This summer, when I arrived alone at the Zen temple with a toothbrush, two T-shirts, and a notebook, what had I been hoping for? Some semblance of freedom, surely.

The mornings were agonizing in their simplicity. Wake-up bell at 5:30, Earl Grey in four forceful sips, then sitting, stiff and still, till half-past 7. The point, as I understood it, was to sit with “presence,” but the only thing I could be present for was a terrible, itchy grief for the people I missed. By this, I mean the moments, feelings, and sensations I would never get back in their most actual, most vivid manifestations. Still, they were mine insofar as anything was mine. As ideas, memories, hauntings. Orange carnations and asters, a glimmering birthday party, safety in a room besides my own.

So, I sat, every morning and every evening, meditating on pretty faces and pretty words, and also fairly often on pretty faces and dreadful words. This felt like a failure in the only way possible. I was not approaching freedom; I was merely growing increasingly aware of and exasperated by my distance from it. 

In those weeks, my personal losses felt so great, and in many ways they were. I found quietude only in the chanting and bowing portion of the morning services. By then (it would be almost time for breakfast), physical hunger would kindly overtake my attention, and the repetitions (“Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā,” nine bows) would lull me into a state of near ease. Motion has a way of dissolving, or at the very least softening, the austerities of the mind. This necessity for movement became an urgent observation for me—one that informed, consciously or unconsciously, my demeanor and hence my reality in the ensuing months.

***

The idea of transferring schools occurred to me during my stay at the temple on a routine afternoon walk to the ocean. It was an idea that landed lightly but, once settled, wouldn’t be shaken. My sudden obsession with making such a dramatic change to my circumstances surprised me, and I took this response seriously. Could it be enough, I considered, to feel called to something? Eventually, I decided that it was. I came to see it as the only thing—apart, possibly, from duty—that could ever make anything worthwhile. 

So, the following semester, I made my plans to leave. I did it quietly, with effort, occasional assurance, and frequent doubt. Most of my goodbyes happened over the course of a couple of days. I said, I’ll miss you; I said, I can’t believe this; I said, I wish you all the best. I said, I’m excited. I’m scared. I said, Stay hungry and keep your dreams close. I said, Do you really think I’ll make any friends? Someone said, Of course I do. Someone said, I believe in you. I’ll really miss you, but this is what’s right.

While packing my bags to move across the country, nostalgia reminded me of the recent other times I’ve left a place to start over somewhere else. 

The morning after my high school graduation, I stood weeping on the side of a gravel road, waving goodbye to my 62 classmates as they set off to begin new lives in new places. The dramatics of the memory are sweet and poignant to me even now. How wonderful to have cared about something enough for its ending to have felt earth-shattering.

Soon after, I found myself alone on a flight to Nepal, where I would spend three months away from the home I knew, slowly discovering a new one in a group of dissimilar but miraculously compatible strangers. Eventually, it ended, as everything must. I spent weeks upon weeks having dreams about the people on the trip. The moments, feelings, and sensations I would never get back in their most actual, most vivid manifestations. 

The rest of the year brought more of the same. Being alone and uncertain but hopeful; arriving someplace new; becoming attached to new people; parting ways. Doing it over again. By the time I arrived in Southern California for college, I thought I had mastered this cyclical process, more or less. I had not anticipated the intensity of the forthcoming cycle, nor how short it would be.

***

Now, once again, I am faced with the propensity of abrupt change to illuminate the fragmentation of the self. 

I am here—in New England, in Rhode Island, in the dining hall, at the table in the corner. Eating one of those obscure ingredient waffles from the do-it-yourself machine. Thinking only of how much you liked these waffles—whether you liked the taste or doing it yourself, I was never quite sure. Thinking of how I refused to touch them until the day there was nothing else I could be bothered to eat; the day that hadn’t happened until today, when there was no herbivore section and no one else’s flipped waffle to wait on, and so, finally, I felt the urge to do it myself. It strikes me now as deeply bizarre that I struggled for drastic change only to find comfort in repeating what once was.

Sometimes I want to beg to be remembered. By you. By others. It seems ridiculous. To be the one who left, and still be so deeply consumed by all the things from which I craved such distance. But the truth is that moving on from anything meaningful is an unrealistic expectation. If not generally, then at least immediately.

***

Life is a perpetual series of endings and beginnings. I don’t think it’s fruitful or even all that interesting to try to fight this. Each new transition is not necessarily easier in virtue of past experience, but the sense of inbetweenness and fragmentation does grow more familiar. I’ve done this before. I’m doing it all the time. I am here, and I am there. In the past, I was there, and I was here, too. We are always in multiple places and times at once. We are dreaming and we are being and there is no firm distinction between the two.

The morning of my final flight out of the Ontario airport, my friend Millie sent me the following text: Just because we leave a place behind doesn’t mean we can’t take it with us and keep it forever. I’ll keep everything and everyone from every chapter of my life with me always. There is no other choice. Loss is a given, but so is the persistence of connection and care by means of the human spirit. If we’ve ever crossed paths, we’ll know each other forever.