Tripping over myself, I scrambled to keep up with the tour guide. I was huffing, sweat lining my neck in the humid weather of Kamakura, Japan. Winded by each taxing step up the incline, I scanned the area for a distraction, settling for the back of my tour guide’s head. She was tall and striking, with black flowing hair and a straight, commandeering posture. Her hair flipped across her shoulders as she turned to face our group, walking up the slope with large, graceful skips backwards. I took in her face; her high cheekbones accentuated her petite nose. Exhausted, my eyes skipped from her face to her flourishing hands as she directed the group’s attention to a massive copper green statue. The Buddha.

As she described Buddhism, arbitrary terms and foreign names seeped into one ear and out the other, until she stressed a rather peculiar tenant of the religion. Liberation from desire.

Catching my breath, I stopped and tossed my head back as I took in the magnificent Buddha, the Enlightened one, who had supposedly freed himself from attachment. To desire nothing – doesn’t that mean he desired something? Puzzled with this paradox, I pictured the ascetic lifestyle depicted in the legend. To not Control, to not Grasp, to not Cling, to not Need. A Willing Ascetism.

As you know, to have nothing and need nothing are profoundly different states; the Buddha plunged himself in the former before attaining the latter. Interesting.

I tore my eyes of the ginormous, yet intricate figure to take in the smaller, more humble buildings surrounding the statue.

Gift stores.

Capture spirituality while you can! You know you want it! Buy a mini-Buddha, get Enlightenment free!

I almost snorted. rude, I know. American, that I am. The way down the hill, I was grasping three scrolls in one hand, and balancing 2 mini-buddhas in the other.

Consumerism, attachment, and desire. The three musketeers.

I think I’ve done something wrong, touched something that didn’t want to be touched, and I cannot pretend that I didn’t want to, because I’ve done it now.

She was a moth, a real live ghostly white moth on the wet bike path pavement, fluttering helpless, one rainsoaked wing stuck to the ground. I stopped and watched and thought that I couldn’t do anything and continued talking to my friend with the contented notion that I would be useless here. And then an inconvenient pang of guilt weaseled its way into my stomach and I decided that I couldn’t just let her die, rugged-terrain treads zigzagging over her thorax as she lay there, defenseless. I turned back. I crouched down. And I tried my darnedest to coax her onto my finger. I felt a quiet triumph when those antennae felt the crook of my index finger and she slowly ventured up onto my hand: she trusts me. In truth, she probably just thought I was a handy twig or blade of grass, something to move her to higher ground, but I felt accepted in that moment by this tiny, frail, desperate creature. She had deemed me safe. From there, my friend instructed me to place her on a hearty sprig of milkweed. This is where things became complicated. Playing the savior, it turns out, is significantly easier than truly being the savior; being takes follow-through. Being the savior means not removing the moth from one quandary only to place her in the path of catastrophe.

Upon that milkweed leaf I attempted to set the moth gently down. But alas, her damp wing stuck to my finger. I tried to gently pry it off. My friend chastised me: “Don’t touch the wing!” I felt angry; I had no alternative method. If I hadn’t touched it, it would have certainly torn clean off the moth’s body when I placed her down and removed my finger. The wing would have stuck to me, and forgotten her, its owner. A traitorous wing indeed.

When I finally did remove my finger, her wings still safely attached to her body, she tumbled down, off the milkweed, into the grass. It was my friend’s turn to play savior. She placed the moth on her finger and guided her up to the milkweed again. And again, the moth’s wing stuck to the human hand. My friend attempted to place the moth onto the milkweed without touching the wing. It bent at an unnatural angle. I felt like criticizing her this time: See, it’s not as easy as it seems! Do you really think your method is better? Eventually she gave in and touched the wing, unsticking it from her finger. It hung uncertainly from the moth’s thorax, clinging to a body not quite anymore its own. It looked heavy with rain, an alien deadweight twisted from what it once melded onto naturally.

We stared at the moth afterwards - alive, safely embracing the milkweed, but looking like not quite a moth. We turned to each other. We laughed nervously, powerlessly. The mist thickened into a drizzle, and we, two mock saviors, walked quickly to the river to forget.

First of all,

I am lonely.

The drag of the wind across my cold, cold cheeks

is painful, of course, this loneliness that drags my voice

to say “hello”, this loneliness that drags my body towards

the warmth of life—for embracing and the caress of nurturing words, but the moment

the question of opening myself to the inspection of a caring creature,

we become too alike, positive to positive, negative to negative, I’m running away

from the cure,

running away from the medecine,

because I fear,

the lies being uncapped,

I fear the hurt as it is torn free from the caves of my reality,

I fear the notion of getting into the ocean with another,

of spreading our vast cauldrons of pain

into eachothers open, quivering palms,

I drown alone,

in a ocean of black stone and passive aggressive sharks,

because I want to be close to something warm,

something alive and comforting,

but there is a barricade I built up long ago,

as a result of something that happened long ago,

and I can’t climb over the wall that keeps rebuilding itself.

It came to me when I was 18. The thing.

It crawled in at the base of my neck, sharp and cold.

It pierced like a harpoon, breathing into me, into everything I was.

Scattered, malignant.

I had never encountered such ferocity,

such persistence.

It would make consecutive strikes. It was a parasite with a taste for life.

Amorphous, impermeable,

I became deflated steel.

Raising a hand against it, I would cry out, the pain tremendous.

When I did nothing, when I stalled, and fell into its hard arms, I slept.

Others came near, drawing a few beats from my guarded vacuity.

But then it would pull me close, telling me of their wants, their agonies. They were all ill formed beings, stupid, destructive.

I could be more, I could be different, it cooed.

In my stony dreaming, dominance directed my eyes, power and cruelty grappled on the curve of my lips.

I killed, It clapped.

It yelled in ecstasy, cheering what had become my name.

But as I took a bow, the sight of blood on my feet shook me awake.

Eyes open, the sound of my own voice sent tremors through me.

It was gone.

But it wasn’t.

One year later, I saw it again in its true form.

Its expression was flat, nonthreatening. Familiar.

It looked like everyone I had ever loved.

Like the mirror.

Now, whenever I see it, I extend a hand,

Never disrespecting its gaze by averting my eyes.