The Guru
It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining brightly, and the birds were singing. This could easily have been one of those picture-perfect postcards you might see in all the known tourist traps if it hadn’t been for my damn tears. It’s all my grandma’s fault.
“People are unforgiving,” she used to say. “They don’t care about other people’s misery; they only care about their own. Don’t expect to get any sympathy from them. Oh, and crying. Crying is the worst. Then you’re labeled as weak for all eternity. No, whatever you do, Anna, don’t let them see you cry. If you really feel like crying, you should go to a cemetery. Nobody should look at you funny, not there.” That’s the part she would usually sigh and put some of her world-famous home-made chocolate ice-cream on my plate. And to think I was only seven at the time.
As I was sitting there, on that cemetery bench, an ocean of gray and white headstones before my watery eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder what my grandma would have thought of me had she still been alive. My grandma, the real iron lady who had survived Auschwitz and lived not to tell about it—talking about that thing was a big no-no in my family—the same woman who had never dared to shed a tear no matter what happened, had a sissy granddaughter, a wuss who cries over what? A man? Really??? Yes, it’s safe to say that I’d reached the lowest of the lowest. I’d been wanting to visit Portugal for the longest time, and now that I was finally here, I was wasting all my time sitting in cemeteries and crying?
But, then again, Tom wasn’t just any man; he was the man with whom I had been planning on getting old, he was supposed to be the father of my theoretical, unborn future children, he was the unequivocal love of my life, the one person that had made me forget how my life used to be before I met him. And now it was all over, forever.
A chubby black cat lay on one of the marble headstones. He opened one eye, looked at me like he owned the place, and resumed with what cats do best—absolutely nothing. I wondered if he chose that specific headstone because he missed his owner. Was it like that famous Japanese dog, Hachikō, who looked for his owner years after he had passed away? A black and white image of a young, beautiful woman had been engraved onto the headstone. She had long, dark hair, a small nose, and two almond-shaped smiling eyes. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old. I tried to read the engraved words that had accompanied her image: “Maria Delgada, Filha, irmã, mãe e avó amadas. Que você descanse em paz interior. 1930-2017.” My Portuguese consisted of about ten words, but as a Spanish speaker, I managed to understand something about her being a beloved grandmother and the RIP part. Although she died at the age of eighty-seven, her family chose to immortalize her beauty and youth, before time touched her with its greedy hands. Two years had gone by since her death.
“Who are you crying over little Miss?” I heard someone ask.
I looked around me, but other than that lazy black cat, nobody was there.
“So, are you just going to ignore me? Is that it?” The voice asked.
I got up from the bench and walked toward Maria Delgada’s headstone—the theoretical deceased owner of the fat black cat. “Kitty, is that you?” I asked in between my sobs. The cat tilted his furry head. He observed me with his yellow-brown eyes and seemed to be completely and utterly disgusted by my stupid question, as if saying: “Why in hell would you expect me to talk? Can’t you see that I’m a cat, lady?”
“Here, little Miss, here,” the voice said. I turned to my left and saw a seagull popping his head from behind a thick bush. He left his hiding place and walked in slow, confident steps on the ground, his black bird eyes looking right into mine.
“So, are you going to answer my question, little Miss?” The seagull’s beak opened and closed. He was the owner of the voice.
“Are you one of those people who can’t speak, or are you deaf, or maybe both?” Now the seagull was standing right beside me and Maria Delgada’s headstone.
“What are you looking at?” He asked Maria’s theoretical cat, who stared at him with a disinterested face.
“What the hell?” I walked back to the bench, collapsing rather than sitting on it.
“So, you can talk!” The seagull announced victoriously.
“Of course, I can talk!” I felt like I was stating the obvious, although there was nothing obvious when a talking seagull was involved.
“What’s your name, little Miss?” He asked and reached for a gummy snake he had found next to Maria’s headstone. Probably one of her grandchildren had dropped it here.
“Stop calling me little Miss!” I demanded. “It’s annoying.”
“Well, if you tell me what your name is, I can stop calling you ‘little Miss’ and start calling you by your name.” Although the seagull didn’t have any expression on his template-like bird face, I could have sworn he rolled his eyes.
