Vesuvius

by Gilit Chomsky Published in Issue #35 Translated from Hebrew by Yaron Regev

AgingLove

My first time in the forest was before the child was born. I was freshly discharged from the army and had come to a picnic with two girlfriends from the service. One was a tall girl who was an excellent painter, and the other a very skinny girl who could calculate math equations in her head.

It was winter, and the ground was cold and wet. The great, exuberant blossoming that always announced spring had not yet begun, but primroses were already growing, and anemones had started to poke their crowns above ground here and there. We spread a blanket on the damp earth and opened a bottle of wine, a precursor to the girls-on-the-verge-of-being-women talk we were all looking forward to. Back then, I did not know that the forest would soon be my own backyard, and that simply being, living, would be imbued with a sense of adventure. But the intimacy we had experienced during our service was already beginning to unravel. Gradually, I found myself preferring to talk only with the tall girl. A conversation with the thin one required a very real effort. It was as if, until then, she had only ever heard of heart-to-hearts from others and was now eager to conduct them according to the same rules. I felt trapped in this triangle we had somehow committed to, and I started to feel it would be best to distance myself from both of them.

All around us lay the blankets of others enjoying...

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