It was beautiful in the woods that day. I haven’t said this enough—how beautiful it was at the Center. I felt it the most on that climb to Serena’s tent, my mouth swollen, the trees sturdy on either side of me, their leaves glowing bright green in the sun, casting a chiaroscuro of warmth and shade across the verdant ground. The clean smell of pine and rock, the shuddering, singing air, the soothing empty fullness of the mountain. Something almost like the Feeling crept into my limbs.

I had kissed Luke, and he had kissed me back. But now, as I climbed, the thrill began to wear off, and I found that underneath it was that same dull shame. Why, when I had gotten what I could finally admit I had wanted all along? I have my theories now. But that girl there, pressing her palms against her hips to try to reclaim the feeling of the first hands that had ever touched her that way, though not the last, not by far—she doesn’t see that she was trying to put her tongue in her father’s mouth. She doesn’t recognize him in all that makeup. But she feels the falsity all the same.

Desire is the root of all suffering, the Buddha taught.

A memory: once, when I was a child, I saw a beautiful blue backpack covered in little gray ponies in a store window. I wanted it desperately, of course. Horses, etc. I threw myself at my parents’ feet in supplication. My father laughed and stepped backward. My mother picked me up by the shoulders, reset me to standing, brushed off my knees. They tugged me away. It was too expensive, and besides, I already had a backpack. I became inconsolable, dragging my small feet, sobbing. The world had ended. I could not live without my pretty pony backpack.

Eventually, my father knelt in front of me. “You’re miserable,” he said, “because you don’t have what you want.”

I nodded.

“But yesterday, you had never seen that backpack, and you were happy.”

I guessed this was true.

“So what is creating the unhappiness?”