Israeli takes American on a First Date
7:04, 7:07, 7:13. Punctuality is a faraway dream in this country where bargaining is the norm and bombs may fall tomorrow.
The minutes she spends waiting fill this sacred window where someone she loves across the world is awake. The Israeli sun sets as the American one rises, and so another day of cross-cultural stumbling continues.
Israeli arrives on a motorcycle wearing skinny jeans and cologne that makes American sneeze. He is the kind of good-looking that her mother would point out on the subway – dark features set against skin the color of her favorite olives.
Israeli insists she ride with him, but American is stubborn enough to refuse to trust a man she barely knows to navigate her across this city where even the scooters pose a severe threat to pedestrian safety. Israeli is persistent enough in his request to annoy her. She tells him she will think about it and is extraordinarily relieved that he seems satisfied with her answer, a polite no disguised as a flirtatious maybe.
Upon his request, she brings his two helmets the size of small babies up to her apartment. On their way to the beach – Israeli begrudgingly agreed to walk – he stops by a convenience store to buy cigarettes. He carries his lighter in the depths of his front pocket.
They arrive at the beach. His cigarette is half-gone. American is thinking about nicotine and lung cancer. Israeli wants to take a photo. American says no; Israeli is stubborn enough to ask her two, three, four times. American is persistent enough in her refusal to annoy him.
This date stumbles over the edges of a shock that nearly drowns her: what was once so familiar is now blindsiding. She is not being dry; she is simply processing layers of a language she is still learning to master, and her teacher is a man six years her senior who mumbles and calls her beautiful when she says no.
Following the end of the date, after she was sure she would feign disappointment that her friend just got sick and she will therefore not ride the motorcycle with him back to his apartment across the city an ocean away from what was once home, she receives a DM.
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