This was in college, a week before she went back to her boyfriend, and I wandered at night, looking for just one star in the dead city sky.

We were wrapped in an army blanket. She said, “You’re just another bourgeois deadweight.”

Her grandfather was a revolutionary. Hence her position.

“What was your address again?”

“Fuck you,” she said.

I bit her arm. “Now, now.”

“Fuck you,” she said again. Her eyes were pale almonds in the
candlelight. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t need your approval.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“I love you,” I said. This was true.

“Just because I believe in something,” she said.

“I believe in something.” I uncrossed her arms, and took her nipple to my lips, and kissed it. “I believe in you. I believe in your hips and your thighs, your belly and your breasts.”

She softened against me.

“I believe in your knees and knuckles, your warm breath.”

I felt her fingers in my hair.

“I just don’t believe that any damn one of us is going to save the world.”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. She stood up and found her jeans, put them on. She tucked her underwear into the back pocket.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“To find a better lay.”

“Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Lunch,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Craig Hase’s work has previously appeared in Pilgrimage and Xen: A Buddhist Review, and he regularly contributes book reviews to the Crestone Eagle. He was awarded the Abrams Prize for Narrative Nonfiction at Connecticut College in 2000, where he received his B.A. in English and Creative Writing the same year. Currently, he lives and works at Crestone
Mountain Zen Center in southern Colorado, and he is a monk-in-training in the Soto Lineage of Zen Buddhism.