There’s an old zen koan that starts with the student asking the master, “What is Buddha mind?”

I’m paraphrasing. The actual question is “What is Buddha?”, but it translates better this way, to Buddha mind, because they're asking about the mental state of the enlightened, not the plump bronze monk most of us will imagine.

So the student asks, “What is Buddha mind?”

And the master replies, “fresh toilet paper.”

Paraphrasing. The master actually says, “a dry shit stick.” But accounting for cultural differences this is essentially the same item. It’s a tool for removing fecal matter from the backside. This one in particular is, as yet, unused.

What does this parable say to me during the time of Covid? I don’t know. I’m in Mexico and there was no toilet paper frenzy, for whatever reason that may be. I have theories.

But as I sit here, months from making my last prose post, I look back on that time :

day after day

night after night

sleepless and scrolling

grinding teeth through

news sites and twitter feeds

article after article

story after story

sucking words like oxygen

til I’m gasping for air

til my head may explode

choking on letters

like the drowning on waves

and now

I think I may understand

how Buddha mind

is a clean sheet

of toilet paper

just waiting

for some shit

to stick to it

i have a friend from high school

who keeps visiting war torn countries

to save dogs

and do yoga

and i see the photos of sun salutations

and lattes

and posts about how gross the air is

and how the people are rude

and dirty

and sometimes i think

i should reach out

but i don’t know where to start

and then i think

well,

i’m probably an alcoholic, so,

who am i to criticize

active members of a community

not to mention

half of our graduating class

has either OD’d

or been to rehab

so maybe poverty tourism

and white savior complexes

are excusable by comparison

i never reach a conclusion

i never reach out

i open a bottle of prosecco

95 pesos at Costco

and look out over the Mexican sunset

passing another day

under the umbrella

of trying to

“figure it all out”

we all ignored it

violence

lying

the way he treated the girls

boys being boys, they said

future war criminal

The letter didn’t mean much when I had first opened it. I had been expecting it for a decade. Knew the kind of person I was. And I knew the kinds of people they were. I remembered the last time they came to “appraise” the house, They had pulled up in something called a Slingshot, something that looks like a motorcycle made out of two sidecars. The song Tainted Love was playing so loud they had to shout at each other.

I had hidden the hand painted Black Lives Matter sign that had sat in our front yard for two years unmoved. I pulled it out of the grass. I pushed it back in the grass. I pulled it out again. I turned in a circle holding the sign above my head. I knew they would ask us to leave if they saw it. How dare we, this used to be their mother’s house, a true Texas woman. It was better to avoid eviction but I keep thinking how easy it is, how easy to pull a sign out of the yard and then just be courteous. How easy it is to avoid subjects that cause conflict. You can’t just hide your blackness the same way you can hide poster board.

Coward.

And here I was holding the letter anyway.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

“At least they gave us three months.”

“You’ve been here ten years!”

“We’re sick of it though.”

“Doesn’t mean we should be kicked out.”

“They’re selling it.”

“They’re tearing it down.”

“The city has changed.”

“The people in the city have changed! They’re using their money to change it. By buying up the property and kicking out the poor people. You’re getting pushed out. Don’t you see that?”

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Piles of bags on the lawn. Trash is full. Couch, my favorite couch, sitting by the curb. I call a company that will pick up the mattresses for a hundred dollars each. We leave them in the bedrooms. Her car will never make it to Mexico. A man down the street gives us three hundred dollars “as is”. The house is showing its neglect. The scratches and scrapes and peeling paint. It’s hollow and gross without the art and lights and fabrics. Pitiable. Broken windows and stained carpets. Holes in the drywall, floppy fan blades and exposed wires. Full of asbestos.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

I stare out the window into the park. My first week on the street the road was closed off for a bounce house. Tejano music ringing in my ears. Smoked pig in the air. Flock of chickens pecking in the dirt in front of the house with the Latin Kings graffiti on the door.

“Neighborhood’s loud but the rent is just right.”

“You’d be moving in on the first.”

“Or the day before.”

“That’s halloween.”

“Oh yeah, you want to move in on Halloween?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling like a conquistador. “I’ll take it.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………

“You guys moving out?”

Matt was standing in his front yard with his hand on his hip. He and Liz had moved in almost two years ago. They renovated the place next door and filled a dumpster in the street with all of the appliances, windows, doors, and pretty much everything else, a lot of it was just put in by the kids of my former neighbor, before they put it up for sale. He cuts his lawn twice a week and resents me for growing ours long, letting the wild flowers take over. He’s holding a brand new lawn mower, this one much smaller than the last one. A tiny, neon green nascar with blades.

“Yeah. They’re selling it.”

“Aw, thats too bad,” he lies, “we never really got to hang out.”

