talking. She noticed I’m frequently looking on the people passing by, trying to detect Ohad, my lover from the past, wondering if I’ll say hi if I’ll see him, wondering how he’ll react seeing me. Shiran looked at me, smiling, she understood my eye movements. After 5 hour of talking, laughing and having such a good time, we went back to the car, she put a CD of Adele, and we sang along all the way home.

 

It was a great night. Like 100 psychologist therapies in 5 hours. She is the best, she is so smart, so understanding, and she knows me so well. She promised to come to visit me in Romania, and I promised her we’ll meet again in a few days.

 

It’s good to have such friends. It is so damn important.

God knows that this year the doors slammed in my face, one after one. Some quietly, some loudly, and there were also some closed on my exact fingers. It hurts, and it will still hurt, but there’s always that window that opens with a little squeak, and with the lights flickered in, accompanied with the colors and smells and life, and lots and lots of hope. A summary of my year.

335,664 minutes, 335,664 moments to remember and cherish. How do you even measure a year? In days? In subsets? In nights? In cups of coffee? Inches? Laughter? Fights? And what about love? Maybe love is the one who can help us best measure and evaluates the year passing by and the one that will replace her in 3 months. When I’m talking about a year I’m not referring to the Christian calendar from December 1st to December 1st, and not to the Jewish one from Tishrei 1st to Tishrey 1st. I’m talking about an academic year in my university, from October 4th till today, July 4th (happy b-day USA!).

it’s a good time for summaries, and not the Physiology 3 summary I finished writing this morning. It’s a good time to reflect on the previous year, the good things that happened to me and the bad ones, the people I’ve meet and those who disappeared from my life, the love stories that began and ended, the doors slammed and the windows opened. Opportunities I’ve missed and all my successes, so as the mistakes.

 

They say that every time a door is closed, a window opens, a hatch for a different place, different time, and different opportunities.

 

Everyone chooses his or her own way to measure and summarize the past year. Some people count the money earned this year. Some have it according to their grade point average. There are those who will mark it for a decision made, as moving or buying a car. Others will look back with anger, and shall appoint the days of depression, loneliness and fear that they lived through. There will always be like concluding the year compared to previous years: was it good or worse, and how.

For me personally, it was a year of self-discovery, I’ve learned a lot. I understood that it wasn’t such a clever idea to start studying immediately after long and hard army service, the memories just got repressed back in my mind, but they still exist. And I discovered that they are coming at night, when I’m sleeping. Countless nights that I woke up shivering, sweating, after seeing in my head terrible images that wasn’t part of any movie. Those countless nights ended with me crying myself to sleep, thinking thousand times if the decision I made in those days were acceptable or not. But I forgive myself. I was a kid in army uniforms, with tens of soldier-kids under his command. They are not all alive with us today.

Self-acceptance was another chapter in my year. Throughout my life I built thousands of metal walls around me. Maybe is because of Mr.Berman and his friends in 5th year, that stripped me and tied me to a tree and threw things at me, leaving me standing there naked before I could get free. Or maybe it's because I couldn’t tell this story only to one person, only this year. I was always the fat kid, the target of them all. And the really sad part I knew my obesity is not my fault, it was a disease I had from birth. I put a lot of effort to build these walls around me, and they accompanied me during all my years, but this year – it came right to my face. Maybe this is why I’m so excited to solve this medical problem on the day of the 29th of July. I will start a new life, and the next year will be pealing the walls away from me, and building a brand new self-esteem.

Disappointments. So many of them. I was never so disappointed in this quantity in my life. And those disappointments make me rebuild the walls, and I don’t like it. Conclusion – I will wait for things to happen. I’m done chasing after it. I know that one day, I will have love. I will be able to give everything I can, to give a goodnight kiss, put my hands on his chest and fall asleep meditating with his breathing sounds. I will be able to smile again, to be excited, not to close myself in my room and listening to Kent. I know next year I could enter all the shops I want and get myself the exact cloths I want, and they will fit on the first try. I will be comfortable enough to go to the swimming pool again like I always loved doing, or play football.

This year was shitty. So very much. Next year will be awesome. I will make it awesome. I’m building myself a new life, and the previous disappointment will vanish like they never happened.

<< the soundtrack of this summary >>

“ We are surrounded by math. Math is all around us, even though we don’t see it” said once one of my professors. Another professor explained that math is music, and only if you know how, you can hear the numbers singing to you in the middle of the night, wonderful romantic serenades and songs that the head cannot disregard. Combine these two sentences together and you’ll reach to the one and only conclusion possible – we are all surrounded by music, all the time. We only need to learn how to listen.

This music are the people around us. Our friends, our family, even that no-so-successful date siting in front of you and trying his best to make you like him. It is possible that under this coat, the average standard looking guy you’ll find to be the best thing ever happened to you. All you need to do is to listen. Listen to the person, not to his exteriority.

Whatever we’ll do, we are all captured with the image of “the guy of our dreams”. Every one of us is looking for something else: tall or short, white or brown, thin or heavy, cynical or romantic, so many criteria. But in the end of the day we’re all looking for the same thing – the guy that will share with us a big piece of our life, for the better or for worst, the one that will be with us along the road and we could be next to him when he’ll need it. It can be a man or a woman, it can be wonderful, exciting and breath taking or it can be long-termed and stable. At least we have it.

There are people who’re looking after their happiness in the exteriority of their partner, looking for the perfect six-pack, the Colgate smile, and the most shining guy in the city. The perfect muscles, smooth skin and sculptured face. And there are those who’re looking for the man inside, the conqueror personality, the unbalanced nerd that explodes out with a sex-dripping tsunami of intelligence. Others are looking after the artistic person, that dances with all your senses, filling the house with sounds or words, photos or moves. And there are those who’re looking for the combination of them all, and the outcome is the man of their dream, with some defects, plus minus.

