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Pony: On my 21st Birthday
10.17.2005
I lived in Jerusalem.
The day before my birthday, Mia came over to my house with balloons and plastic noses that were formed like animal muzzles. She filled my room with balloons. Little Danny (who was a few months away from never being my friend again) and army Dan came over too.
We ate dinner at a mexican restaurant on yoel solomon. The owner (who i knew because I waitressed at the yemenite restaurant across the street) served us cake and made us wear sombreros.
That night I took the overnight bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat and sat in the front seat with my feet up on the railing. Stared out the window all night as we drove through the desert and when the sun rose, I turned to the driver and said: "Hayom Yesh Li Yom Huledet". Today is my birthday. He shrugged his shoulders, as though to say: "What do you expect me to do about it?"
My boyfriend picked me up from the bus station with a present: this horribly unflattering embroidered hungarian peasant blouse that his father had picked up in Budapest. I am pretty sure I wore it that day for lunch with his family. He was my boyfriend but I knew the expiry date on the relationship.
"You should stay with him, he is very faithful," said his sister-in-law who had married the unfaithful brother, "what, of course you don't know that you want to stay with him! No one knows what they really want at 21." But I knew.
I was 21. I was half in love with a dozen other boys. I had a cringeworthy punk-hippy style going on. I was living in another language that let me be more straightforward than my normal self. I was far from family. Failing university. Railing at my own inertia. And having adventures.
Things to know
1) I live in Toronto now.
2) That mexican restaurant was where, a few months later, many people survived a terrorist attack by climbing onto the roof (it was the one restaurant the shooters entered, and the only one where people did not hide in the bathrooms when the shooting began).
3) Mia is still my friend (she moved here, too). She came to my balloon-filled apartment for my 32nd birthday this year.
4) By 22 I was at university in Montreal, much closer to family, and doing well in school.
5) I don't regret anything from that time.
Also:
Today is my sister Jackie's birthday. Happy birthday Jackie!
