“Yes, yes this has got to be it. My friend told me turn right at the tree,” he barked as we drove further inside the deep blackness of the night.

“Uh…or that way could be right, or that way,” I shot back, flinging my arms in every direction at the multitude of trees.

“There’s lots of trees dude. Lots places to turn right.” I said, a little louder. I was trying to sound pissed, like

I had been all week every time my personal Israeli tour guide got that look in his eye that look that every man in my life gets at one point or another that, if forced to have a verbal translation, would come out something like, “I don’t know where the fuck I’m going but I’m sure as shit never going to let you know that.”

“Ahh, ehh—no, do not worry Jess, I’ve got it.” I rolled my eyes into the deep black and dramatically sighed like my mother does every time we have to wait for a table at a restaurant.

I looked out my window into the endless night, trying to fight off my anxiety in silence.

He doesn’t know where the fuck he’s going because there’s nowhere to go. Where are the lights? The moon? Anything? We’re going to drive straight into the sea…what is, is that Jordon? So I’m going to die underwater and my corpse will be eaten by Jordanian Border dogs….is that another car? I knew those guards were following us!

I tried to think peace…I thought of Avram, the Ann Arbor dead-head turned Kabbalist whose art studio (not to mention immortal soul) was nestled deep inside the northern holy city of Tesfat. I thought of what he told me my first afternoon in Israel:
“A bad day in Israel is still a day in Israel.”
I smiled to myself as we turned right. Bring it on mother nature, bring it the fuck on.

“Ahh!! I’ve found it, Jessie!” He screamed from what seemed like light years away. I heard what I thought was the sound of fresh hot springs spilling magically into each other and then wandering drip by precious drip into the Dead Sea. Though in the complete blackness of night this could also very easily be bored terrorists cutting the bones out of lost American girls or wild mountian lions licking their lips after feasting on a three-course meal of baby toes. The sound of my over-sized Tevas hitting the loose rocks broke my morbid daydreams, but still, I was lost.

“I uh, okay…where are they, how are they?” I screamed.
“They’re amazing Jess, come on!”

I pressed the nine button on my cheap rental cell phone using the faint green light to uncover the endless pile of rocks before me. In the near distance I spotted a plastic bag filled with sand that bore a striking resemblance to a member of the KKK. I wonder how he could’ve afforded his plane ticket to the holy land, especially in this economy.

“I-dude, I’m lost! How do I get there?”
“You find the best way to get there, and then you go!”

Of course, leave it to me to come to the land of nice Jewish boys and find the one dick. It wasn’t until I’d be given the gift of time here, not until I’d shoved my way through the market to get the best apple, not until I’d danced in the streets with total strangers, not until I argued my way through Israeli politics with only a bottle of wine to guide me, not until all of these slivers of life did I realize that this one phrase, this one commandment, was in essence what it means to be Israeli.

The water smelled like sulfur….like the smell that floats into your car during a long road trip that makes you realize no human, not even your brother, can produce a fart quiet so disastrous.

“A geyser, like from volcanoes underground, that’s what heats the water,” he’d explained on the drive up or down or whatever way we took to reach now. I nodded intensely as he explained the Geyser, as he’d been explaining all week, from the Christian Arabs, to the economic stature of Hasidic Jews, to dating life in the IDF. He could have said Enron itself fueled those hot springs and I would have kept on nodding, jumping in with the occasional “Tell me more about that…” He was one person in my life that made me feel if I spaced out in the middle of one of his stories, in favor of gazing at the wild mustard flowers, even for a sentence, I would have truly missed something.

Now we were both shirtless and inside the pools of some kind of miracle. We both float to our own corners of the pool – the air so quiet and open there’s not even a pin to hear drop. Time to relax.

Oh my g-d it’s burning so bad, between the legs, on the neck, everywhere! Is this feeling normal? Of course not, this is the feeling of nature ripping my skin off my body or leaving me with scars, scars I can’t afford to have surgically altered. And my eyes! Oh my g-d did a drop just get in my eye? Then I’ll be blind, how am I going to ever work again, blind and skinless? Wait! What was that? I knew there were alligators in Israel!

“Hey, Yessi… if you just let your neck go back and let go..you float…float”
He teased while cracking open a beer. Rather than the graceful and free image I’d imagined, I looked down at myself to realize I was pretty much in stir-ups ready for my annual pap-smear, my neck was so tense it held my head completely above water, and my head resembled less of a smooth swan and more of a stale prune.

Just let go stupid! Just let the fuck go. The Dead Sea, blanket of stars, and the hot Israeli man…this is all real so shut-up lay down in the water and put the living back in your life.

“I don’t understand how people can have sex out here, like in nature in general.” I was perched on the side of the pool, dizzy from the heat and too much warm beer.

“I mean I just feel like someone, something would be watching,”
He nodded, half present. Unfortunately, missing some of my rhetoric didn’t carry quite as much weight.

“I need like life to be happening, a garbage truck, a school bus, a siren. Here… I dunno.  It just feels like there’s got to be something somewhere listening or waiting for something to distract it from the silence.”

