I want to go back to where I a from. Where I can be myself and not feel ashamed, or out of place. All the people I love so dearly are there missing me, while I am missing every one of them while I am trapped here. While I am here, I feel like an outsider and that I am out of place. I guess that is because I am unique, from a different world even. I am an outsider because I really am an outsider. There I truly fit in with everything and everyone.

I fit in because I come from there.

I look like them, talk like them, and I am like them inside and out. From Jerusalem to T’zfat is where I belong, not from Radford to Amherst. I do not belong here, I belong on the other side. I have tried so many things to fit in but nothing seems to stick. I have given up, I used up all the faith that I could trying to do something so foolish.

This is not my place, I realized that it is not meant to be.

I am proud of where I am from, and who I have become. I savor different foods, I look unusual to everyone else, I speak in a weird way than all the people around me. I lived here for 20 years and was never really able to say that I belonged here. I visited there for only ten days and felt more in place there then I have experienced nothing like this in my lifetime. I was able to embrace their culture, and just be myself and not feel uneasy about anything I did or said. How I long to go back to the place I love to call home.

Home to Israel, where I truly belong.