by Various
Drowning…
Then I’m underwater, facing her, trying to look anywhere but at the pain on her open, expressive face. Seeing her as she was the day she rang the bell at the front door. She didn’t bother to use the key like always, she ignored the rock it hid beneath, unearthing instead a secret I would spend the next days trying to think of a way to give back.
I said no, Mia. I said no and he didn’t stop.
Hands bound, eyes closed, tears pouring like blood from a gaping wound.
I do not know if that is how it happened. I only know that’s how I see her when I picture it. Prey and predator, hunt and attack.
It’s nothing like how his hands felt when he’d run them down my calves like he was worshiping at the altar of my temple. How he’d spend hours undressing me with his eyes, even after nine years.
It is everything wrong.
The piercing call of a tropical bird cuts through the room, and my shoulders tighten. The normally quiet bird’s rage blends into my own.
“Do not let the chaos of the outer world distract you from the peace of your inner world,” the Swami says.
Inhale. Exhale.
Inhale. Exhale.
When the lecture on finding your true self arrives, it provides little relief. My true self is still a buried myth.
The day’s asanas punish my body and torture my mind, as my thoughts refuse to quiet.
Brunch brings nourishment, but my lips tremble when I try to eat.
“I feel wrung out,” Kayleigh says, sliding into the seat across from me.
Her skin shines, and she performs a few quick arm stretches like a gymnast cooling down. Wrung out is the opposite of how she appears. She glows, while I ignore the sweat pooling at my back and take a deep sip of water.
“About your manifestation,” I say, pausing to set the cup down.
“I don’t have anything to give,” she says, pressing a finger to her brow, smoothing down the line of fine hair. “The dude got it wrong. I have nothing left.”
My throat burns, and I try to swallow. “Maybe this is the land of everything,” I say, voicing a secret—one I carried when I first arrived. “Maybe your time here will open the doors you need.”
“That’s a bunch of swami bullshit, and you know it.”
I cough a laugh into my shoulder, and she picks up her fork and begins shoveling in rice.
“Face it, Mia, no one knows what they’re talking about. My therapist sent me here as a way to keep me from overdosing on benzodiazepines and tequila. After two hours at the ashram I realized she googled ‘yoga healing retreats’ or something equally new age and presented it to me like a magician plucking feathers from a hat. You know the problem with that? She should have presented me with the whole bird. But the dove is dead, and the feathers are the smoke screen.”
Kayleigh smirks at the gobsmacked expression I can’t keep off my face. “I only understood a third of what you just said.”
“Let’s blame the bad acid, shall we?”
I spear a sliver of zucchini, and force it down. “I am nobody’s guru.”
“Don’t need a guru, and you’re my person. I told you, I felt it. The universe told me.”
She shrugs, and irritation flames into anger. I didn’t ask the universe to give her to me. I didn’t ask to be a mentor or for this kind of penance. I’m not a good friend. I’m not a good anything. This, at least, has been established.
“My girlfriend is dead.” She delivers the line like a fishmonger dropping a pound of tuna on the scale. It lands in my hands, and I desperately want to hot potato it back to her.
Her blink is so slow it’s judging me. “She was everything, now I have nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, when my voice comes back to me. “That’s unimaginably awful.”
“Awful is a polite word for what it is. It’s a rotting decay of tragedy that lives inside my marrow. I can’t pull it out. I can’t let it go. If I could, I would meditate every day under a Bodhi tree from now until the end of time just for this nothingness to leave me. I’m supposed to follow the universe, and I am. Hello, universe.”
Around us is the steady hum of conversation. Glasses clink, forks clatter, elbows and hands smack into plates and against the table. I look over and see the raven-haired man leaning into the jamb of the door. He’s watching me, not even bothering to pretend he isn’t, and I flush from forehead to elbow.
“Why do you think I can help you?”
“You’re doing it,” she says.
“Doing what?”