“How...why can you talk?” I asked.
“What sort of rude question is that?!” The seagull seemed utterly disgusted. “All animals can talk, even that obnoxious cat,” he gestured at Maria’s cat.
“So why can’t I understand him?”
“Because unlike me, lazy boy here chose not to be understood by you.”
“Oh, and you did, little seagull?”
“Yes, I actually did.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted, I want to know why you’re crying.”
“It’s none of your business,” I blurted.
“Bitch alert!” He spun in his spot.
“You’re one rude bird!”
“You’re the one to talk!” He jumped and sat on the bench beside me.
“What?!” I glared at him.
“You heard me. Coming unannounced to my graveyard and patronizing me with your human privilege. Ah!”
“Ew!” I slid to the other side of the bench, trying to distance myself from the bird as much as possible. “You reek of fish!”
“Believe it or not, but it’s not like you smell of roses yourself...” It suddenly hit me that I’d been wandering aimlessly in his cemetery for the last several hours, crying my eyes out and sweating my soul out...Rather self-consciously, I tried to sniff one of my armpits through my yellow summer dress without having the bird see it. I didn’t know though, that like many other birds, seagulls have a 360-degree view. My God, the bird was right, I realized, quite petrified. The salty sweat that had been covering my entire body in places I didn’t know existed, was quite apparent. It was early June, and it wasn’t supposed to be so hot. But I chose to visit Portugal during an intense heatwave. The air was heavy and sticky from humidity. My long curly hair was moist with sweat and stuck tightly to my back. I used the rubber band around my wrist to pull up my hair in a bun. By then, my hair was a tangled mess. I took out my phone from my backpack. 3 PM. So I had been crying for five hours straight. Great. My tears mixed with my sweat and there wasn’t a single dry spot on my entire body. Even my eyes felt sweaty. I used my phone to examine my reflection: as expected, my slightly slanted eyes were swollen, the upper lids made them appear almost shut. My cheeks were puffy and red, and so was my pug nose. I’d never seen it look so unattractive.
“Bird, leave me alone!” I demanded. “This is not your cemetery. You’re just a bird. Let me wallow in my misery in peace!” I got up and started walking away, hoping that the seagull, who must have been nothing more than a freaky hallucination, would vanish. But he didn’t. He flew above my head and landed in front of me, literally blocking my way.
“You’re wrong, little Miss. This is my cemetery and I’m not a bird,” he insisted, trying to sound authoritative in his annoying seagull voice.
“Whatever. Can you please move aside so I could leave your precious cemetery, go back to my room, and die?”
“Only if you tell me what happened to you.”
“Why do you care, bird?”
“A., I’m not a bird. B., I can’t not help a damsel in distress.”
“Oh, my freaking G!” Who are you? Damsel in distress? Really? It’s 2019, no, seriously.”
“I’m Ivan, thanks for asking...” Did he really just smile at me? Can seagulls even smile?
“And you?”
“I’m Anna, ’kay? Listen, I feel shitty and I want to be alone now. So please...”
“Something really bad must have happened to you if you want to go back to your room and die,” he said.
“Oh, gee...No, it’s just a figure of speech. I don’t really want to die-die.”
“You talk funny, little Miss...”
“The name’s Anna,” I cleared my throat.
“Right.” Ivan was beating his wings in the air, his bird face right in front of me, and his eyes glaring at me. “Did someone you love die? Is that why you’re here? Is that why you’re sad?”
“No.”
“So why are you here?”
“You won’t leave me alone unless I tell you what happened, eh?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can we please sit down? I’m getting tired,” he added. He did beat his wings for some time when I came to think about it.
I looked at him disbelievingly and walked back to the bench beside Maria Delgada’s headstone. He followed me and jumped back up on the bench. He looked at me with his creepy, stuffed-animal-like eyes, until I had no other choice but to spill it out. “I broke up with my boyfriend,” I answered, defeated.
“That’s it?” He looked at me incredulously.
“What do you mean ‘that’s it?’ I’ve just lost the love of my life, bird head!”
