Saturday, August 8, 2015

A Painful Memory that Resurfaced

This morning as I lay in bed, a memory randomly came back to me. In the summer of 1998, when I was a CIT at Camp Negev, I had a crush on an Israeli counselor, Omri. Like all my other crushes, we started out on friendly terms, he figured out I had feelings for him (despite protocol that I had implemented to try to keep myself under control), and by the end of the summer he wanted nothing to do with me. My memories of him are very bittersweet and nuanced, and part of me still never got closure for that summer. The memory in question that came back to me this morning was this:

We were at a staff/CIT meeting on the porch outside the rec hall, and there was a box of oranges on the floor. People held out their hands to catch the oranges as Omri tossed them. I held out my hands. No orange. Finally, I said, "Hey, Omri, could you toss me an orange?" He said, "Get it yourself."

Just let that sink in.