We sat there for some time in silence, meditating. I opened my eyes. She was staring directly at me, his thin lips tightly sealed. Was she waiting for me to speak? I closed my eyes again, hoping he would break the silence. But every time I opened them, I would see her glaring at me expectantly. She was waiting for me. He was waiting for me. I would I have to say something. I took a deep breath and began my confession.

At last I reached the clearing. I made sure to keep myself hidden at the edge of the tree line as the two figures scrambled their way towards the steep green bank on the far side. Somehow I knew they would come here, to the bunker, to the hideout I had discovered just a few days earlier. Or was it weeks? It was always so hard to tell. But in this moment for the first time in what felt like a lifetime I was experiencing some kind of clarity. The emotion in my chest had blasted through the dull translucent screen and I was able to see the world through the lens of past, present and future all at once. I was like a comic book character who’d been liberated from their two-dimensional plane, seeing depth for the first time.

When all is erased, what’s left? What’s left of me? “You’re confusing your true self with your ego,” they would say. “The ego is a tightly wrapped knot of past pain that we’re trying to unravel together. And by unravelling it you are helping not just yourself but the whole of humanity to move on from eons of accumulated sorrow and hurt and anger and bitterness and resentment that leads to fear and persecution and violence. Don’t you want us to be from all that?” I could hear those evening lectures playing in my head with no difficulty. There was no harsh texture trying to sand them out of existence. But every time I tried to think back to before this time, if there even was a before this time, I met with the same resistance. There was only one road back. The music. The strings of melodies and rhythms that coiled together into a thick rope that pulled me back to…to…

We share in the delight of the morning warmth, not yet baked into the oppressive heat that is sure to come. Our female companions are just in front of us, singing and holding hands. We are all wearing the compulsory Goan hippie garb that almost all young Westerners wear in these parts. The locals eye us bemusedly, not understanding why we don’t choose to deck ourselves in the Levi’s, Addidas and Nike that we can so obviously afford. No, we prefer to dress in cheap, loose-fitting rags: believing ourselves freed from our habitual consumerist trappings, we dress ourselves up in new ones.

We’re running. Our clothes are soaked, and our shoes are full of water. But after those hot, dry weeks in India, there is a sweet relief in England’s insistent rains. As we climb a grassy slope, I tug hard at Ethan’s drenched sweater, causing him to lose his footing and slip backwards onto his bum. I laugh and dart past him, but he manages to get hold of my ankle just in time. And then I’m next to him, splayed out on the grass, laughing wildly. Up ahead we see some shelter in the form of an abandoned wartime pill box, sitting up on the crest of the hill. We get up and move towards it. Ethan gets there first and immediately starts clambering up into one of its loopholes. I hesitate, but he’s already inside beckoning me to join him. Once we’re both inside we sit and catch our breath. We’re so wet that shelter seems almost pointless, though there is some respite from the continual lashings of wind. I look into Ethan’s eyes. Are they really green, as he always claims, or just subtle mixtures of yellows and blues? I lean in to inspect closer, but he reaches out with his lips to intercept me. We’re shivering and kissing and kissing and shivering. And forgetting. Forgetting everything that isn’t this moment. Forgetting the lonely past and the threat of more loneliness to come. Forgetting that he’ll be going away soon.

It was always difficult to focus so early in the morning. Having been summoned from your bed before sunrise, you found yourself somewhere between sleeping and waking, the mind dancing between trails of half-finished thoughts cloaked in wisps of memory as it tried, again and again, to anchor itself on the breath. This is why they used the soft songs of the singing bowls to help remind you of your focus. And then, gradually, the sound would swell like the sea, its waves seeming to emanate from the walls around you, penetrating your thoughts and rescuing you from the vague comforts of memory, erasing all those little tunes that got stuck in your ear, that threatened to take you away with them into the past.