“There is not anything here Jess…nothing here except maybe G-d”

“Exactly, why do you think he hasn’t come back yet…doesn’t want to miss a good show.”

“You know, if you really want to get an Oscar you need to make a Holocaust movie” I laughed so hard – a real laugh from the inside out. We could laugh at the word Holocaust, right? I mean it’s not like I was in Georgia or even L.A. I was in Israel, with an actual Israeli.

“I’m serious, I seen it all the time. You make this kind of movie and bam Oscar.”  He continued as we squatted, setting up the mobile coffee maker. I put my Camel Natural between his lips and he inhaled. If I was ever cool enough to be French, this is what it would feel like.

“And Jessie, I’ve been thinking about it and you- you just need to demand these jobs from people, demand that people have to work with you- that you are the only person who could direct their movie…you need to be more aggressive, you need to fight, you need to be more Israeli about it.”

For someone who was two and a half years my junior he sure had a lot of career advice to impart – this was a bit of a shock to me considering his work experience could be summed up in two locations: New England Summer camp for Jews and The West Bank.

I rattled off after my third cup of coffee “No, I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s hard. It’s beyond hard work and at times it can be thankless but I’m learning, learning so much about the process of making movies and as long as I’m learning, I mean I’ll pick the sunflower seeds out of a salad, I’ll get up at 4am, I’ll do it all and I’ll smile..at least on the outside.”

“It, it just seems like such…so many egos- these celebrities..awful,” he responded, picking the dead ants out of the sugar canister, though I had insisted their addition to the coffee would only provide natural vitamins. Who was I kidding? I was nature.

“Yeah, I mean there’s always going to be people like that but I’ve met some amazing people as well. It’s so intense you don’t understand,  it’s like, making a movie is like going into battle-“

Did you just really compare the dynamics of a movie set to engaging in Warfare? And to an IDF solider who just spent the past three years in the West Bank? Really Jessie, really….

“Uhh, I mean…sorry so uh like what do you want to do..I mean after Australia?”

After backpacking the planet after you find yourself, loose your mind and find yourself all over again.

“I don’t know, but I think about it and I think I want to study Disease’s so I can fix them..you know, cure people”

I listened over the sound of my own mouth chewing up the sugar cookies I’d refused moments earlier.

“I’m not like you Jess, not creative”

“Yes you are! I mean everyone’s creative, there’s an artist inside everyone” I tried to explain, feeling ashamed by my own disillusionment that the less money you make the more you love what you do.

“Besides, finding a disease and deciding how to treat it, what medicines to take, that’s very, uh, creative.”

“No , but I want to fix people the natural way, not with all the drugs and shit that your country uses…That is just bullshit.” I’d tried to convince him the Xanax popping tour group we met had met on last week wasn’t the best example of the power of Western healing.

“I agree, like hmm if someone is feeling sad or mad sometimes talking, talking about it can really help…” I muttered in between cookies.

I was, of course, referring to the running argument we’d been having all week about soldiers and PTSD. I could not stop arguing that therapy should be mandatory after serving in any kind of combat unit, though he assured me that after three years in the West Bank he was “fine, totally fine” and ready for Australia, ready for his life to begin and not to dwell on his past.

The Camels were gone, the coffee cold, and the feeling of my wet pants was overpowering the beauty of the springs. I waited for him to say it. I wasn’t the jappy American who needed a shower. I was chill, I was present, I was Sephardic.

“You ready, yessi?” Sweetest words I’d heard all night.

We threw our life back into the Mazda as he turned on The Beatles, who are as ubiquitous in Israel as they were in America in 1962. Our hands played together beside the gearshift as we turned past the now infamous right tree. As the road turned from mud to gravel and signs of civilization quickly appeared, I began to feel like I always do when seeing an Ingrid Bergman film, not exactly enjoyable but as the credits roll, as you drive away, you can actually feel it changing you.

We pulled up to the border check signaling our arrival into neutral territory. I’m still so high from the lowest point on earth. As the soldiers signaled for us to stop I got a little nervous, as we usually flew by with a simple nod.
He rolled down the window revealing their faces. Young. So young. Faces burnt from too many bored cigarettes.

“Hatzava lo nimshach lanetzach… ze yigamer bekarov. tihiye im rosh lema’ala,” he said underneath a heavy smile as he veered us back on to the road.

“Oh yeah guys, I’m just with this silly American girl. She’s easy and yeah hahaha insert funny jokes in Hebrew that are so witty they don’t even translate to English” Then the gestures back and fourth towards me accompanied by those looks we’d been getting all week when people realized I wasn’t Israeli.

Well yeah fine, if that’s how he wanted to play it, I’m using you, too. You’re my tour guide, my hot Israeli affair, the best anecdote at all the dinner parties that await me back in L.A. You’re just a story, a permanent memory.  Take that buddy.

I waited a good 14 seconds before I leaned in….
“So, uh what did you say to them…”
“I told them, don’t worry, the Army doesn’t last forever, it’ll all be over soon.”

I leaned forward looking into his face as he squinted hard trying to find the best way home. If I stared hard enough maybe I could stop time, stop this moment I knew was ending before me. Stop him from ever being just a memory.

Additional photography by Danya Micah