Content warning – this story contains descriptions of: cannabis smoking, depression, the North African refugee crisis of the 2010s, sexual fantasies, social anxiety, and Tel Aviv - Jaffa.
* * *
Weeks in bed ... (and in the bathroom) passed me by without having felt anything for a single moment except stabbing pains in my side, and a vague sensation of emptiness in my chest. Like crawling on my stomach in a desert of emotion – the place where feelings go to die – a dry, sandy desert stretching from horizon to horizon in every direction.
But here I was, all of a sudden, after who-knows-how-long, managing to finally put on some clothes, putting on my boots, dragging myself out to the terrible outdoors, taking the elevator downstairs, and getting out of the building. For the first few seconds, I stood on the sidewalk dazed, and wondered why the hell I even went outside. Going back inside would have felt like giving up, but I didn’t really have anything to do outside on a Friday night.
A tigress and a vixen were walking on the dark sidewalk, speaking to each other in that accent that tells you someone’s been living in Tel Aviv for way too long. They burst out laughing the moment they walked past me. My ears splayed and flattened completely from embarrassment, and I ran away as quickly as I could in the opposite direction from the two of them – south.
Again, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, specifically, outside of the apartment, so I just lethargically ambled south, step after step, crosswalk after crosswalk. I took a joint out of my pocket a bit after Frenkel Street, and lit it at Florentine. I had to relight it when I crossed Salameh Road into Abulafya, and then again at the corner of Rabbennu Hannanel, and by the time I turned into Alfassi, I was completely done smoking all of it, and threw it into a green municipal trash bin that someone left standing in the middle of the sidewalk.
I turned into a small alleyway and found out that it goes under a building, and leads out into Kibbutz Galuyot Road, right in front of the Merkazim Building. And there I found out, was the only non-signalized crosswalk on that road. A lion and a lioness crossed it together with me: he was tall and muscular, dressed in skinny jeans and a tight black t-shirt, and she wore hotpants and a black tank top. They spoke with an accent that told me they’d never lived a day in Tel Aviv, and turned left towards the Barby venue.
But I continued on south without really knowing where I was going exactly – I didn’t even know what was south of here – until, without noticing, I had strayed away from all of the main roads, and found myself surrounded by deafening silence – and in every direction stood horrible nightmare buildings about to pounce on me, linked together by wall-to-wall striped asphalt – and one small stone house was poking out from behind me.
Near total silence.
I stopped. My last step echoed between the reinforced concrete walls.
Looking up: a full moon, the middle of the month of Shevat.
And with no reason or explanation (ok, well, maybe from all the weed) – I started howling at it. A long, loud howl of frustration. I could hear it echo for a bit, and then I broke down completely. I fell to my knees, grabbing a hold of a rusty iron railing with some remains of dark yellow paint flecks, and started sobbing. And for the first time since what must have been several weeks, I could finally feel something.
And I coughed and spat and breathed, and suddenly I could smell the things around me. The tears kept on coming and streaming down, but I got up, and looked around, and kept smelling, kept sniffing around – probably also weeks now since I’ve bothered to really look around myself and try to figure out what the hell was going on –
But here, now, with my nose raised up in the air, I breathed in the scents of burning diesel, of dust and drywall, and a faint note of sycamore trees; the smell of a distant field and of longing and of lost childhood years; everything surrounded me like a living and colorful cocktail of smells and stenches, after such a long time that’s passed me by in a dull, uniform gray, devoid of emotion or hope – and here, finally, between car repair shops, offices, empty parking lots, and one small, stubborn house, I felt like I had come to life again.
And ever since that evening, I make sure to go through there on every run, even if it makes my route longer. Even if I’m planning to run to Neveh Tsedek, in the complete opposite direction – I will make the detour, and work harder, and make a point of it, and make sure, and go first of all through the industrial park. So as not to forget where I had come from and what I had to endure to get to there.
* * *
But Saggie would almost definitely not care in the slightest, I thought while standing in the elevator in my short running clothes. My phone’s calendar said it was Simchat Torah today – almost Fall, and almost evening. Still a bit too hot to go for a run in the middle of the day.
