Read Online Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore - Free Book Online

notebook I’d brought with me, intending to record scenes and conversations for some future self, scavenging for the vaguely imagined article I planned to write or desperate to recall past joys. So I don’t remember many specific moments or sensory details from that first trip, just that I was barreled down constantly by their combined force. The manic city streets, the koel birds crooning at dawn, the ancient stone Buddhas nestled at the base of heavy fig trees, the huge white beaches with huge green waves and huge pink sunsets and huge clouds slicing a huge sky. Sri Lanka did feel like freedom—from trying in general, if not from Jared specifically.
    I met an Irish girl at Rose Land, who’d just come back from a silent meditation center in the mountains. “Most beautiful place in the world,” she said, and wrote down the name of the town for me, in the back of my empty notebook.
    SHIRMANI
    Gongs woke us before dawn; we dressed, peed, and brushed our teeth by candlelight; followed a trail of slowly moving flames to the Buddha hall; sat still for one hour; drank tea while watching the sunrise; stretched slowly for an hour; ate porridge with dates and roasted peanuts; sat still some more; stretched; ate rice and vegetables; sat; stretched; drank tea; watched the sunset; chanted; slept. This was every day at the silent meditation center in the mountains above Kandy.
    Sometimes during the morning meditations, a man at the front of the Buddha hall spoke into the darkness about ordeenearness and realeetee. He had just returned from a trip to Germany; a couple invited him to stay at their house and teach their friends about meditation. When the couple went out one night, they thought their Buddhist teacher might be amused by watching television. He flipped through the channels for hours. “More than one hundred programs,” he said to the candlelit room of solitary sitters. “So many choices, all the time, night and day. This is dukkha. This is suffering.” He asked us to experience instead our ordinary human forms, to feel friendly toward our ordinary human lives. What I experienced for the first few days was a barrage of thoughts demanding that I scratch my lower back, extend my legs, stand up, get the hell out of Shirmani, take a lifelong vow of silence and stay at Shirmani forever, fall in love with my breath, buy myself a new dress, burn all my clothes, become a lesbian, notice my breath without subjecting it to conceptual thinking like love, use the working meditation period to hunt down and kill that squirrel that wouldn’t shut the fuck up, do something, anything, just make it better, make it better, make it better. I did not feel friendly toward this vain urgency.
    “Please feel your heart,” the man in white said as our candle flames disappeared into pale early light. “Please feel your heart deeply.” I tried to scoff at his corny command, but the mere mention of that place brought my desperate attention there anyway and just like that my heart was feeling me, grasping at my throat from the inside, pulling taut the skin around my collarbones and neck. All those times I failed to contain my childish urges, drank too much and humiliated myself with some public display of rage or sorrow and so drank more; all the days in Paris I wasted with my misery; all the times I shrieked and punched and clutched at Jared instead of walking away; all the times I failed to take myself home. Impossible to contain the memories of the bad things I’d done, more terrible for their stupidity, for being average, repeatable badness, not even—
    “Can you forgive me, heart?” said the man in white. For the first week of this question, spoken always into the gradually lightening room as the morning meditation came to an end, I did succeed in scoffing and shutting out his voice, or else becoming sensually distracted with the stream of water from my nose and eyes pooling at the hollow between my collarbones. The word “sorry”