i don't know if i've been changed for the better...

...but I have been changed for good.

It seems like a long time has passed since I last wrote, a long time since I sat in the lounge in Tel Aviv. I guess it is because it has been a long time.
I had expected a slightly rocky and slow transition back in to my old life, my old places. I expected time to deliberate. Who could have predicted that, due to two deaths in my immediate community circle in the firs few days I was back, I would see nearly every single family friend at least twice, and be asked what I am doing now with my life more times than I would ever wish to count. Unpacking and adjusting to the cold weather don't seem to be acceptable answers.

The return was in many ways surreal; in one conversation with my mother, she asked me if I really felt like I was coming home, she asked me even, where I considered my home to be. This might seem like it ought to be an obvious question, but how could it be? Was home Roseland, where my parents live, my dog lives, my room is and all my things are? No, how could it be a place filled with but separated from my life, a place I hardly knew and knew no one in. Hopatcong, where I had grown up, spent 19 years? I had never truly felt home there, and less so with most friends moved away, and my childhood house covered in Christmas decorations. Berlin? Jerusalem? True, these places were beloved, invaluable, but foreign. I realized where I considered home to be--a place where I had actually lived, grown in, and the first place where I chose to be. New York.

As my time back, wherever I was, some things had improved. I had started making a proper Shabbat dinner every Friday night at my home. I was seeing old friends, reconnecting with people I hadn't seen in a while. Eventually, after the constant Shivas ended I went to spend a week in the city, seeing my friends, walking my old routes, returning to some old and loved places, routines. Things that always seemed immortal. And yet somehow, in a certain way, it had become foreign. Not just the snow, which was a shock to my middle eastern comfortable system, but something intangible..
even though you return to the old places, people, it seems that from some things, you really just can't go home again.

but that doesnt mean you stop trying to.