I really liked having sex with Saggie, and he was the one who brought up the idea of going on a run together, and I – knowing how important it is to resist the urge to isolate myself – acted like a stupid damn pup and agreed to it.
When I stepped out of my building, he was already standing in the street, typing something on his phone – a huge brown wolf, with white fur on the sides of his snout and his chin and his chest. And he looked even better today than he usually did. He was wearing a dark blue dry-fit shirt with some IDF related symbol printed in the corner (for my secret military kink?) and it wasn’t able to flatten his puffy fur and made him look more muscular than he really was. Fucking cheater. And fucking hot.
“Hey!” He wagged his tail, and I didn’t know if he was expecting a hug or a handshake or a French kiss in the middle of the street – so I went with the safe option and waved from a few feet away and tried to smile. I guess it was enough for him because he didn’t come any closer, just turned his eyes and ears towards me when I stood next to him. “What’s up?”
“As usual.” I gave him my usual noncommittal answer for these situations.
Saggie laughed and wagged his tail even harder and I felt mine fold down between my legs and freeze. He asked “What? Whaddayamean?”
“Oh y’know, same as always,” I answered and hurried to change the subject so we won’t have to talk about how my life is falling apart. “How are you?”
“I’m great, new semester’s gonna start soon, and I’ll finally get to the practical part.”
I panicked. A gigantic wave of anxiety caught me and stopped my heartbeat for what felt like ten whole minutes. I remembered now... that’s right! He’s studying to be a psychologist! And also, oh no! He’s studying to be a psychologist! And then I realized that I hadn’t said anything for a really long time so I quickly tried to say “cool” but only the second half of the word actually came out.
I cleared my throat in a slightly exaggerated and forced way in a desperate attempt to save face and not embarrass myself in my own head even more.
But Saggie wasn’t paying any attention in those few seconds anyway – he finished typing out the rest of his text, then opened an exercise app on his phone, and asked “Alright, should we go?” And so off we went, and I calmed down a bit.
I led us south at a slow jog, deeper and deeper into the industrial zone, while we talked about Saggie’s degree.
His practicum, as it turns out, includes visits to psychiatric hospitals. I opened my mouth to say something a couple times and immediately regretted it every time. Instead, I let him speak, and just nodded and added a well-timed “mhm” every once in a while. I don’t know if he noticed how my tail folded inwards again.
When we were just about halfway through the parking lot where I always make sure to go, Saggie cut himself off in the middle of a sentence about some random hospital or university bureaucratic thing, looked at me, and laughed. “Man, what is this place? Did you bring me here to steal a kidney?”
I couldn’t stop myself and laughed with him. I tried to justify myself. “Uh, that would, uh, definitely make sense given... all of this,” I gestured around at the deteriorating buildings around us. “But honestly I just really like going through here when it’s all empty and there’s no one around.”
I was getting kinda serious there, but Saggie just kept on chuckling. “Yeah, for this amazing picturesque atmosphere of car shops and urban decay.”
Once again I couldn’t resist and snorted a laugh out my nose, like laughing at an awful offensive joke that my only hyena uncle told at the Passover Seder.
Saggie went on. “Like, wow! I thought the neighborhood I live in is bad, but...” He left the sentence hanging in the air, looked around, and gave an annoying, extremely hot smile that made my heart skip a beat.
“Yeah well, we’re in the southern neighborhoods, y’know, that’s how it is and all that.” I tried to summarize the topic.
We were just getting to the crosswalk at Herzl Street, and we had to wait a few seconds for a couple cars to go by. We were both starting to warm up from the run and panting slightly, and our tongues were dripping slightly. I looked behind me and wondered if we were leaving a trail of spit-crumbs like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, but I couldn’t really tell from looking at the uneven and filthy sidewalk, under a combination of the sunset and the dim, dark street lighting, and Saggie was running again already so I hurried after him.
He looked left and right at the road, and then backwards at me, still with that smoking hot smile of his. I waved with one arm to my left and started to turn, and he slowed down a bit and turned with me. I added to that, “And then at that light over there we’ll turn right.”