“I resent that!”
“Well, that’s what you get for pushing your nose..eh, beak into other people’s business.”
Ivan seemed like he had another smart-ass remark to make, but before he had the chance to open his sharp yellow beak, I got up and walked away. Maria Delgada’s black cat rolled on his back, revealing a chubby white tummy. He observed me from the corner of his eye while chewing on the fresh pink rose petal which must have been placed there by a loving family member.
I made my way through the gray maze of headstones. Some of them included a smiling portrait of the deceased ex-person lying six feet under. Others presented quotes from what I imagined to be well-known Portuguese poems. Cold shivers went down my spine as a sudden, disturbing realization took over me; this wasn’t just another cemetery in which I could cry undisturbed. Nope. This was a place full of endings, full of unfinished lives, of unrealized dreams; a place full of broken hearts that either didn’t live long enough to get a second chance or lived an entire lifetime without one. Instead of exploring Obidos, Portugal’s fortified chocolate capital, and a famous (and might I add rather decadent) tourist destination, and taking more shots of heavenly Ginja, there I was, wasting my time in its small, weird cemetery. No, I couldn’t stay there a minute longer; all I wanted was to get the hell out of there and catch the bus back to Lisbon.
“Hey, Anna! Wait a minute!” I heard Ivan’s squeaky voice behind me. I continued to walk, the entrance of the graveyard a few feet in front of me. He flew over my head, getting in my way, again. “You should go Guru Emi.” Ivan sounded a bit out of breath. I wondered how tiring it was to fly. Was it like walking for us humans, or rather like jogging?
Truth be told, that name did ring a bell. Two guys at my hostel were talking about some famous Guru the night before while we were all in the kitchen, making dinner. I stopped and turned around.
“Do I look like one of those people who would worship some Guru?” I asked and made sure to roll my eyes for the dramatic effect.
“I didn’t know there’s such a look,” he said. I couldn’t figure if he was cynical or just plain oblivious.
“All I’m saying is that I’m not into cults and Gurus. I don’t need to pay someone a lot of money all so he would brainwash me. No t-h-a-n-k-y-o-u! Society has already got it covered.” I winked at him, then sighed. I thought about all those people, like myself, who constantly bitch about society. At the end of the day, don’t we all comprise the same society we love to hate?
“You’re saying all of this because you’ve never met Guru Emi. I had. Trust me, if there is anybody in this world who can help you, he is it.”
“Oh really? How would you know?” I wondered if there was anything else inside these two shots of Ginja I had taken earlier. Even for me, a rambling seagull and some famous Guru were a tad too much.
Ivan was fluttering his wings, mere inches from my face. “Because I met him. I mean, I saw him. It happened three years ago in Lisbon’s old quarter; the journey from Spain was exhausting and I needed a break. It wasn’t my first time in Lisbon, so I chose to fly over the old quarter which I absolutely adore. The scent of incense rose in the air – Jasmine. I had been drawn to it and couldn’t help myself. It led me to a windowsill on the fourth floor of a pinkish building. I stood behind the peppermint planter which had observed the incense scent that flew in slow motion through the open window. And there he was, Guru Emi. Not that I knew who he was at the time. He was standing in the middle of the room, radiating health and happiness. I’ve never sensed such vital energy from another creature. He was surrounded by his students and followers. They were all sitting on meditation mats, their legs crossed. They were wearing rather loose, comfy clothes and seemed young. The oldest one there couldn’t have been more than forty years old—”
“Ivan, I appreciate the very detailed love story between you and that Guru guy,” I interrupted his banter as I looked at my phone and realized it was nearly 4 PM, “but I don’t feel like missing the bus back to Lisbon. With all due respect to this chocolatey heaven, I want to be in Lisbon now.” Obidos was a lovely, picturesque fortified town covered with cobblestone. It looked out to open green fields and I could imagine it as the perfect place to shoot a movie that’s supposed to take place in Medieval times. Sure, there was plenty of chocolate there for an entire lifetime and I was pretty smitten with that Ginja—my official post-breakup drink—but the average age of the visitors I had seen there was about sixty-five and the nightlife didn’t seem to exist there—it was one of those places that completely shut down after 7 PM….After nearly six hours of crying my eyes out, I could do with a happening Lisbon bar filled with hot Portuguese men. I still couldn’t believe that Tom and I were over. I wasn’t one of those people who believed in true love nor did I believe in “the one”—in a world comprising eight billion people, it’s not very likely to match only one person perfectly. Statistics, math, and numbers are far more reliable than some childish fantasy society feeds us with.
