The afternoon I landed in Israel in 2000 I called Avi from the airport. “When you take a cab,” he said, “sit in the front seat. This is a democratic country.”

I wasn’t sure how the former followed from the latter, but in any case my driver decided to ferry a friend of his as well, so they chatted away in the front while I stared out the window at the palm trees and the yellow dust. I have no idea why I wasn’t nervous, not even a little, about what lay ahead. I’d never been anywhere in the Middle East before. I didn’t know a soul in the entire country except for Avi, who was going to be rather busy being a soldier most of the time. I’d had a year of Hebrew by then and I felt steadied by the words I held in my hat, but I’d never even read a book about Israel. It wasn’t much more than a name on the radio to me—a little, but not much. A thin thread of language, music and love was the only thing connecting me to the land that day. Shouldn’t I have been worried about whether that would be enough to anchor me over the next eight months? Shouldn’t I have wondered whether I was even going to like it there?

I cannot begin to tell you why, but I felt immeasurably confident. Wholly free. I knew I was going to like it. I just knew.

On the way into Jerusalem the sky broke open into a light storm, and my driver and his friend broke into delighted exclamations. “Maybe it’s not so nice for you on your first day, but we need the rain, you know?” they said, turning around to beam at me and make sure I understood why they were so happy. Maybe that was the beginning of it, their rich satisfaction over the rain. It felt like a door was opening, and behind it all that was good would be better. Whether or not that also meant all that was bad would be worse, I didn’t care. I twinkled back at them. The rain came down. And when I stepped out of the taxi, it was onto wet Jerusalem stone, slippery with promises.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

When I was eleven years old a friend of mine took a volunteer job at an aviary, and when I visited her I saw cages full of tiny baby mice, days old, in between the wild parrots and fledgling hawks. They were food for the birds. I don’t remember now if I asked her to do this or if she simply did it of her own accord after a cry of incoherent compassion escaped me, but for some reason she decided to ask the keeper who supervised her for permission to give me one of these doomed morsels of life.

“It’s very unlikely that it will survive,” she said as she placed it gently on a piece of cotton wool. “But you can keep it warm for a few days, and try feeding it milk with this eye dropper.”

So I did. It was an irrational act: the little pink comma was very small, and the odds against it very great. Its heart beat faintly inside its translucent skin; it was so light the whole of it was nothing but a faint tremble of possibility. Three or four days later, it died.

My parents were out, and my sister was in her room busy being fourteen. We still lived in our first house on the 8th floor of an apartment building, above a large green lawn of shared play space. I wrapped the dead baby mouse in tissue and took the elevator downstairs with it in my hands, careful not to crush its nothing body or its nothing little bones on the way. I walked as far across the grass as I could, until I reached a tree under which I was fairly certain no one could see me. I had no spade. I didn’t even have a spoon. I dug in the hard dirt with my hands and buried my bundle in a shallow grave.

I didn’t say anything. The mouse hadn’t been a pet, really; it hadn’t been much of anything. Not enough of anything to love, anyway. But my heart beat fast. It was a strange thrill to be burying a thing that yesterday had been alive and today was dead. I dusted my hands off on my pants and went upstairs.

Then, as sometimes happens when you are eleven, I found myself in the grip of an obsession I couldn’t shake, and twice before my parents came home I had to go back downstairs and dig up my tissue-wrapped mouse to see if it was still alive. It was an odd feeling that compelled me to do this, not really related to compassion or pity or fear. And it wasn’t hope, either—I didn’t want to discover that the pathetic little scrap of flesh had been reanimated.

I think I just conceived of the dead body, fragile and cold and unresponsive, as being extraordinarily bizarre. Lifelessness seemed like such an impossible property for a body to have that having buried the thing, I found that I just couldn’t be sure it would retain that property permanently. It was entirely possible—and indeed probable, I felt—that life would invade again.

I knew about death, of course, and I suppose I understood it, intellectually. I knew that everything died eventually. But what I think I must have felt that day was that life was the more powerful force, and that the mouse body simply didn’t make sense without it. A lump of matter that was supposed to be alive, and therefore qualitatively different from all the other lumps of matter in the world, was suddenly just the same: inanimate, insensate, incapable of protesting when you buried it beneath the earth. What a tremendously incomprehensible trespass of boundaries. Why wouldn’t I have been convinced that I might just have been imagining it?

In one way my feelings haven’t changed since I was eleven: seeing the dead human body on display, I feel in myself the same sense of odd displacement. These organs like paper flowers; these stretching muscles; this soft brain tissue; this strange fire of nerves; this skin flapping like paper; they are all fascinating, all beautiful in a way, even split open and stark—but cold, dead, preserved, none of them entirely makes sense.

Separated from the force of life, whatever that is, the body becomes nothing more than an oddly messy object. To be sure, it is an extraordinary object; an object of wonder and perhaps even of affection. But it is an object just the same. It is a bit of a crazy thing to stand staring into the eyes of a dead human being and realize that what you are feeling is not reverence or awe, but the same curiosity you feel when you see any other museum artifact.

