More short snippets that are interesting but don't make much sense. They certainly don't belong to any whole.

Seven
I couldn't take its tiny home with me, without uprooting the whole city.
Only three leaves, no luck about it.
Far from a garden, or any caring spade.

Eight
If white lies melted into the sidewalk like soda, the very roots of society would be filled with cavities... This will all be nonsense in the morning

Nine
Minds misty as the moons of Mars
Will clear as crystal be

Ten
"I grow wings when I'm around him and I need to see him soon. Otherwise I fear I might somehow forget how to fly."

Eleven
every second indoors on a day like this is wasted
but i don't like walking alone...

Twelve
You have some bizarre idea
That if you sacrifice life
For bitterness and undue strife,
You'll lift the weight off
Someone else's shoulder blades

...Or whatever the first title was. Yeah. Found another, really long, one. I think it's pretty neat, but that's me. It was a freewrite in a class, looking out the window at - well, if I figured it out, you can.

You know, it's funny, but reading this, I can actually still see the view of that pavement out the window. Interesting, no? Note also that, as a freewrite, this was written lacking paragraph breaks. I've put some in where I think they fit, for easier reading.

Six
The pavement through the window is cracked, scarred, stained. Each crevasse (crevice? No) is a ring: the thicker ones reveal harsh years and harsh weather. The spiderweb cracks, the hair line fractures - these speak of gentle wear and scrubbing. The painted lines [of tar], once surely so vibrant as to almost glitter when approached, are pock-marked and smeared.
Here is where Jenny rode her bicycle last winter when she almost didn't make it to finals because of the flu. We think now it could have been swine flu. We tease her about it, because she certainly ate mud - frozen mud - after the tire hit that crack in the parking lane.
There, this one - the one that looks like a network of highways and interstates around a baseball field - this is from when John drove that car into a tree. There was glass everywhere, and blood, and when the blood froze over and the glass cracked [even further], the road was ruined. The baseball diamond is where the oil spilled a little. That kept the water from cracking the asphalt. Or something.
We don't dare tease John about that one - it was a rental, and the mirror rolled halfway down the road and the engine was ruined and a few doors crumpled in.
He counts his blessings that no one was [seriously] hurt, but he has a few ten thousand little blessings he can't count anymore.
I say no one was hurt. Well, that tree there did grow crooked, and so I guess that should count, and it's incapable of growing leaves on one side. The side away from the road. Maybe trees are cross-brained.
The footsteps, the tires, the destinies that have trodden across those lines and over the cracks that divide the asphalt like Europe after a war - innumerable...
This complicated set of cracks here - they look like an elongated Italy, or like a Victorian hooker, whatever that is. [Our jury's still out.] Mostly it depends on who you ask and how much they've had to drink.
It was just a hair fracture in the road until someone drank too much, actually. It was Debbie. She'd had way too much booze - thank goodness she wasn't driving - and was still consuming alcohol when she passed out, mid-step, on the way to her friend's dorm. [The bottle broke, of course, the liquor spilling into the cracks and, obviously...] The friend started yelling for help, and Max, an English major, came down and gave Debbie CPR until the ambulance came. Rather, he was prepared to give CPR if he had to, but she was breathing, so he just waited with her until the ambulance came. Fortunately, it was only a concussion (coupled with a serious hangover). And, anyway, Max and Debbie practice doing CPR now whenever they can.
Beer, ice, glass, some blood, and a lot of skin. That's the formula for our scarred asphalt. A hummer just went by - not a hummer, really, but a jeep with big wheels, maybe - [I'm an English major myself, and I don't know cars -] just rumbled along. Beer, ice, glass, blood, skin - but rubber and several tons of steel weighing down surely helped as well.

So I don't know how satisfying an ending that is for you, but maybe that was the point. In any case, there it is, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I was cleaning my room and I've come across some things. (The title of this entry doesn't give anything away. Clever, eh?) I think they are pretty interesting: freewrites or something, little vignettes I wrote and then tossed someplace.

I have a nasty habit of doing that.

Anyway, it's time to recycle these sheets of paper, but not before putting here some of the more (I think) interesting bits.

One
"In other words?" I'll give you other words.
In other words, this bus is a claw-footed bath, dragging its behemoth self down the street, trying desperately to be relevant in a world where jet packs are diesel-fueled but right around the corner!
In other words, the passengers are society itself, swimming in their own filth, afraid to wash the scum off and see what's underneath!
In other words, everything - everyone the world - the universe! Is - is - crazy! Lunatic! Insane! Psycho! Waiting [cut off]

Two
Films are still just pictures on a wall.

