Dinner last night was an impromptu visit to a local posh Creole-ish restaurant, $20 steaks and desserts on decorated plates.
I've lived in the country of wine for over two years cumulatively, and I still get tipsy on two glasses.
In vino veritas Anna Maria used to exclaim with a drunken waving of hands shortly before she broke into tears and told me her stories.
In vino veritas last night, I don't know why, I started talking about the medics, our gang of twenty-four in Israel. I started talking about something other than the scorpions we threw at each other in passionate hazing rituals, something other than the golan that we hiked through, the lagoons, the way no one could swim beneath the weight of the rifle.
I talked about the twenty four of us, how there's only three of us left, the three who left the country. Yael, Gad, and I. The seven Davids, the one whose first I was, the one with the curly hair, the one I pulled a gun on, Aviv (I saw him go), two girls whose names I can't remember but whose hairspray I often stole to light sand-crabs and scorpions on fire with.
Since then I've been wondering. Are they why no one is faceless? Is it the number of faces I've kissed against a myriad of backdrops?
Is it the number of faces I've watched grow still and lose all expression?
Oh the melodrama. Brian died on a bus in Ashkelon, he'd taken a weekend leave the weekend I left Israel, we both took the 51 bus into Ash-dod, I got on a plane, he got back on the bus at 8:30 the following morning along with a suicide bomber. I heard about the bomb in the news and shivered that I'd been on that bus twenty hours previous, idly wondered if Brian had heard the news, if he was laughing. Yael sent me a postcard that arrived weeks later, with a naked man on the front, and told me he'd been on it.
At the time, my priorities were still more impressed that I'd joined the mile-high club with a football player named Mike on the plane from Tel Aviv to Montreal.
Last night and this morning I've been seeing ghosts and faces, in various uniforms, from military to punk-ass streetkid.
This morning when Stuart asked me if I'd watched the news last night I told him all too honestly that I didn't have the strength, that I'd already begun seeing ghosts by then.
I keep seeing faces I've never seen, in their last moments before a bullet, a bomb, a cloud of smoke, takes them.
Maybe I'm going crazy. Maybe I'm already there. Maybe I've broken the 200-people rule, where if you try to care about more than that many people, you break in your head.
I'm breaking.
But I still have the strength to wish for peace.
I don't wish for sides, I don't wish for winning, I don't wish for one set of bombs to stop so that another set can take over. I don't care if it's us, or the US, or the kurd or the iraqi soldiers, I don't want any of them to shoot a single bullet, or watch a single face go loose with death.