Asha Lyons Sumroy delves into her Jewish ethnicity and how Judaism and identification with and responsibility for Israel continues to play an extremely complex role in her life.
Living in Jerusalem, in an intentional community, communally (centrally shared money, shared chores, belongings and responsibility), based on ideology, on making change, on justice, was a whirlwind for Asha having just finished school.
“But it was in these months that I found true partners for change in the world and with them that I forged a home impossible to replace or replicate.”
Our apartment was always dark – never enough windows; until-evening lie-ins. But, even now I can’t describe the dimness that filled the walls when I went back alone, two years after we’d moved out, and used my stolen key to get back into the empty apartment. Let alone the landlords plans to demolish it, the feeling of being somewhere once so full – the only place I’d ever felt truly full and home and empowered – and reliving months of hologram memories, was enough to leave me overwhelmed with the nostalgia and longing that’s rooted it knowing something fundamental to who you are, will never exist again. It was tradition to sign the walls, and these love letters to each other and to the future were so haunting now. This meditation, which I sat on our balcony, in the muggy August heat writing, insists on the crumbling displacement of returning home, to find a void.
The only thing that makes my writing page poetry is that I’m not a performer – I write and hear these lines as they sound read aloud. They should be read aloud – the sounds and embedded rhymes and breaks in and between the lines are what make it sound how I meant it – but whispered, to yourself, or to someone you love.
Meditations on our Empty House
We are written onto these walls
And our love lingers between them
We etched our names into the plaster,
The kitchen, bathrooms, bed frames, doors, in permanent pen ink
Markers as strong as the Tubi 60, back-of-the-throat-burning, Israeli shots we learnt to love in the bar beneath the stone arches
To make sure that whoever lived here after us would know that we were once here, that
We learnt each other’s lives here, that We learnt each other’s bodies here, that ‘It was here in this room on a warm night in May that you became my family’
That at this table, too small for us all to sit around without sticking unwashed thighs together, that we shared food like sharing ourselves,
Unending, sticky, nights
In this bathroom we sang out of tune duets to wake our souls in the morning, taking
Turns with the shampoo
Throwing it clumsily between shower curtains
On these sofas we administered wine to cope with 2017’s election, projected onto
These walls from England – two hours behind and nothing near what we know of home now
This bookshelf shared our favourite stories, aside worn-cornered manifestos
This bed we shared the nights we needed to be held
The nights we needed to, we fought
Then tore up the tears with laughter and, eventually,
Song, unending melody
We are written onto these walls
We wrote ourselves there to preserve our love between them
But continents divide
And so do cities
And
See I kept my key
In the secret hope I’d come back and find you all
We lived here, once, I know
But the signatures we left to mark memory territory are just one generation of graffiti
The family after us have been and gone and their narrative fills the space between ours and the hole one of them must have kicked through the kitchen wall
I know we walked this floor, I’m sure
I can see the footprints mapped in dirt we forgot to clean
We cigarette-burnt ourselves into these plastic chairs on the balcony
The smoke leaving lips, unending wisps, echoed by
This hair wound up onto the shower wall Im sure it must be one of yours
Here we spoke of revolution
Here we lived in revolution, see I kept my key so I could come back to find it
But I’m sat alone in an empty house
With all of our names scribbled in fading ink on the walls.