We are thrilled to share another piece from one of our writers who submitted to the annual WGI Invite to Write Challenge!
This year, we asked our talented cohort to create a new piece on this prompt: Write a story where the end is also the beginning.
Next, we are sharing Je’Jae Cleopatra Mizrahi’s piece entitled, “Returning Forward.” Stay tuned, as we will continue sharing the submissions into the fall!
If you would like to find more of Je’Jae’s work, check out their website here and their writer’s bio below!
Mx. Daniels is a Temani-Queer Millenial writer in nyc & has written for several publications & literary magazines: The Village Voice, Sold Magazine, Bluffton University, HuffPost, Pen America, Hey Alma, Lilith Magazine, S.I Advance , The Feminist Daily, Washington Square News, Fluide Beauty, Next Magazine, Jerusalem Post & Centro Voices of Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College.
They have held residencies at Pen America “Dream Out Loud” of emerging migrant voices, National Queer Theatre’s “Write It Out”, Still Here fellowship in San Francisco partnership with L.A Times. The Tab at City University of New York.
Returning Forward
The story begins in the holy mikveh in Tzfat.
Not as a devout ritual, but as a memory — one I visit often. The first time, I was ten, shoulder-deep in warm water that smelled like salt and soap and quiet shame. My Temani Savta Chana hummed Psalms in the next chamber. My mother waited in the car, where she always prayed hardest. My Uncle Shmulik was drowning me in the ancient wells of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, where my virgin / naked queer body at 6 or seven felt mesmerized at my close contact with my attractive uncle who was also wet, playful and holding me with love, while also dunking me like I was being killed. I was told to whisper blessings, but I said nothing. The words felt foreign in my mouth — not because they were Hebrew, but because they weren’t mine.
I was an insecure boy, so desperate to belong that I learned to disappear. I forced myself into the mold tradition gave me, all the while aching with confusion, fear, and an unnameable hunger for something freer, truer.
It took years to stop performing someone else’s story and start living my own. I left behind the rules that told me how to walk, speak, love. I started peeling off the layers of who I was supposed to be, and somewhere along the way, I found color, breath, voice.
Now I am a semi-proud, free-spirited genderqueer adult. I took every part of me they taught me to hide — the softness, the fire, the queerness, the questions — and made them my center. What was once my shame became my joy. What was once my silence became my banner.
I didn’t abandon tradition. I rebuilt it with my own hands. I stitched together rituals from memory, art from grief, and meaning from the spaces where meaning was once denied to me. I am not Orthodox. I am not atheist. I am not the stigmatic labels and normalized Lashon Hara in my former neighbors mouths who villainize someone they aren’t involved with today/ I am not conforming to anyone’s neat definition of identity. But I am deeply spiritual, in my own messy, searching, egalitarian way.
I still light candles on Friday nights. Sometimes I bless them. Sometimes I just breathe. I still seek connection — not through commandments, but through creativity, community, and honest questioning. God, to me, is not a voice booming from Sinai. God is the whisper in the silence when I finally make peace with myself.
People ask me where it all started — when did I leave, when did I come out, when did I become this version of me? But it was never one moment. It was a thousand quiet acts of rebellion, of reclamation. Every time I cried in secret, every time I spoke the truth aloud, every time I chose to keep going — that was the beginning.
And it still is.
The story ends in the mikveh whether in a public pool, on the beach, or in my tub, exposed, afraid, and rejuvenating my spirit by hugging my imperfect, phat, weirdly shaped body that is afraid of myself even when I’m alone in the leisure of my apartment. Yet, I feel the closest to a higher power, when I’m vulnerable, naked and flawed allowing myself to be reborn and imaging in the future how I want to be buried and what my legacy should be.
Not as a ritual of return, but as a ritual of becoming. I step into the water. I step out. I breathe.
And I begin again. My body has changed drastically since my youth. 250 lbs later, a different name, gender, more or less body hair, and unrecognized by the average relative or neighbor in the past. The once admired, lean tanned skin Yeshiva boy who everyone around them thought was a perfect goody two shoes was really distraught at a frum world that didn’t match my wild spirit. The same neshama that was considered tainted, is still preserved inside of me, added with the burden of loving harder a stigmatized body that isn’t seen attractive to most, but still beautiful to me. My gender, identity, and sense of self might be ambiguous to myself and others, but every immersion into water, I am reborn. Washing away my sins, mental distress and the external voices that have haunted my being, all to be met with a radically made, emerging Jewess yearning for connection to a higher power, moral compass and truthful arts portfolio Thats on my terms, not ancestral codes.
