There once was a boy, who once thought they were a girl, who then thought they were a writer (because dancing got uncomfortable), whose first assignment in writing class was called “Boy meets girl” and so they felt very confronted and turned in no assignments.

Then they were gifted a so-called “bible to anyone who writes” by their parents with which they hoped to self-educate but shriveled in the face of so much they didn’t know. The “bible’s” principals for good writing were all summarized concisely and mathematically, in diagrams and graphs and pluses and minuses and stiff-lined geometry.

The boy who once thought they were a girl was then gifted by her sister a so-called “Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”, ordering her to free-write 3 pages everyday, and subscribe to the synagogue of herself, when a mythical-sized war errupted around her.

The once boy who then thought they were a girl decided to take off with their American husband and Cana’an dog, fleeing the mythical sized war, landing far far away…

In Richmond, Virginia.

Where they realised all along they were a Jew.

They returned to their so called “bible” anew but multi-layered conflicts, a strong willed protagonist and antagonistic forces were still things they couldn’t source in their very shapeles life (or the process of sourcing them was very embarrasing).

So instead of plots she wrote lots of convoluted sentences that lied between symbolic, idiotic and imbued with collective trauma, in ambigous gender, in a language that wasn’t her mother’s tongue.

And neither was Hebrew - her mother’s tongue - her father’s mother’s tongue, and neither was Hebrew her mother’s mother’s mother’s tongue.

(And neither was English!)

There once was a candle labled “self care” flickering by a displaced Jewish “woman” on Holocaust Memorial Day. Her mother was far far away on a root travel trip to Poland and she was very much in Virginia. She was trying to muster up memory, boil it down to words and shove them in stiff-lined geometry indoctrinated by her so called "bible", hoping to make a movie. She despaired often.

There once was a cursor flickering all the while, inflicting pressure, indicating time passing by.

A Jewish “woman” asked her mom to bring her back candles and soaps from Poland, by which she would reclaim their genetic artifacts. Her mom replied with an “Oish”.

An uprooted Jewish “woman” was reading the news on Holocaust Memorial Day - her motherland carried on a mythical sized war, by which sacrificing its own people, like a mother killing her children, she thought.

A Jewish “woman” was feeling vaguely abandoned on Holocaust Memorial Day, away from her parents, her husband, her dancing job, her dancing body, and lastly a government that cared, she thought, say she were abducted in a tunnel, say she were a woman or a man or a helpless baby, say she were in an airless terrarium in Virginia.

An uprooted Jewish “woman”, was once living far far away (in Richmond, Viriginia) in a ground floor apartment where no air was to go in or out, as its single window was fraudulent and would not open. So she would alternately deem the space a terrarium, an incubator, a womb to her unborn self.

And what shall she be reborn as? A writer, perhaps? An American she had hoped; a woman encapsulated in quotation marks? A woman encapsulated in a terrarium? An exotic exhibition? An anecdote candle? A soap? A flickering cursor? A thrifted mug? A hand me down table? 9 more months of morning pages?

On Holocaust Memorial Day a Jewish “woman” looks up apartments with windows that open.

She forgets a form of identification when she meets a nice broker and makes him wait while she goes to and fro searching for it. She bikes back down and uphill passing each time the signage leading to “African burial grounds” and “Lumpkin’s Jail/ The Devil’s Half-Achre”. A black man was lying beneath a sign in the sun, on a small patch of grass caught between a two-level intersection.

On Holocaust Memorial Day a displaced Jewish “woman” reorients around different ancestral trauma. She conjures up a sentence about it in her head and looks up “Lumpkin’s Jail”.

There was a comfort in how America laid there, unsolicited, for her to evaluate, disgorged in all its bloody history, hard to swallow, uncatered to foreigners. A comfort in how simply it was uttered to her that old houses here were all built on stairs since slaves used to live below ground. There was a comfort in letting those facts spoil the ground, pollute the air, habituate in the mind.

History seemed unearthed here rather than stowed away in Poland or at one’s parent’s house, or kept away even when it regards one’s mandatory army service. People where she was from were known to be painfully honest and blunt, but in fact she found them to be living on geology of repression and denial.

Thirty sweaty minutes later she goes up an elevator with the nice broker and young people in flip flops (presumably university students) and walks down a windowless hallway to an apartment with another fake window, turning out to be nothing but glass fixed to the wall. The realtor explained there was a system providing fresh air she knew better to call air conditioning. It well simulated something habitable, it well simulated fresh air by filtering in oxygen via tubes, something that keeps one devoid of any dealings with the outside world. Just like things here that well resemble food but really should not be consumed, or a community seeming hospitable turning out to be gated off.

It’s sealed “for safety reasons”, the broker said as they were high above ground. Her ground floor apartment however must have also been deemed unsafe for the risk of intrusion. So where might it be safe to let air come in and out?

The realtor explained most buildings in downtown Richmond would likely offer the same thing, as they wish not to interfere with the old architecture here by installing rails.

Has all Richmond have to offer the Jewish “woman” is isolating shelters?

The Jewish “woman” begins walking back to what she occasionally, unwillingly also calls home. Exhuasted she realises she forgot her bike behind her. When she returns back uphill to get it she hears an uproarious crowd on her left, then turns her head to sees flags in colors that makes her viscera clench. They are in fact so recognizable, the colors, like a flash of undesired nostalgia materialising in front of her eyes. She feels her body dispersing, going in all directions, many amputated particles spreading further away from the core, forming their own diaspora.

She conjures up a sentence about it in her head in a launguage that isn’t her own, nor is it any of her ancestor’s, but is the language shouted to her left, the language she wrestles to inhabit correctly and comfortably, the language uttered in the air she seeks to be in synergy with, to be immersed in its echo system, rather than isolated from.

The Jewish woman then wrestles with her new bike-lock, right in front of her false promise of a new home. Her glasses slide down her sweaty bare scalp, down to her heavy nose. Her hand bag slides off her frail shoulder onto the floor. Once she is done unlocking her bike, she reassembles herself and hobbles on awkwardly. She grips the brakes tightly, hunching her back. This hand-me-down bike is a little too pitched forward for her, she thinks, as the wheels speed down ahead of her.

Her brakes screech noisily when the same crowd digorges itself in front of her - a big car with an open trunk on which a young woman stood shouting passionately to a megaphone, followed by multitudes of young bodies echoing her in a heartfelt canon, effeminate bodies, and gender ambigous, with long hairs and in cropped shirts and scarfs, and glittering eyes. They were costumed in things so awfully familiar to the Jewish “woman” despite looking anything but familiar to her. They pridefully sang things regarding a home she once inhabited, aluding to her desired eviction of it, her disappearance, her obliteration perhaps.

The sun scorched her bare scalp, she squinted her eyes to see past its blazing beams. Her clothes these days were a means of disguise, they were growing larger and larger as she was rapidly getting more frail. She couldn’t discern whether she wanted to disappear or had this feeling been imposed on her at one point. Regardless she froze, glaring. The rioters didn’t know she would be the subject, the adressee of their impassioned calls. She didn’t know whether she would have liked them to. The road was not blocked, she could have taken off but instead she stood taking some odd pleasure in absorbing it all in full, like a narcotic. In fact she couldn’t get enough at one point she took a picture, and a video, like of her own execution, just like all the other people encompassing that performance, only she did so without including herself in it.

Her bike finally carryed her downhill in a sprint. She couldn't see ancestral trauma on the left, she got lost on a road blocked for construction.

She got off to walk her bike, regulating her racing heartbeat, navigating her way back to the insulated terrarium.