A Perfect Day For Head Injuries

Summer 2004

Friday April 12, 2002 was a perfect day for head injuries.

I do not mean that in a bitter or sarcastic “that was the day I received a head injury” sense, even though I received not one, but two head injuries that day.

I received the first injury a few hours before the bombing. While walking to my office, I passed two yeshiva boys carrying a heavy metal rack. One of the boys lost his grip, and the rack fell on my head, knocking me down and leaving me with a small bleeding gash and a headache. I will never know for sure what caused the huge, bleeding gash I received in the bombing although my personal theory is that the force of an explosion occurring 10 feet from where I stood sent me flying, head first and at an enormous speed, into the steel frame of the bus stop.

But as I said, I do not mean that the day was a good day for head injuries in any sort of tongue-in-cheek sense. I mean it literally.

Have you ever had one of those days, or weeks, or months, where you are so damn miserable, that you wish that you could go to sleep and just stay asleep for a while? Not suicide, nothing so drastic or final as that, but rather just an opportunity to turn off your brain and not think for a little while. For me, Friday April 12, 2002 was one of those days.

I will admit that many people would have been happy to be in my shoes. My aliyah, by most objective standards, was going well. I had a job in my field and was enrolled in night school where I prepared for the Israeli CPA exams. I had built a small but close circle of friends: Debbie, Yael, Galia, Nomi and Edith, who I could count on for some measure of support and Shabbat meals. I had a decent apartment with a non-demonic roommate.

Even so, life was not like it was in the States. At 31, four years out of college and at a time where my friends back home were furnishing their starter homes with elegant furniture, I was living like a college student, my room full of random, cheap, throwaway pieces of furniture picked up second or third hand or even off the side of the road. Between work, night school and homework, I had virtually no free time at all and often found myself fighting off terrible feelings of isolation. Worst of all, my romantic life was a complete, unmitigated disaster. I had met a guy. I completely flipped over him. I was sure that he had flipped as well. He did-but…over my best friend. She flipped over him.

They were in love.

Incidentally, this was not the first time that this had happened to me. To be honest, this happened to me frequently. To be painfully, brutally honest, every single time I fell for a guy, he would proceed to fall for whoever was my closet friend of the time. If my closest friend changed, he would fall for each of them, in succession. Usually I was able to grin and bear it, give up on the guy, and keep the friend. This time, I found that I simply could not.

Maybe it was because I had thought that this time, I was going to be the lucky one. And maybe it was the realization that I had turned my back on a good job, a large group of friends, financial security, physical safety and had moved all the way across the world to Israel… just to have my bad luck follow me. Whatever the reason, I broke. All during the week leading up to Friday, April 12, 2002, this pain was fresh and raw and pounding. I was quite simply in agony, to the extent that I would comment to my friends that maybe I would get lucky, and a bus would blow up with me on it.

And so it was that I found myself standing at a bus stop at Machane Yehuda , at 3:45 on Friday, April 12, 2002, my head aching from the blow I had received earlier, and just wishing that I were anywhere but there, and anyone but me. Why had I made aliyah if I was just going to be single, lonely, depressed and just generally the world’s biggest loser? What was I doing in Israel? What was I doing with my life? How could things possibly get worse?

Oh. Yeah. That.