For the first thirty years of my life, I had managed to successfully avoid love. Yeah, I dated some guys and was in several unsuccessful relationships. Two men even told me they were deeply in love with me, but I was faking it. If I did tell someone that I loved him—or rather, responded with “me too,” when hearing those three dreaded words—it was because I felt I needed to be polite, or maybe because I hated letting people down. The point is, while I may have had the occasional crush, I had never been swept away by anyone. I’d never loved anybody. As time progressed, I began to think that something was wrong with me—I thought that maybe I wasn’t capable of loving, romantically I mean.
Of course, I love my parents and my sister, Talia, but this is an obvious kind of love. Yeah sure, every now and again my parents and society would nag me and ask me when I was planning on settling down. They’d keep reminding me, as would any stranger I had met on the bus, train, or anywhere for that matter when they’d discover that I was thirty-two, unmarried and unchild, that time was ticking. The usual finger tap on the wrist would usually accompany these words. I had to stop myself from reminding them that time was ticking for us all, not just for me, and that each passing second was bringing us closer to death...but I didn’t. At first, I actually tried to be polite and tell them I simply haven’t found the right person yet, but after getting these third degrees on a daily basis, I couldn’t handle it anymore and told them to mind their own business and get the hell out of my uterus.
When I turned thirty, a major crisis made me buy a ticket to Ecuador and escape reality for a while. My childhood never seemed so far away as it did on that birthday and my youth also seemed to escape me by the minute. That’s probably how I ended up spending the night with Ricardo, an adorable Ecuadorian guy whom I had met at a Quito bar. When I returned to my hostel in the middle of the night, I made up my mind to settle for the next half-decent guy I’d meet. Instead of living happily ever after together, we’ll pass the time together until...well, until death, of course. Shortly after, when I returned home to hipster Tel Aviv, I met Rani—a friendly lawyer who was good in everything he did, but whom I knew I could never love. So, when he asked me to move in with him seven months into our relationship, instead of saying yes and living up to my non-New-Year-related resolutions, I broke up with him. Needless to say, my parents were furious with me; they were both crazy about Rani and they were sure I was too. They had no idea that during all those times they had asked me whether I could see myself living the rest of my life with Rani, I lied when I said yes.
It all went south during the last dinner Rani and I had at my parents’ house. Rani was discussing Tarantino films with my mom—another film enthusiast—and I drifted away, caught in thought. I looked at Rani from the corner of my eye and tried to picture us old and gray for the one-millionth time. Could I really settle for a friendly companion who’s an okay lover and an okay partner? As much as I tried to convince myself that I could, I knew that unlike most people, who live in reality rather than in an unreachable fantasy world they had built for themselves—yup, guilty as charged—and know when it’s time to settle and give up on their hopes and dreams forever, I couldn’t. I was too weak and way too childish. Accepting the fact that life is not what we think or want it to be when we’re still kids, was something that I had failed to do. My parents were right when they said I was delusional; if only they had known how much I struggled to act like an adult when all I really wanted to do was run away and leave it all behind: my responsibilities, my obligations, the expectations everyone had from me, my fears. It could be so nice to have a fresh start somewhere nobody knew who I was and how much I had fucked up in my life.
