Confession

is a stripping away of protection

Confession was spurred by the memory of a tiny cliff side dwelling in the Himalaya, where my exhausted, feverish body had been laid in a horse manger, as if to die, by a family who had taken me in, sheltered me and fed me rice beer (the only sustenance I could take) day after day, but who were helpless to remedy the dysentery I had contracted, eating tainted food along the trail.

As I approached the shadowed edge of what I was sure was my last farewell, I found the greatest surprise to be not my imminent disappearance, but the fact that I had had a discrete name and identity or even a life at all, and that I had placed so much emphasis on its preservation. At the culmination of my feverish understanding I found myself laughing out loud at the absurdity of individual identity, looking out of the straw-lined horse manger like a mad man. It was of course, the very moment when I began to feel that I might live once more, and as if that discrete sense of myself might survive to cause me further trouble.