“It’s not on the market yet. You can probably put an offer in now if you want. You’re in real estate, right?” I hear myself say. Why am I always so helpful and nice.

“Hmm,” he looks at our safe haven, “thanks, maybe I will. Listen, good luck. And take care.” He reaches out his hand.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

“The trucks loaded.”

“With what? It’s all on the lawn! We didn’t take anything!”

“This is what you wanted, right? A clean start. Not to lug around our old junk and baggage.”

“It’s my home! My only constant for ten years. The only security I have. I have no health insurance. I haven’t seen a doctor since I was in high school. My teeth are falling out. I haven’t talked to my family in years. It’s the only thing…”

“What choice do we have? It’s over. They told us to leave.”

“Entonces?” Her mother asks.

“Ya, nada mas. Listo.”

“Entonces fuimos.”

“No!”

Tears streaming down my face. I don’t understand. This place is an obvious dump. It’s broken in every way. They are clearly slum lords. It’s nothing. Just go, forget about it. There’s bigger things out there. I feel sick. I feel like trash. I feel embarrassed for leaving my trash. I can’t even leave a restaurant without stacking my plates for the server.

“Vienes o no?’ she says, “we are going. Ahorita.”

I lock the front door and leave through the back, passing my little bamboo plant that can’t cross the California checkpoint. It’s too heavy for its stalk so I wrap a ribbon around it and stick it to a post with a thumb tack.

I slide into the back seat of the pickup truck. It starts to rain. I watch the water seep into the fabric of my favorite couch as we slowly pull away, making sure the little U-haul trailer is still securely behind us.

