Himalayan Retreat

November.

My spirits rise as we weave into the mountains, stars above and lights below. I immediately feel safer in the well-known streets; everyone, Tibetan, Indian, foreign, seems much more relaxed, friendlier. The sun breaks over the peaks as I sit at breakfast at 6 a.m., fresh off the bus, waiting for a monastery’s guest house to open.

But the friend I’ve hoped to visit is away, and the surge of peace is temporary. It slips away with the afternoon, and succumbs under the final blow — a mistaken meal I knew I should not touch.

It’s the last time I’ll eat in McLeodganj. Once or twice I day, I haul myself out of bed to fetch crackers and ginger ale, then return to continue the complete withdrawal. I reject all stimuli and fall into distraction, total avoidance of any real stimuli. The wallpaper is too much; to look out the window would be exhausting.

Three days of shutdown. Then, slowly slowly, I realize that I can feel again. That I had not let myself feel fear, not since that moment, that night I took the wrong train — waiting for the general ticketing cars at one o’clock in the morning, I shut it off. A blank dark blind pit filling with fear deep in my chest, heavy hurting holding my heart until the theft, until waiting with the police in the darkening city when it broke, overflowing into my mind to be too much, until I felt and purged it. Until I rested and let it in.

Slowly slowly, I woke up into freedom. Liberated, I returned to Delhi, able to breathe, experience, and enjoy.