"Who is bored?"

I had dinner with Lucas at a Thai restaurant tonight and he let me order. A waitress walked by with a tray of candles and he said, “two, please”. He held one candle up to my face before he set it down and stared at me with his wide, ruminating eyes. “Do you see how the light changes your appearance? There is a glow reflecting off of the white parts. Do you see?”

Lucas asked me if I’d seen Damien recently and if he was still as self-centered as before. I said that he might be, but he is still capable of listening to me and being present. I told him that I guess I don’t mind people with big egos and he said that that’s because I’m a screen that attracts them, so that with my passivity they can project their egos onto me.

(J left on a Thursday, and with his leaving opened up an abyss. I have found myself unanchored and floating, trying to make sense of the pieces of my heart so that I can put them back together again. I told Lucas this and he says that I’ve been given an opportunity with this pain I am guarding. He says it is breaking things up and I have been given the gift to look within myself.)

As we ate, he began talking about how we can never hold onto a moment because it is gone just as soon as it arrives. The light that reflects off of my face and onto his eyes gives him the impression that there is matter around him, but it is all a projection and it is not real. He said, “Ask yourself, ‘Who am I? Who is hearing? Who is bored?’ and in the struggle to find the answer, your mind will become quiet. The answer will come without words because it cannot be expressed with language.”

He told me to close my eyes and feel what I am, which made me giggle. Then I did close my eyes in the candle-lit restaurant and was met with my heart welling up with the sadness that I’d been trying to keep down. I opened my eyes. He said to stay with the pain and surrender to it and I will find that I can observe it from another point of view. The waitress came and filled my water.

Lucas believes that we live in a set of jails - hunger, lust, love, sadness, greed, ambition, selfishness. The jailers help us to survive, but when we realize that the doors are unlocked and venture out, we are met with a vastness and are free. It takes courage to stay out there and so we scurry back to our cells because we know them and their familiarity comforts us. And so on.

He kept on about the glass of water in front of him, how no one can describe the taste. We can only experience it by tasting it ourselves and we cannot describe it with words, no matter how we try. Though I disagreed completely, I tried to think about this as I drank a sip, but it just tasted like water. I tried to feel the vast freedom he described, the infinite experience of being alive, but it just felt like sitting in a Thai restaurant eating coconut ice cream with Lucas, him staring at me, wanting so badly for me to be free.