Against a pale blue, cloudless sky, I saw a wall over the barricades and walked through a chained entrance. Closer and closer, the wall towered over me in the color of sand, as though made of particles that could at any moment collapse and bury the crowd. Hundreds of plastic chairs

clustered in front of the wall. Women sat in shawls; some with books in their hands rocking back and forth, whispering to themselves; others sat with their eyes closed, hands clasped, in total stillness. I was inducted into a noise of undulating octaves that were in one instant piercing and in another, trailing echoes into the atmosphere. The hot desert air sunk over me.

I sat in one of the chairs to write a prayer, or a wish, or a message. As I stared at a blank page in my notebook, I tried to imagine what my grandmother would have written when she came here for the first time forty years ago.

My grandmother, Rita, was not a religious person. She was born in Moscow in 1934, around the time when the Soviet Union was pushing propaganda to divorce all people from religion; a higher entity would distract from the devotion to the state—the highest of entities. As she was growing up, Stalin spurred immense hate against the Jewish people and antisemitism bled out into the Russian population. Though she talked about this very rarely, I know that Rita hated the way religion brought out a senseless hatred between people. To her—and then, by extension, to me— being Jewish carried no religious qualities. It merely was a fact of our blood because her mother was, as was hers, as was hers, as was hers...

Between my thumb and forefinger, I caressed the necklace that Rita had given me when I was young. The silver pendant with opal inlay is in the shape of Chai, ַחי , the Hebrew word for life. She bought it in Israel on one of her trips to visit our cousins who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 80s. Rita dreamed that I would someday travel to Jerusalem for myself; she wanted me to be proud of our heritage the way she could never be in her own home. This Chai necklace was my reminder, and it beckoned me. When Rita passed away four years ago, the pendant took her form laying against my chest. Since then, Chai has never left my body; it is as much a part of my skin as the creases on my palms.

As I sat finally in the Holy City with Rita’s Chai warming my skin, for the first time in my life, I was compelled to write in her language. On the corner of the page, I wrote my message in Russian—a wish through her voice.

I awaited a foot from the stone. My shoulders touched the women beside and around me. The sound of weeping by the ground drew my eyes to a woman kneeling, gripping the wall with the

veins of her fingers pulsing, as if willing the wall to melt into the shape of her palms. In between losses of breath, she let out extended heavy-bodied cries. An older woman beside her, in a crippling contortion, mumbled rapidly under her breath. Another woman pressed her phone to the wall so the person on Facetime could be there too. She whispered softly with her pixelated companion and the frequencies of their conversation were absorbed into the rock. A young girl in front of me put her forehead on the wall and hid her face with her palms. The purple shawl over her shoulders radiated against the sandstone.

My eyes scanned the surface of the wall. I began to notice the deep crevices between bricks filled with folded paper. Each gap was sealed with fold upon fold upon fold. I saw fragments of English, Russian, Hebrew, and numerous other languages. The notes reached a ridge that was more than three meters above the ground. They reached so high up that my eyes had made them to be part of the rock. I thought about the kind of will that lifted women to reach far beyond their wingspan, and what towards.

A pigeon sat on a protruding brick far above and looked at me with a tilted head. I peeked just slightly over to the other side of the fence. The men stood in solitary stances meters apart from one another. Their space was a vacuum of quiet that haulted at the fence.

An older woman beside me grasped my hand. I flinched from an initial instinct but then tightened my palm. She squeezed it just as my heart started to burn as well. Between the creases of our interlaced fingers, I held the scrap of paper with my prayer. My natural impatience wilted inside of me, and I stood with my feet firmly planted in the earth as the women ahead of me emptied their souls. All the while, the resonance of their emptying washed over me like a song that my grandmother used to sing. I was one with other women, and we pressed ourselves shoulder to shoulder to hold each other as our bodies lost the strength to stand alone.

The girl in the purple shawl looked up and touched her lips to the rock for a moment. She turned to me with shimmering eyes, silently calling for me to take her place. Her face held a longing and a heartsickness and what, I thought, could even be a hint of relief. I stepped forward and gave her space to recede. She paused, looked up at the stone again, and whispered something. She did not

turn her back to the wall but took small steps backward. Her body bowed and swayed back and forth in a soft motion as she retreated.

I approached the wall first with my fingertips. The dimpled surface was colder than I expected, but so smooth. Some kind of vibration came off the wall, perhaps from the voices of all the others speaking into the rocks. I rested my whole hand on the wall. And then the other.

Then, as if gravity had changed directions, my body heaved towards the cold. I wanted to be closer and closer. I wanted to extinguish any space between myself and the wall. The sound of weeping women echoed through me. My forehead fell heavy against the stone begging the wall to silence the whole world. I nestled my face with my palms so that my panoramic sight darkened. Chai dangled an inch from the surface and, like a weighted pendulum, swayed and lulled me.

And then, so suddenly, so sharply, so deeply in the pit of my stomach, then my heart, then my throat, then my temples, something burned and boiled and burst and my eyes could not contain. My face broke into millions of shards, and I wept at the wall—and wept.

And everything was silent.

After a time—a time that I could not possibly appraise—my body softened. Still pressed closely into the wall, I crushed the slip of paper in my palms to become smaller and smaller, so that she may find a place with her sisters. Though I wanted to believe these crevices were filled with hope and good faith, I saw hands and foreheads desperately pressing pain into the stone, as if a placeholder for all the body could not hold on its own. I left my prayer, deeply wishing my words of love would reverberate towards the woman to take this place when I could will myself to leave.

Before I let go, I left my tears on the stone.

As women continued to grieve together and hold one another, I backed away slowly as the girl in the purple shawl had taught me. I could not bear to walk away from the wall just yet. I took a seat and watched, still, as the wall happened. And in the heart of the Old City, my chest rose and fell with Rita, matching the rhythm of all the women that came before me and would come after.