I.
Sometime around my twentieth birthday I spoke with the second black man I’d ever met. It was in the decaying parking lot of a Kmart, the sort of place where fading yellow rectangles wait for visitors that are never coming back. I was a stranger. Don’t trust them I’d been warned. I can still feel the nausea of my silence. It was late fall, on an evening that felt like summer, a humid night with a buzzing gaslight overhead working up the effort to contest the twilight. I remember the greenery and broken blacktop, tendrils pushing up into the oily scented air. What I’m trying to say is I was alone and afraid. I apologized because I couldn’t spare any money for the man to get back to Detroit for the funeral. He said God bless and harried by his grief hurried across the parking lot looking for a way onto the next train. I can say for certain one of us lied. We both apologized for it.
II.
The Backwards Glance
I realize I am dying. As a child, you always know what’s important by what the adults don’t say. Children start out in life asking questions about what’s important to understand. Birth, old age, sickness, death. Three of these launched the Buddha on his path of awakening, but by that time the Buddha was no longer a child. Like most of us, he had to find new questions and work backwards. The Buddha could have asked: How did the baby get into her belly? Do animals have feelings? Why did the old neighbor go away? Maybe he did when he was a boy and forgot, but I suspect the Buddha’s little son didn’t forget to ask why his father left. I bet the boy thought he did something wrong. What else could provoke a man to leave his child and become a Buddha? I mentioned that I realize I am dying. It’s happening little by little, day by day, in the usual way. This doesn’t make me happy or sad. I understand adults better now, but don’t think I can ever be one.
III.
Dark Mountain
It seems impossible to pinpoint the exact moment I made a decision worthy of my regrets. I didn’t intend for this oversight to happen and it’s troubling because I want to feel responsible. I want to know my regrets matter. Writing this is hard, like keeping a snowflake hidden in your mouth. I write things like this because I’ve been reading about the old Zen ancestors again. It helps to laugh out loud the moment you realize you’re helpless. By this I don’t mean you can’t do anything because you can always do something. What I mean is you’re helpless, and yes, I realize I’m doing it again. Paradoxically, the only strategy worth a damn in this predicament is to help and keep helping. Keep saving all beings and failing miserably. Writing this way makes me want to fess up about something. When I learned the Zen Patriarch Bodhidharma was called the red-bearded, blue-eyed barbarian I felt proud and searched for a painting depicting him with red hair. I couldn’t find one.
IV.
Trust yourself. The words hang in the air like a fog and I feel the sting of salt in my eyes. The tears have come from somewhere. I’m sitting in a chair across from a man dressed in black who is older than me. He is gazing back at me openly, seemingly not waiting for anything. Small convulsions make their way into my jaw, prehistoric words with no form or sound bubbling up through what feels like layer upon layer of waiting. A century of waiting squeezed into my 41 years. No explanations come, and I hear the words again from just beyond the range of my senses. Trust yourself. No one has spoken. In this moment I’m describing, everything is perfect. Sadness is perfect. Loss is perfect. Every imperfection in love is perfect. Although my mind wavers now and then towards its familiar river of stories, the stillness remains. We keep sitting, the sun is warm through the window. The man cocks an eyebrow and asks me, now do I have any questions?
❧