Those turns will lead us back to Kibbutz Galuyot Road, but along the street this time instead of across it. We said nothing for a bit, and I felt uncomfortable with that silence, so I tried to remember what Saggie was saying before his comment about the creepy parking lot. But then I remembered that it was something about psychiatric hospitals, so I thought that maybe it’s better to just say nothing for a bit.
But Saggie broke the silence once we turned onto Kibbutz Galuyot again. “Wait, isn’t this the same street we were on before?”
“Umm, yes?” I pretended to not understand why he’s so surprised.
He started to laugh. “So you’re telling me we went through those workshops for nothing?!” His tail wagged so hard that it was basically whipping me with each wag.
“It wasn’t ‘for nothing!’ I really do like going through there!” I desperately tried to justify myself, but Saggie just laughed even harder.
“Ok, honestly it’s not like this place looks all that great either.” He nodded his head towards the industrial buildings on the other side of the road – a dark ick-gray, with exposed concrete bricks and no plaster. Probably built in the 60s. I didn’t have the energy to retort.
At the intersection with Har Zion we got a green light on the first half of the crosswalk, and then ignored the red light for the second half because there were no cars there. That led us to run next to a small grassy area, where, sitting on the low metal fence around it (and on the one or two benches next to it), were some 20 or so painted dogs.
Most of their fur was a mess of white and brown and black spots, with brown faces and a black snout, and giant, black, satellite-dish ears, and with white, puffy, furry tails behind them or to their sides.
There were also maybe a bunch of jackals, and I think also one caracal.
They were all men, and most of them didn’t seem to be any older than the two of us. Some of them wore t-shirts and sweatpants, and some wore shiny colorful button-downs and jeans, and some of them had e-scooters or foldable e-bikes. Some of them were speaking to each other, some were scrolling on their phones, and some of them were having video calls in a bunch of languages I don’t understand.
No one really paid any attention to us or looked up at us as we went by. But Saggie, on the other hand, was looking at them really curiously, and maybe kind of went into the creepy zone.
Once they were behind us, he asked in a low, serious voice: “Wow, it’s like, always like that here, isn’t it?” And for the first time since I said hi to him next to my building, he wasn’t smiling. Not even a little. His tail wasn’t wagging other than just swaying to the rhythm of us jogging, and his ears kept turning and coming back as if he’s listening to make sure no one’s talking about him.
I answered his question. “Wow, yeah, it’s really awful, what they do to them,” I panted for a bit and went on, “and like, the government has no plan to help them out or anything.”
We stopped at a red light, panting and dripping. Both of our shirts were quite full of little spritzes of spit-sweat (yum), and both of us were panting loudly.
“Yeah, I mean, it was only now when I moved to Tel Aviv that I realized what’s been going on with that,” he sounded frustrated and a bit angry. He also paused to pant, and maybe think. “Back when I lived in Be’er Sheva, honestly, I thought that the media was just blowing it out of proportion.”
“Nono, it’s like, actually real. Like,” for a moment I looked around to make sure no one was listening to us, despite having passed the place where the refugees were sitting a while ago, and went on. “There’s actually some of them that were like tortured and shit on the way here.”
“For real?!” Saggie was surprised.
“For real.” I summarized it. “And then they finally get here, and the government makes their life miserable at every opportunity and also keeps trying to deport them under all sorts of pretenses.”
We shared a sadder silence while we waited for the light to change, despite no cars turning into the smaller street. I wanted that little bit of rest. When the light finally did change and Saggie started running again, I shouted “Wait!” without putting my tongue back in my mouth, and walked forward slowly.
“Also, where the hell are you taking me now?!” Saggie waited for me and then joined me, walking next to me at my slow pace, and was already back to laughing again and my heart skipped a beat again and my tail folded in again. “Yeah, man, why would anyone want to run along the beach anyway?” He panted for a moment and went on, “it’s way more fun here next to the highway! You can just feel the... fresh, clean air!!” He took an exaggerated deep breath, then coughed like Monny Fuchsov in the sketch with the cigarette commercial.