“It. Finding your higher power, following the path.” She leans forward, and there’s a beautiful and greedy light to her eyes. “I’ve seen it. You understand the readings, you don’t take notes or look confused, you absorb it like a super-sponge. I can’t feel it, can’t touch the light. You can.”
“Rumi said what you are seeking is seeking you,” I say, my words coming fast, because part of me wishes I could be the person she’s described, the person I used to think I was. Even as I know she’s wrong and I’m the one with nothing to offer. “What are you seeking, Kayleigh?”
She breathes in deeply through her nose. “I told you, I’m seeking a reason to live. What else is there?”
Treeni (three)
People turn to yoga because they are looking for change, or so Swami teaches us. For the next week Kayleigh is microfiber to my Velcro, and I spend my days listening to her heartbreak when I’m not coaxing my body into postures that transform my muscles but don’t reach my heart.
I’ve never tried to keep someone alive before. With Kayleigh, I discover it isn’t about living or dying, it’s about being heard. The pain is eating her from somewhere behind her sternum, a little monster of loss chewing on her soul.
She’s taken to saying a simple offering before brunch every day. Hello, Creator, there is a crack in everything, please let my light in.
It’s a small measure of kindness on my part to listen, and a largely selfish one because her heartbreak is a welcome distraction from my own.
I cross paths with the black-haired man most mornings on the way to or from our satsangs. We do not speak, but his eyes crinkle around the edges when we pass. Every time they do, a fire down deep inside me sputters in an attempt to start. I clench it out and pretend I don’t imagine the night wind blowing across his upper arms and thighs, and how cool that skin tastes, before I fall asleep.
On good nights I’m treated to the deep slumber of an inactive volcano, and on bad ones I slip in the spurt of mental lava seeping out, riding the pain of losing him and her.
I thought my life was one thing, but I was wrong. I lived an illusion, a pretty one with a wooden picket fence, two-car garage, robin’s-egg-blue door with matching shutters, thriving but small group of friends and the promise of motherhood to come. I spent months planning for my future, while the present was weaving a different one born of spikes and chains. I couldn’t see what wasn’t real until it smacked me in the face. I’ve been under the influence of illusion for too long, but I’m learning to breathe, and I’m trying to change.
We’re sitting in the hammocks, the day coming to a close, Kayleigh’s toes drawing empty rivers in the sand. “What are you doing next?” she asks.
“Next?” I look up at the moon. “Next, I’ll go to bed.”
“No.” She laughs her full throaty laugh. “Man, you really do live in the present moment. I mean after the ashram. Like, where’s your real life? Who are your people? You never talk about yourself.”
Every day I live inside my head, trapped in the past, shredding my insides trying to get out.
“I don’t have any people.” It’s true enough that the words leave me cold. “I haven’t given a lot of thought to what I’ll do next, I guess.”
Kayleigh plops back into the hammock, toes still dragging across the pinkish-w
hite sand. “That sounds so evolved.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just trying not to drown.” Her head shifts so she can see me, and I climb out of the sunken seat.
“Drowning by breath,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s taking my words as seriously as I take hers. “It sounds like quite the way to go.”
The next day’s yoga lecture is on gratitude and compassion, and I lean in as the swami talks.
“We all live by our perception,” he says, sitting in the lotus position, his posture perfection, his expression gentle. “We are in the company of truth when we are together, and this is why we satsang. Meditation alone is good for cleansing thoughts and calming our monkey minds, while together it is power. When we join together, we open, shifting to purify our thoughts. How do you perceive your reality? Are you grateful for the truth? Today I am grateful for you. We walk together in unity and in diversity. We are all different, and we are all going through something. Look to the person to your left, your right. You never know what the person next to you is experiencing, what pain they carry. Together we remove the barriers for our spiritual growth and lift up those beside us.”
His words are as pretty as a museum-bound Renoir, and I try to breathe them in, stuff them down into the tear inside my soul.
