It Will Clear

There are days when consciousness turns on itself and what it finds is not comforting. These are not feelings. They are observations. And it is that difference that keeps me from treating the matter more gently.

I sense that my country does not love me. I arrived one day carrying the idea that belonging is a matter of choice, that wanting to be from here was enough to be from here, and what I found was that others also have a say in that. Israel looks at me. Classifies me. It had decided what I am before I could decide for myself. It accepted my weight. Let me stay. Love is another category, and it was not extended to me. And there are nights when I walk through this house in the dark and stand still in the middle of the corridor, waiting for my eyes to adjust, knowing they may not.

I sense that my brothers do not love me. Those who breathe this same air laden with sand and gunpowder, those who run to the same shelter with knees that buckle the same way when the siren opens its throat. We are in the same situation. But a situation does not create bonds. It creates coincidences. The tenderness that is born between us is real and warm, but it exists only as long as danger defines us. When the silence returns, each one goes back to his own inalienable responsibility.

And there are days when I do not love myself either. When I examine myself without mercy and find a man who chose to live where wars grow like olive trees, stubborn and old, without being able to justify that choice with any argument that holds up against the friction of three in the morning. It is precisely in that man that the news lands the way a bird lands on a rotten branch. We have resumed preparations to attack Iran, possibly as early as next week. The body registers before the mind processes. It recognizes that point where history stops pretending to negotiate and does what it always meant to do. History does not learn. It bends the same knee. It breaks the same bone.

Inside that man, inside that body, inside this night that will not end, one certainty remains. I do not know how this ends. I have learned to distrust those who do, because those who know, in general, know only what they need to believe.

The old Brazilian song does not explain the end. It only says that winning and losing are part of it, that there is a way through everything, and if there was no way, it simply had not arrived yet. It is not consolation. It is a proposition about the structure of time. And sometimes that is the only useful thing that can be said. It is true at three in the morning, when the alert apps go silent and I am still awake, waiting for daybreak without being sure it belongs to me.

Do not ask me to be optimistic. Optimism is a belief about the future, and I have no way to verify the future. What I have is a choice, and the choice does not depend on optimism. I can refuse to give up. I can lift this heavy head. Keeping it bowed changes nothing on the horizon, and costs more.

There will be more sirens. There will be more nights when the ground seems to give way like sand under the weight of what we did not choose to carry. There will be more moments when love, for this country, for these brothers, for myself, will seem like something remote and unlikely. But the night cannot last forever. It is the oldest law there is, older than wars, older than the names we give our pain. And when least expected, it will clear.