Free Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore

thoughts and sensations as I carried out basic acts of survival. I felt a kind of happiness I’d always believed was reserved for other, simpler people.
    I thought about Jared a lot, of course. But I aggressively labeled the thoughts “thinking” until they dissolved, which made me proud of myself. I was not yet up to the task of liberating myself by examining every desire. But rejecting something does not make it disappear. During one of the half hours allotted daily for right speech—timely, useful, gentle, and true—I spoke with an Australian woman who had lived at Shirmani for fifteen years. She had recently gone to renew her visa; the authorities pressed her on her reasons for staying in Sri Lanka. “They treated me like I was criminal! And I’m not! I’m not!”
    “Imagine how you’d feel if the man you loved told you to get the fuck out of his face when you were crying because he had his arm around another girl,” I unfortunately said out loud. Hardly timely, useful, or gentle. Silence had impaired my already feeble filtering abilities. The woman opened her mouth in a sad O. “I just mean—my boyfriend makes me feel like a criminal too. And I’m not. A criminal. So, like, I know how you feel.”
    —
    After several weeks at Shirmani, I started waking up with a little prickle of fear. What was I doing with my life? It seemed that I had been HERE TO MEDITATE for long enough; wasn’t I meant to experience other things, to make the best use of this trip halfway across the globe? I was in a recent war zone, assailed by humanitarian concerns. This was my chance to act on some of my depressing, lonely knowledge. I didn’t know what that action would be exactly, but I was sure I shouldn’t leave Sri Lanka without seeing the north, where most of the fighting had occurred. Only a couple of weeks remained before my flight home.
    When I told the man in white I would be leaving for Jaffna the next day, he said, “If you are earnest, it does not matter where you go.” Idealistic words, but I trusted them. It was impossible not to, after spending time in this man’s presence. But how to be that single-mindedly earnest? Even the people who had been on retreat for many years—long-term meditators, they were called—had clearly not achieved this state of constant quietness and openness, free of all expectations. Certainly they were closer than I was. But when I watched them inching along the stone pathways and taking a full minute to bring their spoons from their plates to their mouths and breaking Noble Silence only once a week to discuss the need for more toothpaste or batteries, I knew that being a long-term meditator was one more thing I was not and would probably never be. One of the long-term meditators was a Buddhist nun from England who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. She watched the sunrise in the same spot every morning, wearing the same clothes, with the same look of awe brightening her soft, round face. I envied her certainty. My personality is ill-suited to my ideals.
    JAFFNA
    A checkpoint marked the entrance to Sri Lanka’s northernmost peninsula. My bus had to wait for me to get off and register my passport with three leering soldiers. And then we entered a kind of desolation I had never known before. Dry fields were interspersed with army barracks that looked like little boys’ playthings, bags of sand painted green and brown piled before plywood huts. The bus slowed to let off a man whose lifeless right foot trailed the ground alongside him. He limped down a dirt road extending to the horizon. A rickshaw was parked outside the only store we’d seen for miles. A teenage girl crouched beside it, looking at her reflection in the tiny rearview mirror.
    The dusty breeze coming through the bus’s open windows began to smell of salt, which meant we were nearing the coast. We stopped at a tea shop. The passengers mobbed the counter, demanding milk tea and fish rolls. A glass container with