When we leave the satsang, Kayleigh stays behind. I see her go to the swami, her head bowed, tears glistening in the corner of her eyes.
I do not go to the yoga practice. For the first time in a month, I wander instead to the ocean. People preferring the natural experience to a room or a hut sleep on the beach, and tents are erected a tenth of a mile up. I watch the door of a navy-and-white tent as it flaps in the wind, unpinned, unguarded.
My perception of reality is expanding, but I don’t know into what. The sign at the start of the walk from the beach into the ashram reads: A Special Place for Cleansing.
Under bare feet, the sand hugs my arches, its silken grains gathering and shifting with each step I take. The sand is not trying to cling. It simply lets go. Everything in the universe can be framed to holding on and letting go. My nails pinch crescents into my palms, and I try to relax my fingers. Stepping to the water’s edge, I give in to closing my eyes. Beneath my feet the sand is firm. The first wave kisses my toes and ankles, and the sand shifts. It is pulled away from the shore, spirited out from underneath my soles. It’s a heady feeling, like the world is a rug and someone is gently trying to tug it free.
A voice clears, and I look back. Swami Ahimsa is standing two feet back, over my shoulder. His feet are as bare as his chest.
“Hello, Mia.”
Swami doesn’t seek people out, because people seek him. I wonder if that is the precedent the original guru, Swami Sivananda, set when he founded the ashram, or if the swamis want to give us peace—and not interfere. I ask him, and he smiles with teeth. It startles me how much younger he looks, how normal, when he grins.
“We start our days at four and end them at ten. It has to do with a deep desire for sleep and a good book. I find both are a deserving reward at the end of any day.”
My laugh is garbled by the ocean’s breeze. He studies me and takes a step forward. We stand side by side, the ocean pulling grains from under us as we face an endless horizon.
“It’s easy to see why sailors once thought the world was flat,” I say of the edge of the world in front of us. It looks like someone took a ruler to the sea and the sky, dividing them with straight-edge precision.
“Sailors spent months to years traversing the water,” he says, his tone as mild as if he’s leading a meditation into the Akashic Realm. “I believe they must have known the world was round, for they never reached an edge. People on the shore, however...” I feel his smile in his next words: “That’s a dog of a different breed.”
“You’re talking about perception again,” I say, thinking of my life off the island, of Kayleigh and her grief, of the way the sun seems to sparkle on the water like diamonds waiting beneath the surface.
“Life is perception. I suppose I am always talking about it in some form. Life is also gratitude. I am grateful you came here, and I am wondering if you would like to stay longer.”
The ashram doesn’t have rules in the way the rest of the world does. Karmic yogis, yogis who stay on and serve the retreat in exchange for room and board, and growing their education, run the ashram.
“Can you define what you’re asking?” I ask, my heart skipping a beat at the thought, fear shifting the words so I can’t tell if I’m misinterpreting the offer.
“Would you like to stay on longer? It’s a simple question for me, the answer I hope may be simple for you.”
I smile at the almost riddle.
“Think on it, sleep on it, and let me know.” He looks out to the ocean and closes his eyes. When the next wave hits, I watch the childlike delight steal over his face as the sand tugs gently from beneath his feet and is swept back into the ocean.
“The water does not discriminate,” he says, opening his eyes. “It’s a nice reminder that life happens to us all. Whether the incidents in it happen to you or for you, well, that’s entirely up to your perception, isn’t it?”
I make it to brunch, chewing on his words like they’re a twig from the Salvadora persica tree and can cleanse the murkiest part of me. My table is empty, no Kayleigh in sight, and I sit with a cup of green tea and my thoughts for company.
The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” runs in a loop through my mind. The song feels oddly un-yogic, and absolutely right.
What are you doing next? Kayleigh asked me. I’ve been on this island for four weeks, and only one person knows I am here. My life at home is frozen in amber. Things are happening, they must be, but because I’m not there to witness them, they aren’t happening to me.