I do wonder if Gunther von Hagen ever found himself tiptoeing back into his lab at night and poking his row of plastinated bodies one by one to see if life had, in fact, invaded again.

Whoever took this photograph, I imagine it was not my mother.

I say this because of the look on my face (plaintive agony) and also the look on Rani’s face (worried righteousness). It must have been our mother to whom we were both turning these helplessly expressive visages; me because some grievous wrong had been done me at my sister’s hands—this seemed to happen constantly during my formative years, although now that I think about it I can’t remember a single thing she did to hurt me—and her because of course she was guilty of nothing but holding my hand, as she’d been told to do, she was merely following instructions and now here I was bawling like a baby justlookatherwhatdoyouexpectmetodo?

Rani and I eventually became tolerant playmates, and I dare say I worshiped her a little (I remember being wildly jealous of how big and important she looked in her first school uniform) and she mentored me a little (she helped me type up a list of literary insults on the computer I could use on my friend Jon), but it was years and years before we were properly friends.

I say this only to remind my family that Asher will (probably) come around to the notion of Sophia in the end. But I think they might be in for quite a few years of plaintive agony and worried righteousness before that happens.

Tuckshop benches at school, long but not long enough when there are nine people who will die if they don’t get to sit together during recess and only room for eight at a table. When the eight are amiable, they make room — when they are not, there is another bench behind the main classroom building in a quiet green corner where nobody goes but you. Or else there is always a bathroom stall and a book. Recess only lasts half an hour anyway.

Beach-benches, late at night by the sea, kissing boyfriends at high tide when you don’t want to be seen. Smelling the salt-sea and sand between your toes.

Brandeis-benches, when you have 20 minutes to kill before a class and the fresh fall air is sweet and friends pass by every moment, laughter and conversation and other people’s cigarette smoke blowing by while you sit, watching the world and thinking about Tolstoy, not realizing at all that you are inhabiting the closest thing to an idyll there is.

I just found this writing exercise I did last spring, when I was trying out things from a craft book I’d ordered. You might remember the funny little mermaid thing I wrote. I didn’t post the following, which I must have written a week or so later, because at the time I was still less than three months away from quitting teaching and it seemed too strange, too selfish, too something to share. I also didn’t have the energy to change the names in it, but now I do. I share it not because it’s any good — it was just an exercise — but because reading it thrusts me straight back into what it felt like to be in the classroom in the morning, watching my kids blaze in already on fire and not having any idea how to douse the flames. Too, it makes me realize how totally off-kilter my perception was at the time, and for months afterwards — how honestly terrified I was of those girls, for no good reason. I wish I’d had a little more courage, and then I’d have seen them for who they really were.

I AM GARCIA MARQUEZ

Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices).

slam and danae blows into the room like a small tornado not yet eight forty am and already she is burning at her momma who sizzled a curse off the edge of a frying pan this morning and burning at ms reyes who won’t let her into English class until she apologizes for calling her a stupid bitch which she is and burning at that pretty little girl on the bus who looks softer than rabbits she can suck her tits all of them can the whole world danae is apocalyptic or maybe she is just hysterical with the sheer effort of all those long minutes without racing or screaming or throwing herself into the nearest likely sulk slam and coming in she sucks up shamari and joelle so she can whirl them into the center of her storm they squint against the dust and laugh like babies being swooped in the air but there is a thinness to their laughter because they know what it is like to be dropped slam and hanging up her coat danae knocks kaylynn way out into a cornfield somewhere comes back to get her so she can fling her down again danae is small and very dense she cannot be subdued with reason or love it is useless to argue with her or ask her why she does these things for danae is a tornado and tornadoes do not know why they blow

…at keeping secrets, so I’ve completely neglected to tell you that my beautiful sister is having another baby! In the beginning of November! She’s already four and a half months along, and two days ago they found out that it’s probably going to be a girl! Which is wonderful, because she really wants a daughter, and we were both secretly worried that she would keep popping out boys for years and years, and then there would be a football team’s worth of them, and when the last little girl finally arrived my sister would heave a sigh of exhausted satisfaction and hand her over to me to raise because she would just be too. damn. tired.

Maybe it was just me that was worried about that.

Anyway, Asher’s going to be a big brother soon, and I’m terrifically proud and excited for my big sister, so look! I’ve brought you a charmingly heartwarming picture of two little girls that we can all imagine are blood-relations instead of total strangers who just happened to both jump into the spray at the same time after last year’s Pride. I’m expecting it to jumpstart all kinds of fuzzy sibling love.

I’ll start: Rani, hon, I love and appreciate you more and more every day. Which is good, because when I started out it was all pulling your hair and poking your sides and pretending you made me cry, so I think we’ve made a lot of progress, don’t you? I’ll never forget the day you wandered sheepishly into my brand-new-very-own-Room-of-My-Own after we moved into the big house, both of us having been shuddering with a deep thrill for months about not having to share a space anymore, and told me you missed me.

