Not the great partings. It is the small partings that pave our lives.
Moving apartments. No drama. Nobody died, nobody flew off on a long posting to Argentina. Just an apartment you lived in for four or five years. Mere inanimate matter. Soaking up memories. And there is that moment when all the furniture has been cleared out and the movers have driven off and you stand in an empty apartment and the walls are the same walls but really nothing is the same. And that deep breath. And you want to leave because there is really nothing left to do here, and you cannot leave because everything is soaked in the smell of your little girl’s first kiss and coffee with your beloved or just an evening when you fall asleep with a book in the living room. Small partings, no drama. Not like in the movies, a train platform with a child departing and God knows if you will ever see each other again, and a fluttering handkerchief and weeping. Not like that. Small partings. Not of the most important people in your life, only of the third tier. Avner from the grocery store of your childhood always used to give you a candy on the house and ask how your mother was doing, and you loved him, and now, twenty years later, Mom told you that Avner from the grocery store passed away and you didn’t even make it to the funeral, what a schmuck you are. And he is not a brother and not an uncle and not your best friend, just another figure in the mosaic of your childhood, but when he died, one stone in that mosaic was painted black. Small partings, I’m telling you, it’s nothing, happens all the time, you can shrug it off. Your legs are no longer what they used to be; you climb down into the long cave of Wadi Daliya and you know — a hike like this you will never do again. Maybe you will still tell yourself that you will return, that you will come back, but in your heart you know: through this crevice you will not pass again.
And so, in a single day, you realize about a hundred and fifty beloved places that that’s it, you will never be in them again. And who knew that that time was the last — you never even got to say goodbye to the waterfall of Nahal Meitzar. For the great partings we try to prepare, to say what needs to be said, to end things properly; but it is the small partings that pave life without pause. No one tells us that this glance is the last, that this evening is the last, that this sprawling on the couch in this specific house with these specific friends is the last. Only years later will you understand: that night, that unremarkable night, almost offhand — was the last.
A cell dies, a cell is born, a cell dies, a cell is born. The small partings happen offhandedly.
