I was born at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, which I know only because I have memorized the name. 

Hadassah, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, Israel. 

I say it to myself sometimes the way other people say prayers. As though precision, or the syllables themselves, might unlock something.

I don’t remember the hospital. I don’t remember leaving. But I have spent much of my life circling a city I technically arrived in before I could see.

On a winter evening in Jerusalem, my husband and I ate sushi in Rehavia.

Real sushi on neat plates, in a restaurant with soft lighting. The kind of restaurant that could exist anywhere. That ordinariness felt almost confrontational.

Jerusalem is not a city that usually allows you to forget where you are. And yet here we were, passing plates, discussing whether we should order one more roll, listening to Hebrew and English braid themselves together in the air, our waiter moving easily between languages. A normal night. A normal conversation.

And beneath it, something else.

“I think this is my tenth time in Israel,” I said suddenly, halfway through the meal.

The number surprised me as soon as I said it. Not because it felt excessive, but because it felt like confirmation.

Two long stays, the year in 2012 and the year from fall 2021 through summer 2022, each count as only one. The rest were shorter returns. Pilgrimages, maybe. Or evidence.

Some cities you visit. Some cities you keep returning to as though they are withholding something.

In 2012, I lived in Katamon and Baka: small stone buildings, narrow sidewalks, and laundry strung between balconies.

I walked........

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