What do I owe?
Allegiance to her? Punishment to him?
What do I want?
I lean back in the chair and take a slow breath. That’s the question I’ve avoided asking.
Kayleigh enters, sees me, and grins. There is a slight lift to her step. Her shoulders still carry anvils of sorrow, but something is shifting. I watch her wave to a couple at a table by the door as she goes to make her plate.
I want a divorce. In my heart, the divorce is done, but I need to file—I need to rip off the Band-Aid, and let the wound heal.
Weight settles in next to me, and I look over to see the man with the black hair. He smiles and takes a sip of his water. His chin ducks, and I notice a white scar rippled along his jaw. He doesn’t speak, but his presence warms me like heat from a stove. I want to know his name.
My breath catches in my chest.
I want to apologize again to her, to tell her I love her, this wasn’t her fault, and I’m sorry. I want to be a suture along the edge of her wound.
Kayleigh sits down across from me, waggling her brows at the raven-haired man, before digging in to her own food.
My breath loosens.
Like before, at the water’s edge, I close my eyes.
Divorce. Apology. Two things I can do, or get started, without taking a step out of this reality. There’s outgoing mail on the island, and a letter is a start on both counts.
Behind my eyes, light flickers. Soft blue and pink, deep red and bright white. Patterns show up even here, though their form is deconstructed. Lines blur and focus, shapes and outlines and figurations hover in front of me, waiting to take shape.
The world is made up of patterns, and people come to yoga because they are seeking change. My path is waiting, right in front of me.
Stay or go?
Kayleigh says something to the man next to me, her voice a low and happy hum. He shifts, and his elbow brushes mine. Purpose and peace, loss and mourning, they shouldn’t fit together in the same space, and yet somehow they do.
My mind finds the right
pattern, the way forward.
Taking a deep and cleansing breath that fills my lungs all the way down into its basin, I decide.
With a smile, I open my eyes.
The Singer/Songwriter
Patti Callahan Henry
We tell our lives in lyric. That’s what songwriters do; it’s what I am set to do in a few hours.
All my known life I’ve waited for this day and more specifically this moment, and yet here I stand, immobile and indecisive, fear unspooling inside me. My guitar with the thick leather strap emblazoned with my name—Mia—in bright red is slung over my shoulder. My left hand rests on the top of the guitar’s smooth surface, and my right absently runs across the strings as if soothing a lover, not to produce sound but to just sense the strings.
The world has fulfilled my lifelong wish, and now the stage glows with spotlights spilling onto the scratched hardwood floors of the Ryman Auditorium like neon puddles. The auditorium is empty but for the workers and crew setting up, the echoing sounds of equipment being moved and voices calling out. Everyone else—the guitar players, the sound engineers, the drummers, managers, and backup singers—is in the dressing rooms having a beer, pacing while humming the songs, or more likely flirting. I stand alone on the empty stage.
There’s only one first time.
I’ve heard this over and over in the past weeks since I’ve been invited to sing my new hit live onstage during a showcase at the legendary country music hall. The Ryman was once a church, and the original pews faced the stage, staunchly proud in curved rows. I sense the sanctity of the place: the ancient wood; the scrollwork on the balcony apron recently uncovered after layers of paint had been removed; the scent of mildew as subtle as perfume; the memorial echoes of Minnie Pearl and Jimmy Dickens, of Earl Scruggs and Johnny Cash. Even if no one told me it used to be a church, I would have guessed, or maybe imagined it to be so and eventually even written a song about that. Maybe I still will.
It seems all I can do lately—write songs about my life instead of living my life. There is nothing left, or so it seems, to live for except to write about the things that have already happened and are worth the music and the lyrics they offer me. The past can be written about, while the future is as bleak as a night without moon or stars. I questioned, more times than can be counted, whether I’ve been living the right life at all, heartbreak clouding all my choices and turning them into unbridled mistakes.