I kinda wanted to be all pissy and judgy at that comment of his, and tell him that if he doesn’t want to join me then he can stay the fuck at home and leave me alone. But instead I found myself laughing out my nose again and snorting slightly again.
And he was kinda right, honestly. It was already that twilight zone when only religious people can tell whether it’s a holiday or not, so there were a bajillion and a half cars on the main road; and the road widened to six and a half lanes next to us, so the cars also went by really fast and made a lot of noise. Meanwhile the two of us were walking ever so slowly next to them on a sidewalk that was narrower than my slightly crowded bed, dripping spit on ourselves and on the small, gray, square paving stones.
As a response to that I promised him that “yeah, sure, but in a moment we’ll go into Kiryat Shalom here and it’ll all be small side streets.”
We kept walking and panting. Once in a while I could feel the fur on my arm and Saggie’s arm rub slightly, and each time I could feel how my heart would skip like eight beats, and my ears would splay and flatten backwards completely.
We turned right, into the short pedestrian path between the Working Youth building and the synagogue next to the tax office (which was now all hustle and bustle with people celebrating), and entered the neighborhood.
Shiny beige-tiled apartment towers greeted us on the way in. Opposite them were a bunch of buildings more typical of the neighborhood, two-storey concrete houses from the 50s and 60s, some of them painted white, and some of them with rough sprayed-on concrete covered with 60-year-old dust.
Saggie looked around and then laughed again. “Wow! Now that’s a dramatic change! How d’you know this place so well?!”
“I dunno, I check maps and aerial photos and stuff.”
“For real?” He didn’t look surprised like when he said it before, but instead – unsurprisingly – he had his hot-guy-smile on, that makes me anxious.
Once again my tail folded in between my legs. My ears flattened and splayed and I felt so small. Why the hell did I agree to this. I answered quietly, “...yes?”
I started us running again even though my legs still hurt. Saggie kept smiling and wagging, but looked like he was also thinking about something. I led us through a vacant lot with some dirt and a single tree, and left into a small street with some deteriorating houses.
All of a sudden Saggie asked: “Wow, you know who you remind me of?” And before I could think of finding a way to answer, he already answered his own question, “Gingy from ‘Zbeng.’”
“What?”
“Like, from the TV Show ‘Zbeng’, not the comics.”
I hadn’t read the comics, and definitely hadn’t watched the TV show. I didn’t even really grow up here. I had no idea what any of that was even supposed to mean. The street turned sharply downwards, and I could feel how I need to stop myself a bit.
He went on: “Hmm I mean you don’t really look like him. Like, I mean, maybe a bit?” He looked like he was giving a lot of thought to this thing.
I turned right, into a small park with a gray brick path, and Saggie turned with me and stayed next to me, still too hot and still wagging and thinking.
He went on again, “Like yeah he was a fox, not a dog, but he was like, really skinny and tall like you.”
Thanks for reminding me how much I hate being skinny, I thought. And Saggie kept going: “But there’s somethin’ ‘bout the way you talk that’s kinda similar?” He finished the sentence with a chuckle filtered through his teeth.
Why the hell am I here, I thought. What did I do wrong? Why do I deserve this? I tried to sound uninterested in this subject. “Uhhh... Okay?”
“Didn’t you watch that when it aired?”
“No. I wasn’t even in Israel back then.”
He widened that hot-guy-smile of his, and – you guessed it! – laughed his hot-guy-laughter, and summarized: “Ah alright, nevermind.”
We kept running silently for a while longer, and I led us through the park, to some more small, narrow residential streets lined with houses. From there we went past a tall socialist-era apartment block, then next to a long, squat socialist block with stores facing the street. Saggie pointed at the building on the opposite side, another long socialist apartment block with stores, and laughed. “Hey wow! That’s building’s so Be’er Sheva!”
“Very similar, yeah,” I agreed laconically.
We went on, through more streets with more houses, until one of the streets turned into a path inside of a park with tall trees. We crossed the park on the asphalt paths, and got to the intersection next to Abu Kabir, where we managed to catch the green light without having to stop. Saggie looked around at Ben Tsvi Road and laughed again, “Another highway? And... Is that a jail?”
