"Jerusalem Day," Adapted from its original 2017 draft.

I loved and hated Jerusalem.

Loved and hated.

These were the two sides of myself I had to reckon with from my lonely apartment on Yafo Street: the side that was quiet and easy, no fuss; and the side that was alien; terse and unforgiving. What I loved, I also hated. And what I hated, I somehow loved. I had never felt freer, nor more trapped. Never more sated, nor more hungry. Never more lost, nor more found. I was a stranger there, even to myself. Just a brooding shadow following the body of a girl. “Where will the girl go today?” I would wonder, tying up her boot laces, much too hot for the desert climate.

I hated being an outsider but I loved that it felt like a secret. My secret loving lead to a refuge made of secrets: whispered prayers between the cracks in The Wall; a passage of white where the crowds would not go.

My secret loving brought me beauty—antique chairs made of glass mosaics; brass chandeliers to hold flickering candles; tattered, sun-bleached cloths like flags, waving in the wind.

Behind a door, there was love. Every door, love and love and love and love.

But in turning back to take the path the opposite way: hate and hate and hate and hate.

On Ben Yehuda Street, a young woman came and sat beside me on a bench. “Are you writing a book?” she asked me in Hebrew, my notebook lying open on my knees, pen scratching furiously. I smiled sheepishly and she translated. “A kind of a book, I guess,” I replied. I looked at the writing. All rubbish, I thought. “You are making something beautiful,” she told me, “and I will love to be able to support you someday.”

And just like that, I no longer felt like two ragged halves of a mysterious whole. I was seeking, yes. And that was a fact of life. I was a seeker, seeking a God who was suddenly everywhere and all around.

No more contrast. Only Him.

That was the moment when I found my purpose and saw my life for what it truly was. Not a pocket wanting coins or a soldier with a gun or a hungry look in the market. Not a cold shoulder or a favorite pen lost or a barren room in the back of a house. Not a door with two sides, or a Temple Mount or a border wall.

Just a God, and a city, and a chance to choose again.