no sunshine when she's gone

The sun has barely broke the clouds since I've returned, and the house is deadquiet during the day. Sharp transition from the piercing sunshine of Jerusalem, so reliable that it was my only alarm clock for the entire summer. And from the constant echoings of the fivesome shuls and hundreds of little stacked and tumbling homes surrounding my apartment on the Streets of the Stairway and the Saphire stone. I went to the supermarket yesterday with my mother, looked sadly at the prepackaged bags of nuts and the wilting vegetables and yearned for the screaming and gyrating mad chorus of machaneh yehuda, for the nut venders surrounded by peoples and piles, wielding their scoops like trained jugglers and taking three orders at one; for the exploding honey of figs hanging pregnantly from roadside trees, and the rare nectar of fresh picked and just-squeeze shabbat grapejuice.
I long for so many people and places at once, and am no less in the midst of intense emotional vertigo and total confusion about my life, my plans, my relationships. And yet I am incessantly and incurably happy. I wander around my house with this silly smile plastered across my face. I remember Yishayahu:
Lo yehiye hashemesh leor yomam
olenoga
Hayareach lo yair lach
Vehaya lach hashem leor olam
Veshalmu yeme avlech.