On the same evening, Rani drove me back home in his car. He asked me if I wanted to move in with him. Instead of saying “yes,” I ended it. He loved me, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel the same way. Four months had gone by since our breakup, and I was still agonizing for having broken his good heart. My guilty conscience was working overtime and the only thing that could put it to rest was sports, ironically. Right after I told Rani goodbye, I took myself to Tel Aviv’s beach and started jogging there every evening after work. The beach was full of people who, just like me, took advantage of TLV’s amazing stretch of sandy beach to get in shape. Truth be told, most of them, both men and women, already seemed quite in shape with their carved, supermodel bodies. Although I was slim, I didn’t mind becoming more athletic. As time progressed, some of the other sporty people there even welcomed me with a head node. Things were beginning to look better for me: I got a promotion at the posh advertising agency I worked for as a copywriter, I had never felt so fit and healthy, and I stopped agonizing over Rani when a mutual friend told me that, unlike me, Rani had moved on and was now with a gorgeous yoga instructor.
It all changed that afternoon I met Tom, though. From there on, it’d been a slippery slope. I was after my workout, doing stretches near the pull-up bars. I sat on the cement-covered space, stretched both legs, and reached for my toes.
“Oh, thanks for reminding me,” I heard a deep bass voice say. A man sat down beside me and hugged his perfect muscular legs. “I always forget to stretch after working out,” he said and smiled with his toothpaste-commercial-white teeth.
I immediately turned red and shifted my gaze to my own legs. “You don’t need to thank me,” I said quietly. I could feel his eyes on me, which of course only caused me to redden further.
“I actually do,” he insisted.
“Okay, sure,” I mumbled. I flipped onto my stomach for that Yoga Kobra stretch—at least that’s how I called it.
He flipped onto his stomach and followed my lead. “You seem to know what you’re doing,” he grinned.
“Do I?” I asked and snuck a glance at him with a small smile. The guy who was now flirting with me was ridiculously cute. He had a gorgeous light-brown skin tone and his hair was thick and black as were his eyes. And his hands. They were quite big and masculine.
“Oh, don’t be modest,” he laughed. At that very moment, without even knowing his name, I knew I was already his. He had the perfect laugh, warm and genuine, and I loved his voice. He must have caught me staring at his hands because he smiled to himself mischievously. He, too, must have known I was his.
“My name is Tom,” he said when he saw I wasn’t going to say anything. “I just moved to Tel Aviv,” he added.
“Welcome to Tel Aviv,” I said. This time, I mustered up the courage to look into his black eyes. My redness also seemed to have faded away. Oh yes, I could tell he was into me. What I didn’t know, was that he was about to become so much more than a fling, much more than simply a boyfriend. This was the man I would want to spend the rest of my life with.
Yeah, I admit it. It didn’t start out as anything serious—after all, both of us were recent breakupees. Tom also turned out to be six years younger—he was twenty-five when we had first met. I don’t know when or how, but before we both knew it, we were in a committed relationship and I was hopelessly in love with him. We even talked about future kids one night before falling asleep. Normally, such a topic would freak me out, but it didn’t. As far as I was concerned, this was it. I finally loved someone, and he loved me back. So, I was able to love someone after all.
For the next six months, I felt high all the time. I couldn’t get enough of him. I was about to ask him to move in with me—after all, he did come over every single evening—when he spilled out the news: he had been accepted to a student exchange program in Berlin. That meant being six months away. When he told me about it, he had already accepted it, his eyes shining. I remember swallowing the aching lump that had threatened to burst out of my throat as an uncontrollable cry fit and forced a smile. I told him I was happy for him—a lie, of course. Ever since we met, he had been wanting to go on that student exchange program. He was an environmental planning student and Berlin was THE place for that. Naturally, I assumed that his plans would change—we were hot and heavy and pretty much inseparable—but they didn’t. He was so excited. We even went out for dinner to celebrate the occasion. Usually, I was the chatty one, but that evening was all about Tom. I let him go on excitedly about all the things he had planned to see in Berlin, while I sat there and smiled lovingly at him. That’s when the dreadful fear started making its way inside of me. It was the beginning of the end and I knew it. What could I do? Cry and beg him to stay in Tel Aviv with me? Convincing him that I was worth it? I knew I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want him to resent me for having made him give up on his dreams. Of course, I told him nothing about my desire to move in together, not when he was about to leave in three weeks.
