Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“Okay. Whatever.”

The sun-warm stone on my water-cold butt, toasting each other raunchily with cold cans of tingly beer, getting relaxed and giggly…“Or just two beers. One each. No more.”

“Sri Lanka turned you into quite the Buddhist, huh?”

“The reason I need Buddhism is because I am a horrible Buddhist.”

—

I tried going to a meditation group in Carpinteria. One of the girls there was wearing a halter top with no bra and a glittery bindhi stuck to her forehead. The group leader had a Buddha tattooed on the back of his neck. While we were supposed to be meditating, he would say stuff like, “Our Western culture tells us that happiness comes from material things. But all material things are impermanent. So true happiness comes from relinquishing desire. Stop thinking, stop wanting. Sit. Feel the peace.” His desperation to feel the peace made it pretty hard for me to stop thinking about how much I wanted him to shut up.

I tried a yoga class called Moving Meditation. It was nice in a physical way. The teacher ended every class with the affirmation “Enlightenment is possible in this very lifetime!” A lovely idea, but one requiring a commitment — giving up everything except sitting — that neither I nor the other people who had driven to yoga for a little exercise seemed likely to pursue. It required the kind of faith, or maybe just circumstantial desperation, that made the long-term meditators at Shirmani stay there for twenty years, that made the man in white sit perfectly still for two days straight. In its classes, posters, and bookstore, the yoga studio encouraged people to love life, to honor their bodies as sacred, not to worry about the past or future. There was nothing wrong with these ideas, but I resented the grandiosity that was attached to them, the implication that feeling good led to enlightenment — as if enlightenment was just being the exact same person you were today except that you were constantly happy, as if no difficult sacrifices were required to change that profoundly. It’s not as if I was making these sacrifices myself. But I didn’t believe I was just one mind-blowing yoga class away from enlightenment. I just knew that meditation helped.

So I tried to sit on my own. But just assuming the posture — crossed legs, straight back, palms upturned on my lap — overwhelmed me, and I’d quickly jump up to check my phone or make a cup of coffee. Jared tried to meditate with me a few times. But it felt like one more pose — the two of us hungover, wearing only our underwear, hopped up on coffee, sneaking peeks at the clock, desperate for the fifteen minutes to be up so we could eat and talk and laugh away our shame at the money and time and energy we’d wasted the previous night. To walk away from something that has taken so much and given so little is to accept monstrous, murderous failure. It’s easier to remain caught up in the unworthiness, telling oneself this is just the way life happens to be.

I got an occasional letter from Suriya, a reminder that there were other ways I could be spending my time. She took our friendship seriously, as if it were based on much more than one afternoon. In a particularly desperate mood, I bought a phone card and called her mobile phone. I couldn’t understand much of what she said in her broken English over the bad connection, but the sound of her voice comforted me. I had a link, however tenuous, to something far away.

—

My other source of comfort was that Donnie had agreed to run my Jaffna story as a cover. It made me like myself more to think I was publishing an article about Tamil oppression, even if it was disjointed and a touch overwrought. But, week after week, my piece kept getting pushed down the line by something Donnie considered more “time-sensitive.” The week before Christmas, a writer failed to turn in a story that was slated for the back of the book, and they needed something to fill the slot. The editor cut my piece in half in a matter of hours, while I argued with Donnie to make it the cover story, since the current one—“This Year, Give the Gift of Experience,” which included suggestions like gift certificates to spas or movie theaters — was already short enough to run at the back of the book. “I’m sure your piece is brilliant,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder and looking me in the eye. “But people just don’t want to read about depressing stuff like that during the holidays. Have a little compassion.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t spread this around, but I’m willing to pay you for the original word count.”

I have never had a lot of gumption when faced with obstacles that feel to me unjust. Paris taught me that. I was so fragile that I’d let a few bored waiters chase me out of my potential future. And now I resolved to give up journalism for good. Poor Dhit. I had exploited his affection for nothing. After the skeleton of my original article was published, crammed between a review of a Britney Spears record and a new sushi bar, Jared comforted me with whiskey and sex. “Don’t worry,” he said, “one person can’t make a difference.”

—

The same week my Sri Lanka story was butchered, Jared left his email open on my computer. I read one suggestive message after another from a girl named Calypso, breathing so quickly and forcefully that my lips and hands went numb. I’d gone with Jared to a couple of drop-offs at Calypso’s place. She had silicon lips and pockmarked skin caked in foundation. She worked as a pinup girl, mainly doing car ads. She was sexy in a way that made sex seem depraved and dumb. After I read her emails telling Jared she couldn’t stop laughing about such-and-such a thing he said and she’d been having naughty dreams about him and missed his adorable face and would he please pretty please meet her at this party tonight, I downed three beers and texted Jared to come over after the show. His band was playing at a dive bar in Ventura. I’d decided to stay in, supposedly to work on Fifi.

I wasn’t planning to tell Jared I’d read his email; I’d bring up fidelity some other way, open a real conversation about our future. But when we started having sex, my mind assailed me with images of his hands on other larger breasts, his mouth on other fuller lips. I pushed him off me and demanded he never see Calypso again, I knew what he was up to, that girl was such a loser, did he have any self-respect? Jared got out of bed and stepped into his pants. I jumped up and placed myself between him and the door. I felt myself yelling words I didn’t hear. “Knock it off,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “You’re boring the shit out of me.” I didn’t mind what he said, as long as he was still in front of me. I wrapped myself around his legs. His leather boots were cold against my butt. Gripping his jeans, I told him Calypso was an ugly slut and I’d never see him again if he walked out the door. “You were away for months. You think I just sat around waiting for you to get back?” He peeled me from his calves and slammed the front door.

I stayed up ’til dawn looking at rooms for rent in Brooklyn, Houston, Seattle, Boston, gripping my breasts so hard I left handprints on them. I needed to be anywhere but here, anyone but me.

—

New York seemed like the best place to go because it was far away and close-but-not-too-close to my dad and supposedly artsy. Becoming a translator felt increasingly like my only acceptable option. I had no interest in trying to write books or stories of my own, although that would seem to be a logical vocation for me, if only a dream one, what with all my devouring of books and obsessive jotting down of thoughts. I refuse to use the word journal , since people started using it as a verb, as in, “Why don’t you journal about your colon cancer?” Whatever it is I do in my little notebooks is more an effort to purge myself of thoughts than it is a hope to make use of them. Which is why I needed to be a translator, to use words in a way that would take me outside of myself, exploit my brain as a vehicle of someone else’s expression.