A true story about salty tea

I was lost; there is no other, fancier way of putting it. That’s not to say that I haven’t been lost since or couldn’t find myself lost again, but it is as clear to me as anything about my past is clear, that I was ejected from the army after three years like a stray bullet, without a target and without a mind of my own, lost and nothing else. That ‘nothing else’ was as significant as being lost was, and the two elements fed off each other. I only knew one thing; I had to write. And so I wrote every single day. Other than drugs, it was the only thing I did.

My friend Yoni was out of the army as well. One day he bought a plane ticket to India, and that was that. He lay down on one of the boulders on drummer’s shore in Tel Aviv, spread his body out to invite the afternoon sun and said “This is what I’m going to be doing for the next six months.” He looked up and asked “Will you all be in a crisis when I leave?”
“Do you want us to be in a crisis?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I want to be missed.”
“There’s no way of knowing if that’ll happen. We might just forget about you. And as for a crisis, well, I’ve been in a crisis for a long long time now.” I was lost, and even though I kept up my habit of daily writing, it could take me nowhere because I already was nowhere.

On our last night with Yoni we asked him, “What do you want to do tonight? You are the prince of the evening.” He said “I never ever want to be the prince of the evening ever.”, and so we sat in his attic and played the last game of chess he’d be playing with any of us for months to come. Our prince’s throat hurt, and since Gil had never been more than a bored observer of our chess games, he volunteered to make him a cup of tea. “I really appreciate this.” Yoni said solemnly when Gil handed him the steaming mug. A few turns later he laughed and said “Gil, you’re the man. You made me tea with salt.”
“What?” Gil asked, surprised. I tasted Yoni’s tea and had to laugh myself. It was so disgusting that I needed a sugary tea to follow it and heal my taste buds, but at the same time I’d loved it. It was salty tea, so exact and preposterous that for a brief moment it woke me from my lull. In my sick state of mind I raced to fit it into a metaphor or force it to give birth to an idea, but of course nothing came.

The next day Yoni was gone, he’d turned from flesh and blood to the occasional email. Two months later his mother called me up to ask for a favor; the family was leaving on a vacation for the holidays and she wondered if Gil and I wouldn’t mind staying in their house to take care of the dog.

Living in Yoni’s empty house for ten days in his absence was a strange experience that required that we maintain a constant state of drug abuse, so constant that by the end of the week our supplies had run dry. We rifled through the kitchen cupboards until we came across some alcohol. We’d been building a resistance to other drugs but the liquor hit us like fourteen-year-olds. Soon enough we were violently smacking our feet against the sidewalks of Yoni's neighborhood in the late hours of the night on our way to the twenty-four-hour store to buy more.
“We’re walking really fast!” We laughed, and pushed on.
Gil said “I wish I had a pen and paper. I’d write some poetry right now.”
“Write it out loud, I’ll remember.” I huffed and puffed. It was hard to speak while drunkenly speed-walking.
“Ok… a leaf on the sidewalk…” he began. “No, wait, cross that out.”
He started ten different poems that way and had me cross them all out in my mind.
Finally he said “It’s a good thing I don’t have a pen and paper here.”

That night, despite being drunk and despite the fact that I was on a strange bed in a stuffy attic that had no air conditioning, I slept like a baby. It was all right for me to stop writing and do nothing at all.