“Gotta liiiiiiive like you’re dyinnnn…”

The song echoes, muffled in my ear. Clouds surround me, glowing green, pink, and shades of purple that are only detectable when I squint my eyes. I float like I’m in one of those space-station simulators, flipping and swimming through the air and flipping backwards and flipping forwards and flipping sideways. The song changes, and I smile. I bounce off the soft, pillowy clouds, and… wait… pillowy.

I shoot up in bed and dart my head around. The music now echoes from a peculiar cloud, one that looks eerily similar to my alarm clock, one that blares both the music and the time: 7:30.

“Shit.”

I jump out of bed, but I let the music play.

Fair warning: this piece includes transliterated Hebrew. Lemme know if you want a translation.

My friends and I dive into the mob, Hinei-Rakevet style. It’s late afternoon in the Old City. The sun is sinking gradually, though the same cannot be said of the patience of the crowd. A sea of bodies attempts to move forward in a street of Jerusalem stone. Personal space ranges from 0 to -3 cm.

“DACHOF!” a man bellows out. “JUST POOSH!” “LO!” another testy Israeli shouts. “Don’t poosh! We are ole trying to geyt through!” Possibly intoxicated by the body odor surrounding us, my friends and I start to laugh. “Oh my God!” we giggle, like the Seminary Girls we look forward to being next year. “Ahhhhhh hahaha! Oh my God!” The bitter Israeli man behind me lets out a grunt. “Oh my gode!” he shouts in a frilly voice. “Oh my gode! Nu??? Dachof!!!”
The people with the strollers, we soon find out, are in a tricky situation. We see one man bench-pressing his light blue stroller as he shoves through the crowd, and from far away it looks like a floating stroller is surveying the chaos. Other parents aren’t so gallant. Most try to weave through the crowd on the ground, using their strollers as pity-play. “We all want to get through,” explains someone to a nudgy father. Where are all of the kids who belong in the empty strollers the parents are pushing? Huh.
It’s a good thing I entered the mob in a good mood, because the heat is spoiling tempers. We stand still and laugh or complain or talk, like produce in an overstuffed, defunct refrigerator. A woman’s elbow is pressing against my back, and a man’s arm is squished against my shoulder. The crowd begins to move. MOTION! Then pausing. What the hell is a car doing trying to drive down this street? The crowd starts moving around the car, but one guy stops to lecture the driver through the window. “Nu, Mah Ata Choshev??” The people behind him tap his shoulder, a gentle reminder that this would in no way get him out quicker.

We escape the sardine-packed, conveyer belt of a street, then burst into laughter. “We made it!” we jump up and shout, and we warn passersby not to enter what we just escaped.

“Never-“ I begin, still chuckling. I take a deep breath of fresh, personal-space induced air and grin. “Never have I felt so close to Am Yisrael.”