I don’t remember how I heard about the burned girl.  Probably it was my new friend Scot, with his spiritual leanings and whom I was seeing a lot of at that time, who told me.  A new friend is useful in the kind of crisis that ensues when you are cutting your old life loose, or have had it cut loose for you.  A new friend finds you starkly alone, sees you naked of attachment the way you cannot yet bear to see yourself.  A new friend accepts you, even loves you, for your freedom, in a way that you realize you will have to come to, but cannot imagine how.  My old friends felt like daggers then, pinning me to a shared history that was tearing painfully and an identity that was crumbling away.

The burned girl was so young, only nineteen or twenty, and had come to stay at the nearby Buddhist monastery.  After she disappeared one night, a few of the monks had been delegated to search the adjacent autumn forest for a sign of her.  They found a note under a rock at the base of a huge old tree, next to the charred remains of what was identified as her body.  Apparently, she had drunk most of a bottle of wine and then with kerosene and matches, intentionally, unimaginably, set herself on fire.

Well, certainly it was shocking.  And sad.  And in the midst of my own ordinary troubles, I found myself thinking about her all the time.  Night after night I put two worried children to bed with a look in my eye they had learned, I guess, to understand as meaning they had better not resist.  I would open my nightly bottle of wine, settle in front of the TV, and instead of seeing whatever old movie or sordid sitcom was on the screen, I saw a young girl walking through dark woods.  I pictured her as a very serious girl, wide-eyed under a shaven head.  I wondered what she had revealed in her note.  Had she done it all holy and fiery like some modern Joan of Arc, conceiving of her act as the only way to cut through the material matrix that bound her and go straight to God?  I wondered, when it was begun, had she changed her mind?

Most of my mental energy was otherwise spent in an effort not to remember certain things I had heard (his tone of voice, a woman’s breathy message on our machine), or seen (scented letters, hidden photographs), or even to think.  If I let myself relax in any way, I was swamped with imagined visions of their lovemaking and an awareness of my abandonment that left me literally gasping like one drowning.  My heartfelt intention to carry on as usual with everyday concerns was unsuccessful.  Not surprising considering the minimal amount of cognitive force that was left free.  I more than once found myself parked at the Grand Union unable to remember why I was there.  Sitting in the car, plowed snow piled all around me, hours might pass before the cold or dark cut through my trance to remind me of buses unmet or children unfetched.  Often I lost myself in thoughts about the burned girl.  I watched her walking through the fall woods; the leaves so fragrant, the pine needles like spice, the soil dark and moist and sweet as if the coming winter had suffused all dying things with a last great intensity of essence and being.  Had she noticed every tiny mushroom?  Every birdsong noted and leading to the question, “Is that my last?”  Or were her senses already withdrawn into herself and focused on that inner path to vast imaginary space?  Did she hear a distant chainsaw marking someone’s attention to coming need, or was her mind already out scouting ahead, gathering signs of the other world she was making for?  Could she just have been trying to make somebody sorry?

The winter ground on, exceedingly small.  Sometime in the middle of it I was informed, at some volume, over the telephone, after repeatedly insisting on being told the truth, that the person I had lived with for twenty years was happy with his new love, and did not intend to return.  “So that’s it,” I repeated to myself, not very poetically.  “So that’s it,” over and over like a mantra as if it settled everything and would point me marching toward my new life.  But in reality, I was fastened to a post by a chain of refusal that dragged my purposeless steps around and around in a circle, wearing a rut so deep I forgot there was a world above my head.

And I thought about the burned girl endlessly, compulsively, even to wondering why I thought about her.  I was twice her age at least, and tied to a life whose facts added up to nothing: no marriage, no job, no skills, and no sense of direction.  The details of daily life were an external machine that marched me about to its own rhythm and requirements.  And then, more disturbing than the feelings I had suffered in the midst of the initial pain, feelings whose intensity could not be stood for long, was the fear that dawned now—that this lifelessness could go on forever.  There was nothing to stop it.  I imagined the burned girl’s face under the rigorous scalp; the luminous eyes seeing everything, the rare but glowing smile.  I remembered that I had cut my hair drastically once, when just about her age.  Home from college where I was failing classes and could not settle on a major, I began hacking away at my long hair with a vengeance born of self-loathing and the conviction that my life was at stake.  Cutting away to uncover the core of me, the solid real center of something, I found nothing but an ugly appearance.  Family members politely ignored the episode.  I returned to school, buried myself in two more semesters, and then escaped the terror that was closing in on me by marrying my high school love.

As the cold weeks went by and my situation did not improve, I considered enrolling in one of the weekend retreats offered at the monastery.  Even before I learned about the burned girl I had wondered what monastery life was like.  I had read a little about it; early rising for sitting meditations, simple meals, simple work, more meditation, healing silences.  I’d had a fantasy of being happy there.