I probably said, “Get out of my room!” but inside my heart was melting, I hope you know that.

I also remember the time I slouched into your room, miserable and wet, after my very first breakup, and you soothed me for days and told me that he was indeed a jerk, and that my heart would heal, really it would, and took me out with you to keep me occupied. That was really cool of you.

P.S. Whoever the little one turns out to be, she’ll be very lucky. Being the youngest rocks. You were right all along.

The other night, after Avi said to me — teasingly, of course — that I don’t write about him enough (incidentally, you might be surprised by the number of times I have received that complaint, explicit or implied — I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone who writes about their lives for serious), I said to him, “You require context.” And he said, ” המבין יבין” (”He who understands will understand”).

Which is partly true. Jenn, for instance, has her memories. Sean probably has an idea or two in his head. But it’s hard to see what the two of us have become, out of those days. There are friendships that begin and continue in just the same way, always the same on both sides, comforting in their steadfastness. They are threads knotted around your wrist: keeping you connected to the people you were when you met, helping you hold on to particular incarnations of yourselves. And then there are friendships that not only grow with you but help you grow, until you are twice the people you were when they began. You can trace them back to their sources, but only as a river, rushing strong and sweet, is traced back to a questioning stream.

Here is a stream:

I am 19, freshly unstuck from home and suddenly free to choose the shape of my life in ways I have never contemplated. I have a boy nine thousand miles away, his picture on my desk and a promise in my heart, but did I mention I am nineteen and suddenly free? I am tremendous with hunger for knowledge and experiences and all of my role models in life are still mostly dead white men. I want to be cool, but I don’t want anyone to know I want it so I am guarded with my joy and my confusion, afraid to be too kind. I have many ideas but few ideals: I want to show the world something special, not save it. Still I am ready to stay up all night talking about the universe; that part of me is true. And I hate Brandeis — I want to be in New York City with the bohemians.

Avi is the same, freshly unstuck from an intense first love whose threads still cling about him and tall with a sense of superiority that comes from having grown fond of the way people’s faces look when he shocks them with his intelligence, his arrogance, or his lack of concern for their expectations. He is smart as a tack and just as sharp; he thinks he sees through the rest of the world, but he could stand to ask a few more questions about it first. He wears his religion and his politics with pride. He rubs everyone the wrong way so he can see who smiles instead of frowns. Still he has an air of serious sadness that peeks through his posturing; that part of him is true. And he hates Brandeis — he wants to be at UPenn with the real intellectuals.

We meet at orientation and I like the way he picks a blade of grass and chews on it while everyone introduces themselves. He likes my calm, watchful look. Looking back I can see that we’ve both fallen for the other’s defences. But within days it is us against the world, and by the world we mean everyone who isn’t as sly as we are. The only two sly and slanted people in a straightlaced school, we think.

So there it is, mostly. Avi and I spend almost every evening together for the entirety of the first semester of freshman year (by the spring the stream had already hit a rocky patch); usually several hours every evening. Sometimes I think about that fact, and realize how unusual a thing it is for two people not in love to do. But if I do not walk one way through the corridors of our grotty dorm building to knock on his door, he walks the other way to knock on mine, and then we disappear out the doors to sit on the grass, wander the grounds. All we do is talk. Neither of us is quite who we ought to be, but maybe we can see the shape of our future selves behind the smokescreen, see through to a time when both of us have grown out of our pretensions.

Maybe, but probably not. I’m pretty sure I, at least, thought I was kind of great the way I was.

Here is a river:

I am 27, working full time in a job I would have considered not even worth thinking about eight years ago, neither saving the world nor being famous. Every day I figure out ways to make meaning out of my life despite that fact, and most days I succeed. I have tasted failure for the first time but not the last, and although I thought I would die from it I now know there are few things less fatal. I laugh more than I ever have and hug both friends and strangers with impulsive affection. I am married to the sweetest heart in the world; waking in the morning my heart is gladder than you can know. I have given up on being cool, but I am still ambitious. I want to be good, and kind, and right, and human.

Avi will be the same in two weeks, and he’s on his way to a job that he might have wanted eight years ago but that he is only now wise and compassionate enough to perform well. He has shed, slowly and one skin at a time, his arrogance and his assumptions about the world, and one of the things he does best these days is ask questions about it; his heart and mind are open to love and stories and other people’s wisdom, other people’s questions. He is still smart as a tack but altogether he is softer, sweeter. He wears his love for life and for his friends with pride. I think he too has given up on being cool — almost, anyway. And he too wants to be good, and kind, and right, and human.

There have been moments, these eight years, when we’ve hurt each other or tried to hide our darker selves from each other. But for the most part, I like to think we’ve both had something to do with this water growing sweeter, with our growing up like this: becoming two friends who really do have a reason to love the person the other one is.

There it is.