ALL THAT I AM
Alongside Bialik
by Noa Kon
When I try and think about love, try and grasp the huge word, my mind automatically brings up a familiar image I can cling to. The relationship Lev and I tried to have and hold, and we'd stumble and fall, build and break, until we'd have some sort of grip, until we'd be able to admit, to each other, to others, to ourselves – of our love.
And I knew it. I knew I had it, I knew I felt it, I knew I held it, I knew I lost it.
Believing that the way I felt fit that word, the word that today could be uttered so easily, hardly acknowledged for all that's in it, for all it is. Becoming like all the other words we have control over, the words we let roll off our tongues without bothering to learn, memorize, and analyze their actual meaning.
Believing that what I felt was it. What I felt was love.
Now, I don't know. Now, standing far from it, standing in a so-called more objective place, now I'm unable to decipher the feelings I felt from the feelings I would feel if it was it. And maybe it was. And maybe I'll never know.
I stopped writing there, washed the dishes, took a shower, collapsed in bed. And throughout all this something kept bothering me, telling me that I wasn't finished. That it wouldn't be fair, to myself, to stop there.
Because what I was saying wasn't accurate, wasn't real enough.
It would be so easy to abridge and reduce everything I felt into something so simple and clear-cut. Like, how could I even begin to know what love was, being only a teenager. Boy, do I hate that word. That world.
And I could look back in years from now and make fun and laugh at who I was, at who I thought myself to be, and say how immature and ignorant I really was. But I said I loved him, I was convinced I did, and so I believe. I analyzed myself through and through to know that what I felt was real. I know my feelings run deep, I trust my 16-year-old self that if she says it was love, then it was love. I won't let the world categorize me into that box of adolescence, to reduce feelings into words, my love into a crush. I spent my teenage years denying the fact that they WERE in fact "teenage years", disconnecting myself from the world of adolescence. So it wouldn't be fair to minimalize all I was into that one word, "teenager". The world I tried so hard to shake off, to rid myself of.
So I believe I felt something. I definitely felt SOMETHING. Something huge. I know I don't make something out of nothing, I know I can't. I know it was something, I'm just not a million percent sure it was the same something everyone talks about. If the love I felt is that same love people mean. I know it was something I'm just not exactly sure what.
:ועוד רז אחד לך אתוודה
;נפשי נשרפה בלהבה
- אומרים, אהבה יש בעולם
?מה זאת אהבה
And even if I did have those infamous teenage years – I never really felt them. Never really got so much out of them. Never really got to know them, to live them, to hate them. They didn't last for me.
Like right now, I'm seventeen. And feel so far from it. So far from the joy, the beauty, the fun of the sweet and innocent, the pain of growth and exposure, the drama and mood-swings, they're far behind, they're up ahead, they're swirled within. I never get the real pure teenage feelings, they just mix in with everything else, join the mess, never stand alone. I've never been a real teenager, never felt what it would be like if I was a teenager and nothing more. I always had more. Not that I would want to be a part of that looked-down-upon world, that pathetic and meaningless era.
And still, everyone goes through it, everyone works past it, and only I skipped over it. Never got to really taste it.
If I say I'm seventeen it should mean something, I should be feeling seventeen. I should be feeling that stress, love, beauty, pain, confusion.
And seventeen should mean those silly teenage girls on television, lying on their beds and talking to their boyfriends on the phone, those teenage girls who fight with their parents and rebel, those teenage girls who giggle and scream and cry from every tiny thing.
And where are they, and where am I?
As stupid and cheesy as I know this will sound, I really do feel like when my dad died a part of me did as well. In fact, all of me. All except the physical aspect.
Like that banal but true clich? of the flower being picked before its time, before it had a chance to really blossom.
Picked at sixteen, before I really got the gist of adolescence, of life.
,ובעת רחמים, בין השמשות
שחי ואגל לך סוד ייסורי
אומרים, יש בעולם נעורים –
?היכן נעוריי
Looking back on all I was, all I wanted to one day become, I can't help thinking about how much I had, how much I lost.
How much I wanted to some day become rich, successful, famous – to be someone.
And it's so far behind me; I don't want to be anybody. I don't want to be at all.
I've been fooled, told that there's something out there for me – told this world was worth something, held promises and treasures I would someday find and cherish – I was told, and I, so innocently, believed.
Believed I could be happy, I could be whole and complete and I could live.
Believed this world was a good place, that it would hold me and envelop me, that it would spread before me its charms and riches.
Believed that this life would be all it was bargained to be, that it would satisfy me and lead me through roads I'd conquer and challenges I'd overcome.
Believed God would watch over me, would hold me up and get me through, would protect me, would carry me and wouldn't let me fall.
And then came my dad's death and invalidated everything I'd been brought up to believe.
Not knowing where to continue from there, having lost faith in the world, in life, in God, in everything I once clung to, everything that turned out to be one big lie.
God took away everything, left me with nothing, and now, that's all I've got.
,הכוכבים רימו אותי
;היה חלום - אך גם הוא עבר
- עתה אין לי כלום בעולם
.אין לי דבר
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