Three (recounting of an actual occurrence, which I had forgotten)
His tiny fingers curled around the pendant, blue eyes filled with wonder. He tenderly stroked each silver feather, [possibly] imagining the birds they came from. I was struck by the care with which he handled the necklace.
"Do you like my necklace?" I asked him, simply, as folks are wont to do around small children.
"Neckrace," he replied, [fascinated]. His eyes were still stroking the tiny beads. Suddenly he leaned in, putting one small hand on my chest for balance. "Kaden --" I began [to scold him,] underestimating him. He stopped moving, but not because of [the tone in which I'd said] his name. He stopped to carefully position his small lips. With the greatest tenderness and respect, he kissed the pendant. Then, he drew back, slowly, [reverently,] and took his hand back; turned those grand eyes on me.
"Neckrace."

Four
[Titled: Krystal, as in Krystallnacht]
Tonight a tree branch scrapes the window
Tonight the moon shines through the glass
Tonight the tree branch does not scare me
Tonight my warm bed holds me fast

I ought to blog all about Israel, oughtn't I? I'll just begin with that: there is too much to tell. The anecdotes that I could put here are ridiculous and most of them aren't funny unless the reader is slaphappy (as we were, most of the time). I made a great friend in Poland, in Auschwitz, made because we were both bawling and needed a shoulder to lean on. And I adore her.

I got way closer with tons of people, but distanced from two, which makes me sad. And about thirty of the 66 people on the trip I still don't know very well.

Nonetheless, it's really like a family. I won't lie to you. You don't go hiking through the desert, on the inside of a mountain, through woods and thorn bushes, over mountains, halfway to a Crusader fortress and back, from sea to sea and tip to tip of a country so saturated with history that every stone is carved with a prayer - you don't do that with 65 folks and then part ways without feeling a connection of some sort.

Of course, I'll forget names. That always happens. Of course, we all won't hang out all the time like we said we would.

Many people will find a park to smoke hookah, and I won't go - I probably won't be invited. There will be birthdays misplaced, phone numbers lost on old SD cards, and even some faces will fade away and only the shirt will be remembered. Do you remember that guy who got Tonsilitis only the week after he was hospitalized for dehydration? (That was Alex, by the way, poor guy.) Do you remember that girl who was always falling down - when she slipped and fell into the river? (That was me, of course. I'm a bit of a klutz when I'm not on flat earth.)

Nonetheless, I daresay that even the not-so-good memories will be thought of fondly eventually, and the people and stories are imprinted on the pictures we'll all put in our albums when we finally get around to pulling everyone else's pictures off of Facebook, sorting them, picking out the best, calling people to help remember where and when they happened.

I'm glad to be back home to normalcy, but at the same time, there's the nagging feeling that some of the things that I remember happening didn't actually occur. It's false, of course, brought on by time there and time away, the feeling of being tugged by two different homes - one po (here) and one sham (there) - the sleep deprivation and the occasional feeling, even there, that we were dreaming while awake.

Nonetheless, some things can never be lost in my mind - at least, I hope not. Conquering my fear of heights on the narrow ledge between a cliff and a sheer drop into a rocky valley; ocean, plains, mountains and forest, another ocean, cities and rivers passing by the window within minutes of each other.

And the experiences that were so deep, so personal, so wonderful and thrilling and terrifying that I could never write them in a blog - no one would take me seriously, thank you, K.M.V. - and can only share them with my one and only, letting these stories escape hurriedly from my lungs and rush to his side...

I can only try to keep my breathing steady as I recount something I cannot comprehend until my breathing and my story dissolve into sobs of confusion and exultation as he listens and considers, comforts and believes me.

These stories I keep for those times.

So that is all I'll say about my experiences in Israel thus far: that there were many of them, and many incredible people with whom I shared them, and as is logical when one considers so many teenagers breathing and eating and sleeping side by side for five weeks, there were dozens of inside jokes and many of them were dirtier than we were after traversing that country.

Now we are back home, to relative normalcy. Has this trip changed us permanently? I doubt otherwise. I, for one, feel that it will be impossible to ever do anything again that isn't sitting and thinking, or seeing and listening. Writing papers again for school will be bizarre, to say the least. How many times a during a school day will I pause and think to myself that at this time in Israel, I might be picking tomatoes for the povertous, or climbing a "mountain," or even a mountain?

I can't say. But hopefully I'll be able to keep you posted.