Chapter 35: From His Side: An Acrobat's Diary
Updated: May 11
After episode 34, where I poured out everything I had on my heart from my personal perspective, I felt like something was missing. To understand someone who is not me, sometimes you have to change your glasses.
It's important to clarify: I'm not cheating on anyone. I'm a widow, 60 years old (with the soul of a 10-year-old), a former kibbutznik and current Tel Avivian, a mother of a stunning daughter, and completely free to fly about my life and the world without being accountable to anyone.
But from the moment I landed with open curiosity in the world of fakes, and among us, most of them are married, because who needs all these masks if he is really free, I began to ponder. Sometimes this contemplation reaches the border of appeal. Who are these people behind the screen?
So after we concluded that "In the Shadows" is not just the name of a cheap perfume from the 1990s but the permanent address of all the lovers in the Pikeland Home Office, I decided to do an experiment. Close your eyes and try to be
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From His Side: An Acrobat's Diary
I know exactly what you're thinking. I'm the walking statistic, the cliché with the ring in my pocket. But let's just leave it at that, he didn't reserve a seat at this table anyway.
At home, everything is ticking. The children are my heart, the house is the fortress, and my wife? She is the best partner I could ask for in running a business called 'life.' But in this business, the CEO is starving. Not for the hunger for carbohydrates, but for the hunger for touch that doesn't feel like a chore, for a look that sees me and not the grocery list.
She looks at me, the Torah lover, let's call her Liat, and asks the million-dollar question: 'Why are you cheating?'
I take a deep breath, the smell of the B&B or the air-conditioned car envelops me, and I tell her my truth: 'I'm not cheating, Liat. I'm surviving. Cheating is when you take something from someone. I don't take anything from my wife. I simply bring oxygen to our relationship from an external source. If I weren't here, with you, I would wither, become bitter, and end up tearing everything apart. Basically, by being here, I'm saving my house.' (Yael: Do you understand?? I don't! )
I know what I have to lose! I know it every time I camp far away, every time I clear my search history like I was an undercover Mossad agent. The price of dissolution is infinite, but the price of emptiness is daily.
Then night comes. Everyone is asleep. I sit down on the couch, the light from my smartphone burning my retinas. I go on Facebook, or Facebook as I call it. I scroll and scroll. Staring at all these stunning Facebooks, all smiling under filters of pure happiness. And me? I feel actual physical pain, a wave that moves in an endless loop between my hips and my brain.
It's the pain of intergenerational hunger. The body screams, seeking confirmation that it's still alive, and the brain pounds like a 5-pound hammer. I see all this fakery and know that I'm part of it too. That I'm just another photo on someone's feed, another human 'like' of the moment.
Who am I in this triangle anyway? Sometimes I feel like an actor in a traveling theater who forgot what show he's in. There's the 'devoted husband,' the one who remembers to bring the special bread my wife loves. And there's 'Liat's man,' the one who feels the blood flowing through his veins as if he's twenty again.
But when the screen goes off, guilt creeps out of the corners of the room. It doesn't shout, it whispers: 'Traitor.' That word gets stuck in my throat like a fish bone.
I ask myself: How long can I hold two contradictory truths without exploding? I look at my wife. She is a good woman. She is a partner. But when I look at her, I see a reflection of everything that has withered in me. Is she betrayed? Yes. But am I not betrayed by life itself?
I try to imagine the situation the other way around. My wife, the one who now sleeps in the other room, completely certain that I am 'hers,' holding a secret phone. Smiling at the screen in the dark. Smelling a strange man's perfume. The thought sends a shiver of nausea through me. If I discovered that she was cheating, like me, would I forgive her for this 'alternative oxygen'? Or would I call her names that I refuse to call myself?
The truth is, I'm afraid of her. Afraid of her ability to be faithful, because her faithfulness is the mirror through which I see how twisted I am. I live in a triple identity: the husband, the lover, and the judge who sentenced me to life in prison in a lie. I'm the man in the shadows, searching for a moment of grace on Facebook while drowning in the mud of his conscience, knowing that in the end even the most beautiful filter won't hide what I've become.
I feel like I'm living in a constant state of theft. Stealing hours from work to be at the B&B, stealing emotion from home, stealing my peace of mind. I'm building concrete walls inside my head to separate my wife and children from the smell of your perfume, Liat, but those walls are starting to crack.
I feel like a hunter caught in his own trap. I search for truth in a sea of lies, and I do it by lying to everyone. My mind analyzes the risks, recalculates the route, builds an excuse for tomorrow morning. And the loins? They just want to feel, if only for a moment, that they don't belong in the graveyard of routine.
I see you retreating, Liat. I see how you begin to realize that you are 'in the shadows,' that you are paying a heavy price for fleeting moments. I see you leaving, and I already miss you, but I can't stop you. Because I know that all I have to offer is love in a dose of medicine, and the look of a man who needs you desperately, but will always come home on time.
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In the end, when the lights go out and the crowd disperses, the acrobat is left hanging on a thin rope over an abyss of silence, realizing that his greatest talent is not his balance but the ability to keep smiling while he falls.
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