At the statue of Buddha.

This is an essay I wrote for class. I’m never going to do anything with it otherwise, so I thought I would print it here.

I once went to a place in southern Oregon where there is a white Buddha statue the size of a large elephant. It sits, fat-bellied and serenely smiling, under a particolored Chinese-style gazebo, from which hang in fluttering ropes flags that carry the prayers of the statue’s more spiritual — and therefore, to some degree, literal — pilgrims. All around roll verdant hills and grass obese with recent rain, and one could just as easily convince himself he was in rural Jiangxi Provice as in the mountains just north of the California border. The place not truly very remote — not far away, perhaps twenty-five minutes by car, is the reasonably sizeable city of Medford, which is flat and brown and ugly — but it feels as far removed from the world as a dream, or a vision. I suppose it was chosen for that reason.

I went there with a woman. No — that’s not true. I went there with a girl. I was myself not a man but a boy: I was nineteen, and she was just short of her twentieth birthday. We had once, months before, fallen into each other’s arms in a dark dorm room. Shortly thereafter she broke my heart by returning to her high school boyfriend. Now, in late summer, shortly before returning for our sophomore year, we were here, trying to piece together whatever was left of our friendship. I didn’t know it at the time, but it wouldn’t work. It has never worked, not for me. We were young, and doomed, and deeply sad, and we were setting a pattern I was to follow for a long time thereafter.

Her name was J-. She was taller than me, with a regal, aquiline nose and hair she kept trimmed short, and I admired greatly her vast reserves of energy and sarcastic way with a phrase. She could be cruel — it was always hard to tell if it was intentional — and changeable. The last two fingers on my right hand were still numb from having cracked my ulnar nerve on the post of her bed that morning as we wrestled, ludicrously, intensely rehearsing for a sex life we would never have together.

She led me away from the statue of Buddha, up into a clutch of Douglas fir trees where the wind blew cold and carried with it great dollops of fog, moveable penumbrae that shot between the trunks in silky skeins. Eventually we came to the lip of a sheer, vertiginous drop. The fog barrelled headlong over it and into the invisible depths beyond. We stood, woozy, and held one another for balance, for warmth, for reassurance.

 *

The collapse was depressingly typical — jealousy, anger, hurt feelings on both sides — but mercifully brief, and with the wild resilience of the young we moved on. It happened just two weeks after we stood on the edge of a cliff, strangely, sexlessly in love. We yelled a lot. I don’t remember what about, anymore, other than that we never wanted to see one another again. It was the only thing we could agree on.

We didn’t speak for years afterward. I tried many times to write about the Buddha on the hill, the foggy forest, the cliff, and us, but I could never get it quite right. I could never decide what it meant. I had this vast sense of having done something hugely, terribly wrong, but I was too youthful, too stupid, to figure out what it was. I realize now it must have been having lived for months with the wound of having been left, trying, trying, trying to fix it by getting her to come back. It turned me inside out, made me bitter and strange, and eventually my attitude of perpetual grievance ceased to be fair and became, instead, hurtful. But by the time I figured that out, it was much too late, and I wasn’t even quite sure I cared anymore. I left her a note of apology once, in the middle of a drunken night of self-recrimination, but if she ever replied (I don’t remember) I never read it.

We were about to graduate when she found me again, in the middle of the week-long bacchanalia that seniors at our school had while everybody else took finals in spring. I was standing on a beach just south of San Diego, by myself, soft water licking my toes, smoking, feeling very, very cool. I was a little drunk. Not nearly as drunk as the people splayed along the beach in clutches of last-minute sex — just enough to feel romantic and sad about myself. Now, years later, I wish I had only had the wit to find my way into one of those piles, naked, writhing — living. But that wasn’t me. It still isn’t, really.

She arrived at my side, and she said, “Hello.”

We didn’t say very much. I believe I told her I had missed her all those years, and in saying it I realized it was true. She said she had missed me, too, and though it’s impossible to see through another person’s web of artifice and pity and genuine feeling, I believed then — I believe now — that she meant it. I believe she meant it because eventually she put her arms around my waist and we stood there, swaying, watching the ocean, until the sun rose, and neither of us felt the need to say goodbye when we parted.