The Blogs: Just one spoon and fresh out of forks

At what point
are we allowed to make dark jokes about the war?

How long do we wait
before our laughter doesn’t like a war crime?
Before we can say something obscene and true
without someone whispering
“too soon”?

Because I want to talk about my spoons and how I have literally one left – like LITERALLY one spoon – and no it isn’t a metaphor but maybe it is, but it isn’t, and am I allowed to laugh about it?

The living hostages are home.
They’re home.
They sit around their family tables again with their spoons – if they have any spoons.
They walk barefoot on the beach,
they hold their kids,
they can go to the refrigerator and marvel at the sight of food….
they sleep with the light on
because darkness feels too much like memory.
They’re home –
But can they ever really be?

And how dare I even ask?

I’m here,
in my apartment that never collapsed,
my body unscarred,
my fridge still humming like it knows something I don’t.

And I have one spoon left.
Just one.

Gaza is rubble.
Parents claw through concrete, searching for the bodies of their babies.

Israel still shakes.
We’re still waiting for our dead to come home in plastic bags.
The world looks at us and blames us for every atrocity under the sun and moon and shattered stars –
even our own grief.
Like our suffering is bad manners.
Like our mourning makes them uncomfortable.

And even when we speak –
even when we say we see the children of Gaza,
that we know that kind of agony because we’ve lived it too –
they tell us to shut up.
As if empathy is a weapon we’re not qualified to wield.

And
I used to have twenty-four spoons.
Now there’s a single, dented, shell-shocked survivor
in the drawer beside a pile of takeout menus and a half empty box of Benzos.

I used to have twenty-four spoons.
They were shiny.

Now there’s a single, dented, shell-shocked survivor
in the drawer beside a pile of takeout menus and Advil.
I’ve looked everywhere:
under the couch, behind the radiators,
inside the washing machine,
between the cushions,
inside the silence.
Nothing.

Just one spoon.

I blame Hamas.
I blame Hamas for the spoons.
For the noise inside my chest.
For the empty chair in my friends’ living room.
For the fact that I can’t tell fireworks from shelling anymore.
For the way the sky hums and my pulse hums with it.

And maybe that’s ridiculous.
Maybe that’s how dark humor begins –
in the absurd place where rage becomes domestic.
Where trauma sneaks into the sink
and hides next to the forks.

Although I’m fresh out of forks.

The spoon – this last spoon –
isn’t symbolic of hope.
Don’t even.
It is emphatically NOT.
It’s not brave.
It’s not shining.
It’s scratched to hell.
It trembles when I stir my tea.
It’s tired.
Like me.
Like everyone.

The spoon isn’t even endurance.
It isn’t the small act of continuing
when continuing doesn’t make sense.
It isn’t even the refusal to stop stirring
just because the world stopped making tea.

It’s a sooon and it’s my last one.
I didn’t serve in Gaza.
I didn’t crawl through tunnels.
I didn’t pull anyone from the rubble.
But I buried friends.
I sent voice notes to people who never replied.
I lit a candle that burned down to the bone.
And I still flinch at thunder.

So am I allowed to laugh?
To say my spoons are prisoners of war?
That my brain has turned into pumpkin-spice hummus
with a side of trauma?
Am I allowed to laugh
while the sirens in my skull keep going off?

Because I didn’t go through Auschwitz –
but somehow, I still remember the smell.
I wasn’t driven from Spain,
but I still pack like someone might knock at midnight.
I wasn’t exiled from Jerusalem,
but every time I leave, I carry her dirt under my nails,
just in case I don’t come back.

Maybe this is the joke:
every Jew was there,
and none of us ever left.

So yes, I’m writing about my sooon.
It’s not funny.
It’s not healing.
It’s just wind with teeth.

I’m holding a spoon
Not like a sword,
Not like a relic,
Maybe just proof that something in this house still stirs.

And I stir.
And I stir.
And I stir.

Until the honey dissolves,
and the bitterness remains.

But I stir.