So what do I look for in a man? I was trying to define it lately to myself mostly, to think about those points that someone need to push on for me to get excited and interested. Unfortunately I discovered that they are different from one person to the other. Mysteriously, I don’t have any guidelines for looks, even though some of my friends claim that I’m a bit racist. Well, I’m not. Some of my friends envy me, but I feel like it’s a nightmare, because I like everyone – and its confusing as hell. From one side you’re surrounded by potential guys, and from the other side – you’re still alone, and it cannot be lonelier then that.

My personality guidelines are pretty clear: he needs to be intelligent, with a sense of humor and enough goodness to sell the leftovers in the market. A guy that wants to listen to you, before he wants you to listen. To read poems he wrote before impressing you with his résumé or his beautiful muscles. One that looks deep inside your eyes when he’s mad at you, or calls you back after you hanged the phone on him. Someone who kisses the tip of your nose, before he hugs you and fall asleep in your arms. Someone who’s not afraid of telling you he loves you, even if right now it’s the most random thing to say. Someone who’s waiting for introducing you to his friends, and waiting for meeting your friends. Someone that will know all your stories by heat but will be happy to hear them again, if you feel the need to tell them. Someone that will feel lucky to have you beside him, and you’ll feel like you’re holding a million dollars bill in your hands.

When you’ll find this guy, hold him strongly in your hands, and never let go. Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for mine. He’s out there, I’m sure.

Her name is Shiran, and we are friends for the last 4 years.

I first met her in the army. I was a medical officer and she served in a medical educational unit that goes for a week to the fighting units to train them according to the army schemas of treatment of wounded people. When I got a phone call saying that my unit is next in line for this training, I didn’t like it so much. My first thought was “who the hell are they, the non-combat soldiers to come to my unit and teach my soldiers something that they already know? The soldiers of this unit are sitting in Tel Aviv next to the mall and they never saw blood in their lives”. But since nobody asked me if I want this training or not, I accepted it.

 

A week after, when the soldier came to my unit, she needed to leave in that exact day due to problems at home, but she promised they would send someone else to cover for her. And they sent Shiran.

 

To make long story short – it was a very nice week of training, we all enjoyed it very much, and me as the commander had many nice conversations with her in the evenings. Since then, we kept in touch and because good friends even outside of the army. Before I left Israel to Romania, we used to go out almost every night, sharing the same love to Tel Aviv at night and an ice-cold Guinness. After I moved to Romania, our phone calls became rare, due to my lack of time and hers. She lives in the reality of an Israeli ex-soldier wanting to go to med school in Israel – taking tens of exams, improving high school marks, and mostly working every free minute to earn the money for all of this.

 

But every time I’m coming back home, we meet at least 3 times a week, sitting somewhere in Tel Aviv and talking for hours, like we never came apart. She understand me the best, and I understand her, and most of all – we share a great respect and love to each other. I usually don’t tell her when I’m coming back home, and surprise her by calling her and saying – put up some cloths and come down, I’m here to take you to Tel Aviv.

Today she had a birthday. I called, she started to cry out of excitement, and I told her I’m coming back home in 2 weeks. She told me she has some many things to tell me, and I told her the same. She said that she knows that I’m going through something hard these days, and I was amazed how she knew, since we didn’t talk for the last 4 months. She said that she just sensed my misery and she just knew. She always knows.

 

This summer I’m going to tell her everything. I’m going to tell her about all the events that happened to me in the last year, cause I need to tell someone and it seems like she is the only one I will tell and she will really understand. I don’t need to explain myself much, she understand it anyway. It will be great to tell her about my sexual preferences. She will never judge me.

 

I love you Shirany, you’re one of a kind.

No anger, no nerves. No stress, no grudge. No remorse, no yelling – clean and tranquil talk. No blame, no shame, what happened in the past – is over and gone. The important is what will happen in the future. No black, only white, new writing paper, no stains. If my soul is storming, if my heart is shivering, if I want to scream to the sky, if I cannot avoid thinking about it – I will go to sleep, wake up a new person and tell myself – think positive. Always positive. Never end up a relation with your best friends with harsh feelings, cause you want to remember the best of him, not the bad times. Don’t leave it with darkness on you soul. Not everybody is like you, accept the others. Don't expect even your best friend to consider your feelings in his reaction, if he is part of the problem.

 

A lesson for life by the present being.

I’ve learned few things yesterday from a wise friend. For you, my good friend (yes, I know you read it now and you know that I’m talking about you) – thank you so much for yesterday – you’re the best. And I’ll see you very soon.

After making a decision to take a break of a year and to finish what I started almost 5 years ago, to go back to the olive-green uniforms, I started to think about what I’m going back for. First of all, I’m going back to a name-less place, where my name will not be that important anymore, and my personal number and the title “sir” or “lieutenant” will replace it. I’m going back to the sand of the desert and the mud of the north, to be responsible again for so many people, for making crucial decisions on a daily basis and to remember to salute back to the young soldiers, cause for them – your salute as a response for theirs, means so much. I’m going back to be the proud owner of 4 phones, giving me probably enough radiation for growing 2 more testicles and to get them all cancerous. I’m going back for the 1/2/3/4/5 am calls from the central command, telling me I need to take my team, my tanks and be in that point ASAP. I’m going back to be in control, to teach, to command, to take care of my beloved soldiers and to prove myself again that I can. I’m going back to the adrenaline, to the rush, to the wonderful feeling of going back home from an important mission. I’m going back to catch the bad guys, and to help to the good ones. And after a year, I’ll go back here, with a handful of new experiences.