What Happened to the Words, After They Were Spoken
Old faces from another life surface like artifacts stirred up by a passing current. On an ordinary day they appear, as they do, in the drifting feed of Facebook. Suddenly the past is in the room again. Not the whole thing. Just a face, a name, a few afternoons in the heat of a kibbutz, a sense of being young and raw and still becoming someone.
Then the pull: should I reconnect?
It is not a question about a Facebook click. It is a question about what to do with a ghost that is not dead. It’s like a hand pressing to the glass from the other side.
There is a peculiar tenderness in the hesitation. If he had been indifferent, it would be easy. But he was kind. And kindness has a long half-life. It leaves echoes that return when you least expect them.
This is where the deeper question rises:
What happened to the words, after they were spoken?
Where do conversations go once people walk away? Where does the warmth of an old friendship rest when life scatters everyone to different continents? Does it fade or does it wait like a sealed letter no one has opened in decades?
Maybe what is haunting here is not the man in Beersheba but the version of oneself that existed back then. The words exchanged were not just sounds. They were fragments of two people crossing paths exactly once in the long river of life. Those words are still somewhere. Not floating in the air, not trapped in memory, but lodged in what they did to a person.
Reconnecting would not begin anything dramatic. He might smile. His wife might say that she remembers the Swiss boy from the kibbutz. Life would go on.
The deeper act is simply recognizing that some friendships do not decay.
They go dormant, wrapped in time like seeds.