I comforted him with a blatant lie: “We’re not gonna be here too long.” I wanted to run straight home already. Ugh. But taking the shortest way back home would mean going through the industrial park again, and I don’t have the patience for more comments about kidneys and attempts to steal them. Ugh again.
Well, okay, I thought. Exercising is supposed to feel awful, and here I am, exercising, and feeling awful. Whatever. We can just keep going straight until we get to the edge of Jaffa.
Saggie asked me how I’ve been and what I’ve been doing lately, so I told him about the all-too-long and all-too-difficult process of filing for disability with National Insurance, and about the medical committee I saw two weeks earlier. Meanwhile we passed next to a park, two gas stations, some deteriorating British Mandate era buildings, and a patch of grass with some weird sculptures.
“So, yeah, I’ll only actually know in a few weeks how much disability I might even get.” I summarized the National Insurance story.
Saggie answered with a serious-sounding “wow”, and stopped wagging his tail again.
Next to the ancient Ottoman water fountain and the old car shops, a bunch more painted dogs and two caracals (yeah, pretty sure they’re caracals this time), were sitting and scrolling their phones – but I guess both me and Saggie didn’t feel like we had to replay the conversation about their colleagues from earlier, so we just ran next to them with a meaningful and heavy silence hanging between us.
We managed to catch the first crosswalk at Shlabim Road on the green light, but then we had to wait on a tiny traffic island that was still under construction, with tall gray metal fences around us, flanked by cars going a million miles per hour in front of us and behind us.
Spit was dripping from our tongues onto the hot asphalt, and the drops were falling diagonally because of the air being blown around by the cars. I couldn’t see a trail behind us.
I complained: “Ugh, ever since they started widening this road,” I panted, and went on, “crossing this intersection became so much worse.”
Saggie, who was looking at the exercise app to check how far and how long we’ve been running (3.29 miles in 44 minutes), turned the screen back off, looked around, and then smiled at me with his ears perked up and his tail wagging again. “Yeah, what’s up with all these highways? Is that all there is in this part of town?” He laughed, and my tail folded in and my ears splayed out.
The light changed to green, and I switched to a walking pace again. Saggie ran for three steps, then realized, slowed down to a walk, and stayed next to me.
“Are we, like, entering Jaffa?” He asked when the buildings started to change styles a bit. Here and there, some rough beige stone popped up between the concrete walls. A bike path showed up next to the sidewalk, and we had to walk on it, because cars also showed up, parked on most of the sidewalk.
“Kind of,” I answered, being a bit of a wise-ass for no reason, “Like, yeah, these days yes, this is basically where Jaffa starts. But this border has always been pretty, uh, unstable, and like, kept moving around over the years.”
“What, you mean like, because of the unification with Tel Aviv?”
“Uhmmm, like, yeah, that was the last part of it,” I explained, “’cause like, in 1950 the two cities were unified and the border between them became completely blurry and a bit irrelevant.”
“Okay?” A bit of a hot-guy-smile started peeking out of the corners of his mouth, and he turned one ear at me and one ear to the side.
I didn’t know if I should go on or not, but it’s a subject I’m interested in, so I erred on the side of yes. “But even before the unification, Tel Aviv kept growing and growing, so every time they bought more land, the border would shift, like,” I took a small break to pant and kept going on: “Like even here, where these days it looks like it’s just 100% Jaffa, 50 years ago this was pretty much outside of the city.”
“Whaddayamean?”
“I mean this was mostly just orange groves. There’s some map from 1930 where this entire area shows up as orchards.”
The bike path ended and we had to step down into the road for a bit because a car was parked on the sidewalk. Horizontally. After that we turned right, starting to go back up north again, and got a view of the half-renovated soccer stadium in front of us. I got us back up to a slow jog.
“Wow you’re like really into maps and stuff, huh?” Still an unsettling hot-guy-smile.
I tried to stay diplomatic in the face of this unending laughter. “Yeah, especially old maps. It’s a really great way to learn about the city’s history.”
