To Israel, lying on my back thinking of England

It was 2014, I was 23 and old enough to know better. During a month-long train trip around Europe, I had returned again to the classic favourite, Berlin. I checked-in to a sketchy hostel and made my way to an even sketchier club in the Kreuzberg district. The universe delivered a young Israeli with a skateboard as a dance partner, and it was a seven day love affair.

With all romance abroad, you make the parting gift of a half-baked promise – one day we’ll see each other again. No one believes in honouring this but it makes for a powerful goodbye. I left Berlin and by Bratislava the Israeli with the hand-poked tattoos was a distant memory.

Out of the blue and almost one year later, the Israeli skateboards back into my DMs. Did I want to visit him in Tel Aviv? I was at university, broke and recently heartbroken, but Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had given me a hearty rebate of money I didn’t know I was owed. I took the chance and I booked the flight.

I touched down in Tel Aviv on a Thursday morning. The grey oppressive sky of Manchester was two timezones behind me and my parents had no idea where I was. Passport security had a field day. They asked me why I was here, who I was meeting, where I was going, what address I was staying at. I didn’t have the answers to these questions. I was just an irish girl in her early twenties alone in Israel wanting to hang out with an old friend. I called Shahar. No answer. I text him, are you picking me up at the airport or can I get a bus to yours? No answer. I call again and the dialling tone doesn’t go through. The call doesn’t connect.

I rang the only other person I knew in Tel Aviv, a friend of Shahar’s I remembered hazily from the club in Berlin.
„Shahar’s girlfriend found out you were coming and gave him an ultimatum. He won’t be picking you up.“

I was too naive then to feel panic in the way I have perfected feeling panic in 2020. The friend came to collect me, begrudgingly. In a beat-up dusty car whose model I don’t remember or couldn’t decipher from the dirt, we sailed the motorway into downtown Tel Aviv, a neighbourhood called Florentin. I remember it like yesterday. The windows down and broken, Black Sabbath on the stereo and a bottle of tequila in the drink’s holder. I spent 6 days in hell and wrote a poem.