The days were getting hotter. I felt roasted, as on a spit, eight thousand feet high. We continued to meet at night, to give ourselves the Feeling, to play at lightness, but during the day, Serena said that it was too hot, too hot to do anything that mattered. We spent hours on the rock palm, eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches and popcorn and the small frosted cakes Serena liked and never seemed to run out of, drinking warm, sweet lemonade that grew warmer and sweeter as the day went on. Laurel plucked everyone’s eyebrows, even mine, into perfect comets. One afternoon, Janet taught me to do a cartwheel, which no one could believe I didn’t already know how to do, while Serena and Laurel sat back and gave us grades on form (very poor, in my case), writing numbers on their palms in eyeliner and holding them up. Janet taught us all to play poker; we made bets with small stones. Serena said it was purer that way. The fact that Janet won every game might have also been a factor. But most of all, I remember space. I remember doing nothing, but doing it together, which made it something after all. Now when I put a dish in the microwave for thirty seconds I am paralyzed by the discomfort of unorganized time. Is thirty seconds enough to read something? Check the weather? Pee? I reach for anything to occupy me, but now I’ve spent all of my time wondering how I should spend it, and the machine beeps, and I have purpose again.

“What do you know about emptiness?” Serena said on one of these days, draped over a rock, her fingertips in the grass.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Good answer,” Janet said, and the other two laughed.

I thought, before, that emptiness meant nothingness. But that’s not it, or not quite. Serena explained it: Emptiness doesn’t mean that nothing exists, but rather that nothing has a fixed identity or importance. While the objects and people and phenomena that populate our experience are there, in a relative way, they have no inherent nature, no ultimate existence. Rather they are in constant flux, acting and acted upon, utterly subjective and unstable.

“You think that the things around you are real,” Serena said. “You think that they mean something, and that you—that is, the impermanent, illusory construct that you call you—can somehow possess them. But if you realize that you can’t, then you will begin to lose the pain that comes with attachment. You will shed the agony of clinging to solid concepts. Like the earth, for one. Like your body. Even your thoughts.” Everything she was saying felt new and familiar at once. It was as if I’d lived with a set of books on my shelves for years, walked past their spines every day, and had only just now taken one down to read it.