Nothing was harder than having to hide my frustration and agitation behind a cheerful smile during those three weeks before Tom’s departure. The thought of letting him go drove me crazy. From a lone wolf, I became a needy, pathetic woman who can’t go on without her man even one day apart. When I say “needy,” I mean an emotional neediness. He was the first man I had dared to completely open up to, and he was my best friend. I let him see my less pretty sides, knowing he wouldn’t go running away. How would I be able to survive six months without him? Why was he so damn happy and glowing when I was so miserable? Didn’t it bother him not to see me for so long? Bitter thoughts started to hover in my head like vultures waiting for their prey to breathe its last breaths and die. Was it possible that he didn’t love me as much as I loved him? I shook that horrible vision into some dark corner within and continued to play business as usual with him, waiting for him to realize how I was feeling. But he didn’t. He was caught up with the arrangements for Berlin.
“So, will you come to visit me in June?” Tom asked me on our last night together before his flight. He was spooning me and softly kissed my neck.
“You know I will,” I fought the tears that threatened to burst out of me with fury. Tom didn’t like to see me cry. He said it made me seem weak—although he knew I wasn’t—and he couldn’t handle me when I cried. I guess I should have seen this buzzing alert sign, but I chose not to.
“I’ve already given the dates to my boss and he’s cool with it. In June, we’ll have ten whole days together!” I completely faked my excitement. Ten days were nothing compared to six months apart.
“Nice!” he tightened his grip around me.
“Yeah, nice,” I replied dryly. Several rebellious tears managed to escape my eyes and sink into my pillow. I was thankful my back was turned to him. That was it, this was our last night together—EVER. I wanted to tell him that I’d never loved another man like this before; I wanted to tell him that he was my best friend, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, that I wanted him to be the father of my theoretical future children. But I knew he’d probably freak out, so I kept my big mouth shut for once.
The first few days apart were torture. He said that he was busy and only sent me short text messages. He didn’t have time to talk. I wondered how I managed to find this time even with all the overtime at work. In hindsight, I did what I always did during our relationship; I ignored the sirens that were wailing in my head and shooshed them.
“We are meant to be together,” I reminded myself when in doubt. Time and time again, Tom let me down, yet I chose to look the other way and classify his selfishness as a mere misunderstanding.
I kept on texting him, and he kept on taking his time writing back. He always had a convincing excuse at hand: I was out with friends, I was busy studying for an exam, there was a blackout, I overslept, I was in the shower. Without even realizing it, I found myself checking my phone every two minutes or so. I completely lost my mind. How could a man who claimed to be crazy about me, act so different now that we were on two different continents? I started hating the person I had become: an insecure, self-doubting shadow rather than an actual person. I lost all the power I had. Tom was in control, and I was forced to cross the few red lines that I still hadn’t crossed for him.
We had our first real phone conversation three weeks after he had left. By then, I was too shaken up by his behavior. And too angry. Tom called and acted as if nothing was wrong, as if it was okay that we hadn’t talked for three whole weeks. Everything that had been built up inside of me burst. I lashed out at him and criticized him for only thinking about himself. Now it was his turn to give me a piece of his mind. He raised his voice, something he had never done before, at least not with me. Tom told me that I was too weak after I had said that I can’t stand being apart. He said that he had a lot of things on his plate, and this relationship was a burden for him. He wanted to be free. He even asked for my permission to sleep with other women. Needless to say, how hurt I was. I hated him so much at that moment. He had consistently worked his way into my heart, and now I was suddenly his warder? I hung up the phone after thirty minutes and cried my eyes out. There was another angry exchange of text and voice message, but that’s it. I wanted to tell him that I’d never loved another man the way I loved him, but the momentum was gone. I held that piece of information deep inside my heart. He never knew about it, not that it mattered. He didn’t love me, regardless of what he had told me and written me. I felt like someone was shaking me up, trying to wake me up from a dream I never wanted to end. I was finally awake, and the dream was dead. A month and a half after our break, in June, instead of flying to visit him in Berlin, I changed my travel plans and flew to Portugal, hoping it would help cure my broken heart.
“Little Miss? Are you here?” Ivan’s annoying voice interrupted my toxic chain of thought.
