The Unbearable and Comforting Distances of Ne’ima

From her mother, Ne’ima knew about love. But quite early on when she was four, that mother left home. To care for another man’s children. She never came back. And so Ne’ima forgot about love. Her father left home too, but in a more obscure way. A slowwww leaving. He would leave, then come back. Leave. Come back. L e a v e. He once said to Ne’ima, while in a room with children he made not with her mother: ‘I don’t need you. You need me’. He didn’t always say things to her.

Only on rare occasions. He spoke to her, he stopped, he spoke. He didn’t. When she was already in her twenties he decided not to speak to her for five years. It was about the distance she chose to take from him. Back to Ne’ima’s early childhood, utterly grief stricken she got into the habit of going out, leaving home daily, to seek solace in distances. Of all kinds. She’d walk her tiny legs to the fields around the home she was born into, to build her own peculiar homes.

There were cardboard boxes, forts made of blankets she carried through the dust, borders made of markings in the dirt. She would build her temporary dwellings in the wild. Wilderness, was far from home, as far as a four year old can walk to before it’s time for supper. She would chase hurrying tumbleweeds, run alongside creeks. She loved watching them all run away from her. In some familiar way that would soothe her. She despised stagnancy. She was fascinated with forward movement.

Movement she could cause. She desired to see anything that was different than it was before. At first the boxes she made were spacious, as far as her hunger, imagination, and loneliness, would make them. Big enough to include true imaginary lovers, to create her own version of love to hold the entire world, different than her own. She quickly learned, that when no one provides, she is the one to do so. She learned to self soothe, self care, self love, self build, self help, self touch. Self pretend.

Much much later she sought homes in foreign countries and even took foreign men into the boxes she meticulously created. Ne’ima was fascinated with distances. Her inventions and illusions. She was mused and amused by people’s deceptions and perceptions of distances, by farness and closeness and their relationships with intimacy. One thing she became proficient in is the knowledge of distances and the understanding of the profound differences in which humans define them.

With time, now an eldering woman, Ne’ima learned ways to keep creating those boxes, they did get much smaller though. At times so little, they look like little tiny books, like those little bibles people carry. They became so small that no room was left any more for anyone else to truly fit in. She now lives with her little silver cat in those lofty miniatures she makes, without being able to imagine even one man asking her the most banal question: What’s for dinner?

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Orly