Free Wreck and Order by Hannah Tennant-Moore Page A

chocolate and crackers had a sign that said FOR MILITARY ONLY . As we continued into Jaffna, street signs, buildings, and vehicles coalesced into what felt like a large, developed city. Shamefully, I was disappointed. I’d been expecting a wretched warscape. The bus deposited us at a bustling roundabout. The first rickshaw driver I flagged down didn’t speak English. I opened my guidebook to the map of Jaffna and pointed out the guesthouse I’d chosen for its promise of a talkative owner “whose memories are as fascinating as they are tragic.” When the rickshaw turned down a narrow road leading to the sea, the landscape shifted so dramatically that I jerked upright, my hand covering my open mouth. The fruit stands and tea shops and buses had given way to detritus: bullet-riddled walls with no roofs. A baby’s cry rang out from behind an old sheet covering one of the gaping holes. A man in a plaid shirt and khakis stood in the yard of one of these bombed-out homes, talking on a mobile phone.
    The guesthouse was at the end of this road, facing a dirty strip of sand before the flat sea. The words “Seaview Inn” were spray-painted on a piece of cardboard leaning against the house. The windows were boarded up. The driver cut the engine and smiled, waiting for his fare. Part of me wanted to get out and knock on the door of this decrepit house. Maybe there was someone inside; maybe his tragic stories would justify the mosquitoes and dirty sheets and fearsome bedtime aloneness. But I was too cowardly to take a risk that promised only unknown difficulties, no hope of fun or pleasure. I chose another guesthouse at random and showed it to the driver on the map.
    The Purple Inn was clean and dowdy, owned by a plump family with whom I communicated through elaborate hand gestures punctuated by laughter. The only other guests were Sinhalese—Buddhist Sri Lankans from the South—who’d come to visit the part of their country that had been off-limits for so long. Overwhelmed by the day’s bustle after weeks at Shirmani, I got in bed before eight, missing the rowdy Europeans at Rose Land and the long-term meditators crunching biscuits. I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of Jared’s improbably comfortable bed, a futon on top of an old box spring. How he pressed me into the hard mattress when he came. His hoarse bleating in time to the spasms of his legs. The moment afterward, when he fell on me. The helplessness of his dead weight. Jared’s body unmediated by Jared. Sometimes, even if the sex was short and sudden and brought me little physical pleasure, the moment of Jared’s collapse was pure love, wanting only goodness for another person, feeling only gratitude for my capacity to provide that goodness. Other times, the moment was such sadness that I never wanted to have sex again, to avoid the awful loneliness of being left behind. Jared’s chest crushing my lungs and his shoulder smashed against my mouth. I rolled onto my stomach in the hard guesthouse bed, one hand on my breast and one hand between my legs. His penis falling out of me when he sighed, skin softening against my swollen opening.
    It felt good to long for Jared, something accessible that also longed for me. Why couldn’t I be earnest alongside him? That’s what I was trying to say, in my profane way, to the long-term meditator who couldn’t get a visa: Even at a silent meditation center, it’s nearly impossible to feel reality, unadulterated by worries and preferences. What if I could do this in the context of intimacy—lean back again and again, return to the constancy of the breath, that other way of understanding my life? What if I could accept my helplessness every time Jared ordered one too many shots and then stayed out for days with his phone shut off? He would come back on his own, he always did. There was nothing I could do to force his return. Wouldn’t I rather bear the discomfort he caused me on my own than spend days obsessing and