Human Writes: Rave
A true story about an impossible reality | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup
The reason I love stories so much is that they’re one of the only ways I know to take all the chaos and lack of meaning around us and put some order into it. When you hear a good story, the whole mess known as reality takes on a clear shape, and everything you didn’t understand or feel before gathers into a coherent, delineated pattern. But there’s a different kind of good story, too. There are stories that seem specifically designed to illustrate the way reality can be an intractable knot of terror, hope and pain. Stories that leave you feeling even more confused and lost. Here is one of them:
The drive home from the hospital was long, and the taxi driver was unusually quiet. Israeli taxi drivers always insist on talking to you about something, usually politics, but this one didn’t seem interested in talking to anyone about anything. He also was not listening to the radio or any music, which made him even more unusual. Our drive proceeded so quietly that I could hear his heavy breaths, slow and endless like the war in Gaza.
I was on my way home from a rehab ward in Ramat Gan, where I’d been visiting a young soldier who’d lost a leg during combat in the Shuja'iyya neighborhood of Gaza. He’d asked me to come and teach him how to write. I don’t really know how to teach writing, but when a charming, excited young man who just had his leg amputated asks you for something, you do what you can.