“You’re right beside me, bird, so what’s with the stupid questions?! And, for the last time, the name is Anna. A-N-N-A. Not little Miss. Kapish?” I could hear myself sounding like a total bitch, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop. Part of me felt thankful for having someone to lash out at. The fact that Ivan was a bird and not a person made it easier to feel less guilty.
...
Title: The Guru (temp.)
Genre: Romantic comedy meets urban fantasy
Word count: 57,532 (ongoing, target word count = 75,000-80,000 words)
Age range: 25-45
Author name: Hadar Badt
The project’s fit: I saw that you also represent humoristic novels about or with animals. I’m also a big fan of Esther the wonder pig!
The hook: What could possibly go wrong when a bewitched seagull, a captivating guru, and a gorgeous bestie of THE EX join a young woman on her journey to rediscover herself?
Synopsis: Thirty-two-year-old Anna thinks she has her act together: she has a nice paying job as a copywriter for a posh advertising agency, a nice flat close to the beach, lots of friends and going-out buddies, and she lives in Tel Aviv, the hipster beach and party capital of the Middle East and one of the greatest cities in the world. It all comes crashing down when her boyfriend, Tom, the love of her life, breaks up with her. Heartbroken Anna realizes that she’d been blind; everything in her life is wrong: she doesn’t like her job, her dream of becoming a screenwriter for SNL is as far away as the moon, and she will probably never be able to love again. She decides to take a vacation and fly to Portugal. But instead of enjoying herself, she’s busy crying in cemeteries, the only place she lets herself cry at. There, she meets Ivan, a quirky, bewitched seagull and a mysterious black cat who keeps on appearing in her dreams. Ivan tells Anna about a world-famous Guru who can help heal her broken heart—Guru Emi. He just so happens to be in the Israeli desert, as part of a big, spiritual festival. With nothing left to lose, cynical Anna, who’s not into cults, gurus, and spirituality, travels to the desert with Ivan, only to discover that Emi is a gorgeous man, whose charm she simply can’t resist. To make matters worse, Tom’s best friend, Amit, asks her out, and Ivan claims to be under a curse, a curse that only she could break: if Anna succeeds, he could regain his human form. It’s only when everything falls apart, that they start making sense for the first time in her life.
Target audience: Young people (both men and women, but especially women) who live in big cities and know a thing or two about the urban single life and the endless search for love.
Bio: An Israeli-German writer, I’d recently returned to Israel after four years in Berlin. Having studied business anthropology, traveled the world alone, and lived on four continents, cultures play a big role in my writing. My short stories and journalistic articles had been published both online and in print. Speculative fiction is my absolute favorite genre both as a writer and as a reader. My preferred sub-genre is magical realism - I am fascinated by unorthodox relationships between people (and possibly also fantastical beings) and the “interaction” between magic and reality. I work in Tel Aviv as a content writer (English and Hebrew).
Platforms:
@HadarBadt
https://www.facebook.com/HadarBadtWriter
https://www.inkitt.com/hadarbadt
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadar-badt-4820a948/
Education: As a teenager, I attended an art school for 3 years, in addition to my regular school. I was in the creative writing department. I also took a course on the principles of the short story in one of Israel’s top art institutions. I hold a BA in Economics and Management and an MBA with a focus on business anthropology.
Experience: I’ve been working as a content writer and copywriter for more than ten years. My specialty is commercial writing. I also worked as an English-Hebrew-German translator and wrote for a popular magazine while still in Berlin.
Writing style: I’m a goofy person, and that reflects in my writing. I have so much fun writing quirky, humoristic stories and making myself laugh. I tend to include talking animals in my stories and I like to create unusual friendships. I always showcase cultures in my writing, and I like to set my stories in different places around the world. I’m a polyglot (I’m fluent in 4 languages), but I only write in English and Hebrew at the moment.
Hobbies: Traveling (not relevant in 2020 because of COVID-19 :( ), learning languages, reading books, buying books, jogging, volunteering with stray cats, engaging in the social media (I’m an addict, guilty as charged), doing fun stuff with friends, hiking and being in nature, and Netflixing, of course.
Hometown: Karmiel, Israel