My brother told me to keep on writing poetry.
When I was a kid I was taken to the principal's office.

I had no idea what I had done wrong.

I could not imagine what was about to be told to me.

Maybe I had lice?

I had just returned from two years in Israel and I was in deep longing for the life that I had left there, for my friends and the outdoors and the boys that seemed to like me.
I was in 5th grade now, back to being a foreigner just after having nearly stopped feeling like one in Israel. Now I was one, once again, in America.
I was not happy.

The principal showed me a short paper that I had written for English class. She asked me if I had written it. I looked up at her, not quite understanding her question. My name was on it. Who else could have written it? And why was she holding my paper? What was wrong with my paper? Were there too many spelling mistakes? Had I written the letters backwards as I used to in the beginning when I had just moved to Israel?

And then she told me that my paper was a beautiful piece of writing. I didn't quite understand what she was telling me and why I had to be called to her office to be told this. In Israel invitations to the  principal's office were a sure sign that punishment was on its way. I nodded and smiled politely, wondering if she thought that I had not written it myself. That was an absurd thought considering that all my emotions were there flat as the sun that pounded into me the day of departure. Only that day the sun had a black hole in it and only I could see the hole. It was pressed into the shadow on the pavement. I sat atop our luggage thinking about my best friend that had sobbed the night before when we had hugged our last goodbye. She was wearing her pink pajamas and it was painfully hard to leave her crying like that. I saw the hole in the sun from there and it was as black as the sun was shining. Writing about how I longed for Israel and about everything that got left behind like my grandmother who was my sunshine was not going to bring me back there. I was ready to have this meeting over with.  I had a whole world tucked away in my soul, a world that flowered and blossomed, a world that was full of love and animals and outdoors, a world that my grandmother belonged to and I surely belonged by her side. And somehow I had to accept that that world was slipping behind me and that this world now was to become my life. I found that in my writing I could keep that world alive. And even when it began to recede into the outlines of my life, I knew full well that I would return to that world again.

Within six months my spelling was better then that of most of the class. I had fallen in love with English and would continue falling in love with my English teachers up until and through-out high-school.
I have been away from the English language for twenty years now. The first eighteen years away were in Israel. The last two years away were mostly curled up in the corner of my childhood room, here in America, my mind twisted and frenzied with pain. Now I am slowly reconnecting back to the words, slowly seeing if they will dance for me like they once did. They have been frozen in time, left behind with my childhood passions that could not move with me to Israel.
Like poetry clubs
And poetry readings
Like good-looking English teachers that left me lusting after them as opposed to my class-mates.
Like the toads that died out or hopped away. I wish that they hopped away. I believe that they died out.

There was not much that I loved about my childhood. But writing was one of my loves.
And though the words feel so stale, so imprecise, so rusted and callous, I am trying to refine them, I am working on learning their rhythm and their lust, their truth and their natural urge. I am working on trusting that they will still work for me, that they are still my loyal companions and that though I have abandoned them for so long, they have remained as loyal and as devoted to me as all the invisible friends of my past.

In my mind we all dance together, bringing the invisible into the visible, healing the hurt, and treating the pain, unlocking doors and releasing all that belongs to life.