I was going over a bit of my blog, trying to clean up a bit in honor of the guests who will read and hopefully share with me in which pieces they found meaning (which pieces should be put in an arts pamphlet made by women suffering from PN and Vulvodynia) . And I read back to the post about the red wires and the stakes. So, i thought that i should put in an update. My older brother threw all the red wires in the garbage. They have all been taken away and so there will be no red wires wrapped around me and no stakes... in some ways this is a relief because I don't want to go back there. I don't want it, not now and maybe not ever. Maybe the words will do for now. It took me a long time to be able to write about it. For now I will stay here. I feel safe here. Though I do not feel that anything I write here can describe what I lived through. I am trying to write again but I still feel like I am bending wire that is not flexible and pliable any longer. In jewelry class every time I want to make a new imprint on the metal I have to anneal the metal again. I like annealing, I like the flame and I like the way the metal softens up again. I like that I can play over and over again with the same piece of metal. The metals are strong that way and I like discovering the way to work with them. I am learning how to weed beauty out of them and I like that fire is part of the process.
I guess that after twenty years away from writing and from the English language I have to practice and practice and practice. Maybe with time I will appreciate the progress that I made. So here I am. There is no principal inviting me to her office. The essay itself is tucked away somewhere in the basement. Israel and my life there were once again snatched away from me. Twenty-seven years later I am doing what I did as a ten year old; trying to put together the shattered pieces of my life with words. And along with the words I am soldering and annealing and engraving my grandmother's name into the rings that I make. Being far away from her today makes just as little sense to me as it did twenty-seven years ago.