Facebook does this thing where they exhume something you posted on this day, x years ago, just to remind you that you did: “You have memories on this day,” it helpfully intones. Sometimes you want to be reminded, sometimes not, and sometimes you can’t be sure. This one, I guess, falls into the third category. It was the midpoint of a long walk I took on June 10, 2016, which fell during Ramadan, when I was fasting. I was living at the time in Abu Dis in the West Bank, just east of Jerusalem. It was either a day off from teaching, or I was just done teaching, so I started walking, on a whim, from Abu Dis to the neighboring town of Eizariya.

I happened to get to Eizariya exactly when the 263 bus was about to leave for Jerusalem, so I handed the driver eight shekels, got on, and without thinking, rode the bus into Jerusalem: proper documents in hand, but not even the semblance of a plan. I got to the Arab bus station by Damascus Gate, and just walked, half with and half without aim, to HaMoshava, the German Colony neighborhood in the southeast corner of the city.

I had a habit in those days of just walking places without knowing where or why. It was, I suppose, the wrong neighborhood to have visited while fasting, full of inviting restaurants and cafés. At any rate, the hunger kept me walking until I ran into this guy playing the violin on Emek Refa’im Street, “The Valley of the Ghosts”–the first of a bunch of serendipitous musical encounters I’d ended up having in these parts over the years. I was reluctant to film it at the time, but am now glad I did.

People talk a lot about One State or Two State, or even No State Solutions, but really, the only solution I foresee at this point is a Final Solution. You can believe this or not, but I often had vague premonitions of it even nine or ten years ago, walking aimlessly along these sunny, apparently halcyon streets. It somehow didn’t take that much discernment to sense that evil days would someday come–just a matter of time. Every uptick in violence seemed like The One, but wasn’t, until it was.

I don’t know how spooky or presumptuous this bit of prognostication sounds, but I was hardly alone in the sentiment. No one who knew the place disagreed. At the end of the day, prophecy is just another word for “local knowledge“; immerse yourself in a place long and hard enough, and it’s really not as tough as it’s made it out to be. We all have it about something, somewhere. The place where you have it best is the place you call home.

I can’t imagine that I’ll ever walk these streets again, or visit this city, or hear this musician, or find my way back to whatever’s left of whatever’s left. It doesn’t matter. The years have taught me that happiness is a happenstance that comes and goes as it pleases. You can’t expect it to last. It’s enough that it once happened, and enough to remember that it did. The music brings it back if nothing else does. When it’s all there is, it ends up having to be enough.