Middle Eastern Promises
Israel sometime between Y2K and 9/11, my travel companion tried to coax a marriage proposal out of me. I wasn’t ready. We’d spent the previous 10 days in a haze of labneh and young lust, eating our way from Eilat to Rosh Hanikra to the Haifa bus station revered for its shawarma. But now we sat in silence, deadlocked over differing emotional timelines and a plate of falafel in a sun-soaked pedestrian mall on Ben Yehuda Street. She was probably thinking: . I was thinking about the oily falafel dripping tahini down my arm.
