Life after separation is similar to returning to a country whose laws have all changed since you last visited it. The stories in this file are an attempt to map this territory and mark landmarks in it: the first night when the children sleep with their father, the first holiday apart, the first match on Tinder, a first date with a strange man - but also parting with children who have grown up, parents who have aged and especially old versions of ourselves . "We didn't divide the bank account between us, but we divided the days with the children like you deal a deck of cards at the beginning of a game, one for him and one for me, one day for him and one day for me, and we divided the weekends, which were the jokers in the pack, in the same symmetrical and equal way that turned our diaries into two mirror images, Two chains, two and one evening of presence and absence, with and without. The children wandered between us with drowsy looks, hunched over from the weight of their backpacks. They looked exhausted as if they had gone on an annual trip that goes on and on and refuses to end... Time has never been more like a loaf of bread, cut and spread with precise calculations so that even One wouldn't go hungry and yet I walked around with a constant pit in my stomach." In all these separate stories, apparently, at one time one heart and one long-standing love, which succeeds against all odds to rebirth itself. They all depict different faces of the same woman, like the moon shows. While moving back and forth on the timeline, they take on and lose shape, and coalesce into a feminine, bare and contemporary odyssey. Stories from the breakup unfolds a network of exciting moves in which the end is also a promise of freedom and the beginning is an opportunity to find what was lost. In all the branching paths she takes, the heroine of Shiri Artzi moves between difficulty and strength, between the terrible sorrow of breaking up together and the intense excitement of the revelations of the felt and between the pain of growing up and the sweetness of maturity. Shiri Artzi is a screenwriter, writer and media person. Her first book, "Mud" (Khargol-am Oved Publishing House 2006) won the Minister of Culture's prize for a debut book.