“Sounds like it!” And then he also asked, “Where do you even get old maps form anyway?”
“Oh, I was actually thinking of a map that’s up on GovMap.” I could tell from his tail wag suddenly stopping, that he didn’t know what that was, so I explained: “It’s this government website, GovMap dot Gov dot IL, where you can, like, see a map and aerial photos of the entire country, and there’s like, all sorts of historical maps of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa.”
“For real?” He sounded surprised, and then went back to sounding like he’s laughing, “Good to know the government does anything ever.”
“Honestly yeah, it kinda exceeded my expectations,” I admitted. “I expected that, like, they’d censor and hide and delete and shred and burn any map from before 1948 where you can, like,” (I panted,) “see some Arab town that later disappeared or, uhh, mysteriously turned into a Moshav or something.”
Saggie laughed at my joke, and I allowed myself to laugh with him for a bit. For a rare moment the both of us were wagging our tails.
I tried to add another joke, “and here to our left is National Insurance, so we need to slow down to a walk, or they won’t believe that I’m really disabled.”
At first Saggie looked at me shocked, stopped wagging, and slowed down a bit, but when he saw that I wasn’t slowing down and that I was still wagging and smiling and starting to laugh, he smiled again too. “Man, for a moment I thought that was for real.”
“Lol yeah,” I agreed with him. And then I got real stressed out because I said lol in real life, and the year 2007 was loooooong gone. I hoped Saggie wouldn’t notice, and quickly added, “like, I heard all kinds of things about how they send out private investigators to spy on people requesting disability and stuff,”
I guess he really didn’t notice. He just answered “yeah, me too!”
So I explained, “that’s why I thought it’s funny that I, like, let myself run here...”
“Yeah, I got it,” Saggie confirmed, and laughed through his teeth again, and as usual, I could feel my tail fold and my ears splaying.
We kept going through the plaza with the bank and the McDonald’s, and stopped to wait for the light at Salameh. Both of our shirts had gone from tiny spritzes of spit-sweat to a medium-to-large stain of spit-sweat, and Saggie’s entire chin and neck were wet. Mine too probably. We panted noisily without speaking, and I noticed that I could smell Saggie’s panting, and I fought the urge to touch that unbelievable body of his. I forgot to look and see if we left a trail behind us.
The light changed to green, and we jogged to the other side, snaking between an old hyena with a cane, and a badger wearing a beige headscarf. I took us through the pedestrian street next to the fountain, and through the small alleys behind the theater kind of at random, because I didn’t really know how the streets were laid out there. But it turned out ok, because we made it to the staircase leading up to the American Colony. We climbed up, panting and dripping.
Saggie laughed, “nice, and we’re even getting a bit of a stair workout!”
Between pants and stairs, I answered and tried to laugh too, “this is better than running up this hill from the main road, believe me.”
“Again with your highways?” Saggie wagged his tail faster, and looked into my eyes, smiling yet another one of his stressful hot-guy-smiles at me. For a moment it made me feel like I was going to get sucked into those wide, dark eyes like a spaceship into a black hole. Like I had to run away before there’d be no chance of escape.
We were on the larger stair in between the two flights of stairs, and I missed the next step and tripped, stumbled, and fell. I tried to break my fall with both paws forward, but I landed with my elbows on the stairs in front of me. It wasn’t very far, but it was no fun at all, and it hurt a little.
“Shit! Are you alright?” Saggie was still wagging, but not a happy wag. He looked startled.
I tried to sound confident. “Uh, yeah, uhmm, yes.” (Great job, Braveheart) I was kinda shocked and paused for a few seconds.
“Do you need help standing up?” he asked.
I turned my head to look at the large wolf next to me and imagined what it would feel like if he put his strong paws around me to lift me up. What it would feel like to have his spit-sweat dripp onto me. What it would smell like to have his scent right up my nose all of a sudden. To feel his breath on my neck and—
And then I realized that I’d been fantasizing and getting all turned-on by his offer instead of just accepting it or rejecting it.