It’s 1:42 am

And I’m up

Asking Google

About the nature of reality

They say the Universe is 13.8 billion years old

And 93 Billion light years wide

I look up a light year

Which they say is 6 trillion miles long

But I don’t understand this

I have no context for numbers this big

Earth is 6 billion years old

But humans have only had hands for 2.6 million years

And that seems like a relatively short amount of time

I think

Comparatively

But also that’s an unfathomable amount of time

To spend evolving all this DNA

Just so I can have hands

And no good ideas for what to do with them

Speaking of DNA

There are 204 billion atoms in the human genome

But I don’t understand DNA

Or atoms

The internet says there’s

7 billion billion billion

Atoms in the human body

And 100 billion neurons

Forming 100 trillion neural connections

In the human mind

It’s 2:05 am

I scratch my head because I can’t grasp these numbers

But I’m worried I haven’t made enough neural connections

To make it through the Alzheimer’s stage in life

It runs in my family

Also Dementia

And Parkinson’s

But I don’t understand these things either

Maybe they’re in my DNA

They say DNA is only 3 meters long

6 if you stretch it out

I can picture that, I think

But I probably imagine it

Out of proportion

It’s 2:41 am

And I’m not sure what I should be doing

I drink some hot water from the electric kettle

And some tequila Pancho gave me for Christmas

I read that most of the atoms in your body are hydrogen

2/3 they say

And that hydrogen has an unstable relationship to its electrons

Because it only has 1

And the valence shell likes to be full

Which takes 2

So the atom drops the electron

Or picks 1 up

Changing its charge

To either positive or negative

Making the atom an ion

And most bodily fluids are made of ions

Because Hydrogen is so fickle

Or flirty

Or unstable, I guess

It’s why we have the pH scale

Negative ions means it’s acidic

It’s 3:03 am and I drink some more tequila

It’s probably full of negative ions

Because it’s acidic

Or maybe I don’t understand ions

But it hurts my teeth either way

I switch back to the Universe

I capitalize “Universe” now because I don’t believe in God

But that seems silly because wouldn’t that be idolizing something else

I shake my head and agree with myself

Then I read that as much as 90 percent of the Universe

Is made of dark matter

And dark energy

But it doesn’t react to electromagnetic radiation

Which means it doesn’t react to light

So no one has ever seen it

And it might not even exist

And I think about the Universe being 90 percent

Of something that no one has ever seen

And my body is made out of how many billions

And billions and billions

Of atoms

Mostly Hydrogen

That I’ve never seen

And now its 3:19 am

And I’m panicking

Because the infinitesimally small

And the infinitely large

Are crashing in my head

And I can’t keep track of which one

I’m thinking about

And it makes my heart race

And I picture red blood vessels

Racing through my tubes

Made of tiny little atoms

Bodily fluids so they’re probably ions

And then I feel the space outside of me

The 93 billion light years

Full of dark matter

And how far that is

Through the wall

Through every wall

And the floor

And the ceiling

Every direction

And then I remember a thing I read

About Dissociative Identity Disorder

And how each personality has its own set of physiological eccentricities

Different allergies

Different eyeglass prescriptions

Different dominant handedness

And I think about my hands

Which I’m sitting on

Because I’m not sure what to do with them

After so many years of evolution

Which makes me feel guilty

So I sip the tequila

With the negative ions

And hope I’m not just a personality

And wonder

How the body changes eyesight

And how precarious

And misunderstood

And insecure reality is

And now its 3:25

And I’m rubbing my feet together

And clenching my teeth

And avoiding my problems

Because I have no money

And I wonder if all this stuff is not for me

Because I panic

But as a human I have a curiosity

Which leads me to ask questions

But we don’t have time for the Unknown

Space exploration is for rich people

Billionaires

They call it a Mars colony for a reason

We make coffee

And shake martinis

And now it’s 3:51 am

And I can’t sleep

And I’m going to die

And I’ll never know

What I could be doing

With these hands

The desire to die is also a desire to be reborn. Which means the desire to die is not the desire to physically die, but maybe to kill the ego, or the alter-ego, or just the rut you're in at the moment. The desire to die is not the desire to destroy physical tissue, it is the desire to end a psychic chain of thought, a repetitive sequence of negative feedback loops, a grim series of interactions and relationships that have disguised the unknown future as an inescapable, inevitable, and predictable repetition of monotonous, meaningless, passionless pain. The desire to die is the desire to live.

*I originally wrote this as an inspired comment to a post by @Riley_45. After reading it over I think I like it enough to post on its own. I'll leave the link to original post in comments.

She ran her finger across the tip of her shoe. It was smooth and dusty, cracked in places from the pressure of being bent. The holes in the bottom were starting to cause her socks to rip in the same places. She put her finger through the one in her heel and tickled the soft skin on the bottom of her foot.

She pulled a small green notebook out of her pocket and began scribbling down numbers, adding and subtracting, crossing out and circling. Her bus bounced by a group of young girls walking with back packs and soda cans. They were pointing and shouting at something on the other side of the street. She twirled her head around in her seat, pressing her forehead to the glass as the scene rushed by.

Missed it.

She returned to her notebook. The number “four” was circled.

The bus dipped before popping up onto the bridge to cross the river. It was peaceful how, even moving at 40 miles an hour, the water seemed to sit quietly still. Unlike the trees and signs and street lights whooshing by in blurry streaks.

“Three weeks late,” she mumbled, thinking back to the letter from the electric company. She’d thrown it out so that her roommates wouldn’t see that she hadn’t paid it yet. They would turn the power off this Friday. She had four days.

Three thirty in the afternoon. The ride home from work was always the same. An unopened novel lay in her lap with the same disposition as her hair gracing her neck. Her forehead, two or three shades lighter that the rest of her face, once again pressed against the tinted window in the back, corner seat. Everything was spinning in her wood chipper brain. Even the beer in her fridge seemed no more appealing than the cobwebs lining the baseboards of her mint green bathroom.

She dropped her head between her knees and wished it would just fall off. It would roll straight down the aisle painting the rubber floor red and then smash into the ticket machine. The passengers would flee their seats screaming. Blood splattered across the driver’s horrified face. She could feel it. How much lighter her body would be without this sad head to drag around.

“Hey, excuse me, miss... You dropped this,” a boy next to her interrupted, holding out the fat, overly ambitious novel she’d been “reading” for the past 3 months.

“I could never finish this one,” he said, handing her the paper brick. He had soft eyes and a genuine warmth about him.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, smiling, a bit of the rigidity melt off of the structure of her cheek bones.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m... fine. I don’t know, I guess. I just hate this time of day, you know. Nothing happens. The sun beats down, and it’s just so bright and so hot. I can’t think at all. It makes my brain feel like a melted pint of ice cream. It’s the most useless time of day. No wonder the rest of the world spends it drinking tea and napping.”

“Ha! Well, not the whole world,” he laughed.

“Yeah, maybe not. But I still see where they’re coming from. It’s enough to make you want to drop dead. Just stop right there and sleep for a thousand years.”

He didn’t respond. He glanced at the holes in her shoes and back at her face. She knew that her hair was greasy and looked like a child’s experiment with yarn and glue. Her eyes sunken into dark pits. She was tired and she’d meant what she’d said. He was sensing her sadness, she thought. Recognition crossed his face like the pedestrians on the street, conscious yet unconcerned. He studied her casually for another fraction of a second before seemingly becoming self conscious and shifting his gaze back to his own footwear.

The bus screeched to a short stop.

She turned back to the window. A homeless man had fallen asleep on the traffic median. He was still clutching his sign in his gloved hands. A dog stood beside him, staring straight ahead, tethered to the base of a yield sign. Surrounded by speeding cars, he sat there panting in the Texas sun, waiting for the man to wake up.