But one day Scot mentioned offhandedly that, in his experience, there was a monk who would walk amongst the meditators and strike with a cane anyone whose attention seemed to be wandering.

When I was eight years old, my mother, hoping to smooth over my extreme physical awkwardness, enrolled me in a ballet class recommended by one of her friends.  The teacher, an old bony woman with an indecipherable accent, had been a member of the Russian ballet, which supposedly excused her method of instruction.  This method consisted of smart and unexpected whacks with a cane as well as verbal abuse directed at any girl assuming an incorrect or sloppy posture.  I, predictably, was the most frequent recipient of the hateful, humiliating strokes.  (Not only did I never learn any ballet, I refused to dance at all until college, when I learned to drink as well.)  Scot’s assertion shocked me enough that I looked no further into monastery matters.

One night in February, I awoke in a panic.  I was accustomed to those dark hours of wine insomnia, but this was something different.  What was going on?  Even as I tried to remind myself that what I was afraid of had already happened, waves of panic began to build and my breath became shallower and shallower.  I fought to breathe at all, convinced I was dying.  Somehow, it was by thinking of the burned girl with her deliberate horrible purpose that I slowed the gasping and relaxed myself to sleep.

A thaw came in mid-March.  It was impossible to tell if it was the real thing or one of those false starts that spring sometimes gives us.  I conceived the desire to climb to the top of High Point Mountain, with some idea that I could breathe freely up there and shake off this thing that was strangling me from the inside.  The trail was still fairly deep in snow and it took five hard hours of struggling to get to the top.  Emerging onto a bald rock height, I saw the sky opened wide around me.  The heat of the sun was surprising and I reeled a little.  Giddily taking in the view, I was satisfied to see something that surprised and pleased me.  Down in the valley, the landscape seemed all roads and stores, houses and wires—the forest all neatly parceled and tamed.  But from the top of the mountain there was just one blanket of trees that stretched out in all directions, connecting everything.  There was enough coniferous forest that even at the end of winter this was so.  “The monastery would be about there,” I thought, looking west, “and my house over in that direction.”  I traced my finger in a line to the east.  It was one forest connecting those two places.  And, somewhere in between, the place where the burned girl died.  The trip down was much easier than going up had been, but for days I ached from the unfamiliar exertion.  It felt good to have real physical pain to contain me.

In April, I went into the woods.  I can place the date exactly on the fourth because the third had been my daughter’s seventh birthday and after sleepwalking through her party like I did everything else, I had arranged for her and her brother to stay with friends.  By the time I finished packing a satchel with a sleeping bag, a notebook and pen, a bottle of Merlot and an opener, some matches and a small bottle of kerosene, it was late afternoon.  The woods were already soft and darkening when I walked in by the trail behind my house.  In no time at all it was too dark to see, so I wrapped myself in the sleeping bag and sat at the foot of an old pine, on the side out of the wind.  I was surprised how comfortable I felt.  The sound of the wind stirring the branches of the trees just added to my sense of security.  I opened the wine and took a long draught out of the bottle.  A wave of emotion hit me, so foreign and unexpected and mixed.  There was real joy in it, like I couldn’t remember ever feeling and maybe had only read about.  There was sadness too, heavy, heavy sadness and an achey, stretchy feeling like something in my chest was changing shape and breaking apart in the transformation.  I poured out some kerosene onto a small pile of twigs and leaves.  The light shot out all gawky angles and shadows when I lit the match, as if the fire had changed the shape of the world around me.  Comfort was banished as presences seemed to move at the perimeter of the light.  I wanted to touch the burned girl.  I didn’t know her name, I didn’t know anything about her I hadn’t imagined, except the way she chose to die.  Maybe I wasn’t dying, but it was by default only and by way of some stubborn blind persistence that didn’t feel anything like being alive.  I wrote her this, and what I imagined she felt.  I wrote what we might have said to each other had we met with open and knowing hearts.  I wrote how angry I was that she had thrown away the youth I wanted back.  I poured out my regret, imagining myself at home that night, all unknowing and self-absorbed, while not far away she entered the forest alone.  I tried to describe how I felt like her double and her mother and her child, all at the same time.  I mailed the letter by burning it a page at a time in the fire.

The burned girl didn’t seem like Joan of Arc to me now, just small and lost and scared.  I watched her in my mind’s eye as the whole world receded from her in some terrible tide that had no return, but receded forever.  I cried for her, and in my tears felt I had found her in that bright and dark place.  I felt myself go to her and hold her while she burned, believing she would somehow know that I had put my own burnt heart next to hers and there, in the fire, loved her.

 

© Lisa Starger 2002.