“Uhh, no no! I’m good, thanks!” I stood back up quickly, brushed imaginary dust off of the fur on my elbows, and kept climbing up the stairs (and holding onto the railing, this time). I tried smiling, but I only managed to smile with my mouth; my tail didn’t want to wag. I was shaking slightly.
We got up to the plaza and I immediately went back to a running pace, to prove to myself that everything really is ok, and to try to get rid of the shaking. Only my elbows hurt from the fall; my knees and my legs didn’t hurt any more than they did from just running.
Saggie let himself change the subject. “Wow, this is a really beautiful neighborhood.”
I explained, “This is the American Colony. Formerly the German Colony.” I pointed at a small tower that was visible behind the roof of a two-storey house. It had a little cross on top. “There’s also a church. We’re gonna go past it in a second.”
Saggie was saying something about how the church is really beautiful, and I was trying to think about the small alleyways after Elifelet Street and trying to remember which one of them leads back to Wolfsohn Track Road.
“Wait, why isn’t it the German Colony anymore?” Saggie asked after a few seconds of doing some thinking of his own.
Now it was my turn to chuckle, “Uhm, you know, because of World War 2 and all that?” I raised the tone of my voice at the end of the sentence like a question.
Saggie joined in and laughed and wagged too. “Oh right! Wow yeah, that was a bit stupid of me.”
We crossed Elifelet on the north side of the intersection where there’s no crosswalk, and a car honked at us, because we kinda ran right into the road in the dark, and also because we may have crossed it diagonally. After that we turned right at the first split and then continued on straight, into a narrow alleyway with woodworking shops, and a giant construction site at the end.
Saggie looked around at the alley and said, “Wow! A dramatic change here too!”
“Welcome back to Florentine,” I declared as if it was all completely obvious.
At the end of the alleyway it turned into a narrow passageway between two woodworking shops, and it dumped us out to Abarbanel Street, but I messed up because we were at Frenkel instead of Wolfsohn Track. I could hear Saggie chuckling behind me when we went through it, “Say, are you sure you’re not secretly a rat, with how well you can navigate this maze?”
I could feel my tail fold in on itself again. I didn’t have the energy to answer anymore, so I just panted loudly and kept on dripping spit-sweat on myself while I waited for a taxi to pass, then crossed at the faded crosswalk at a slow walking pace.
Saggie walked next to me on the way-too-narrow sidewalk on Abarbanel and then on Wolfsohn, and instead of talking, the two of us just panted and dripped. Our fur kept touching and I kept thinking about what it would feel like to put my entire hand paw in it.
We came to a stop at the gate in front of my building, breathing heavily with our tongues dripping like open faucets. Our fur and our exercise clothes were pretty much soaked in spit that flew onto them.
Saggie told the app that we were done running.
I looked at him, and found myself imagining his brown, spit-covered fur rubbing against my moist, silver fur. I could smell his noisy, manly scent again now that we were standing in place. I imagined what it would feel like if our tongues met. Or what it would feel like to hold his shoulder between my teeth. Or to push his head down towards my groin.
He almost didn’t have to even ask. “Should we go up to your place?” and, man, I almost started to tell him yeah, sure, come on up, come...
But then suddenly I imagined Saggie staying with me afterwards, and speaking to me some more. And more. And a little more after that. I imagined how he’d go back to laughing at everything and throwing that laughing-hot-guy-smile of his at me every second.
And suddenly I found myself imagining a different parallel universe instead. I could see before my mind’s eye how I’d stand in the elevator alone, step into the apartment quietly, say hi to my roommate who’d peek out of their bedroom, take a shower, order something tasty and bad for my stomach from the Wolff app, and sit in my room to listen to the sweet, sweet sound of no one saying anything.
I realized all of a sudden that I’d frozen in place for a couple seconds. Saggie had started to come closer just a tiny bit, and started reaching out for my elbow ever so slightly. I instinctively took a step back the moment I realized someone wants to touch me, even though I actually really wanted him, personally, specifically, to touch me.
But here I was, standing before two different and equally tempting fantasies, and I had no idea which one I should choose.