"So I want to ask, why is your husband's name on your outgoing message? I mean, he's not there to answer it or anything..."

Yesterday I went to the zen temple down near the Whole Foods on Ashland for the first time in months. I've meditated a handful of times in my house since my previous visit, but my practice has been erratic at best. On Saturday night I knew that if I did nothing else on Sunday I should to go to the morning meditation session. And so I did.

I don't sleep well without S and even less well with my new neighbor and her hammering away on my ceiling, her steps here her steps there, her dog's scritch-scratch patternmaking across the floor. I woke up when my neighbor came home around 2 or so in the morning, then again when she got up to take the dog out around 7. Since I fell back asleep, I didn't leave the house until 9:30, the same time the first gong sounds to begin. I got there a half hour late, snuck into the main room and sat on one of the chairs that were lined up behind the lines of cushions toward the back. The chairs are for people whose knees can't handle sitting down on the cushion and for people like me, late people who don't want to disturb the sitters by walking in front of them or tripping over the knees of the taller folks whose legs are just too long.

The Sunday morning service consists of two 20-minute meditation sessions, some chanting, and a little sermonette at the end where everyone gathers together on the floor and the meditation leader discusses a topic, perhaps reads a poem or two, and then gives the announcements. The sessions are perfectly quiet. Everyone tries to sit still (there are always some fidgeters) and the purpose is to try to stop thinking about anything at all except the fact that you are breathing. It's hard. Really hard. Especially if you're tired or distracted, or like me, always battling the revision of past conversations and the fantasies of future ones. In my mind I will run through every possible scenario for any given situation, even situations that have yet to come to pass. And there are endless possibilities. Even when I sleep my nights are cluttered with subconscious chatter, dreams and images and scenarios, an endless stream of one after another. It's exhausting, which is why zen teaches that you're only truly at rest when you're meditating even though you're wide awake and sitting up with your back straight, your legs tangled together, and your eyes open. When I concentrate on my breathing and stop all that patter for even a few moments I see things just a little more clearly than before. It's a wonder to me why I don't do it more often when I know it's so good for me, but then I guess I'm not the first to know what I should do and not do it anyway.

Yesterday's sermonette seemed to have no real direction, which is not so unusual. Every time I've gone to the Sunday service I tell myself that the next time I'll skip out before the little get-together starts. Every time, though, I stay anyway because I think that perhaps this time will be different, this time the sermonette will be filled with insight and send me off for the rest of my day thinking about how beauty is found in impermanence or how change is inevitable and it's okay. Yesterday's sermonette was too much like a sermon for me. It was about how we have to eat right and not be promiscuous and "take care of the earth" and all that other blah blah blah, platitudes that sermons from all religions fall back on out of laziness, I guess, laziness on the part of the sermon givers and the listeners. I'm not promiscuous. I already eat fine. Anyone who's meditating at a zen temple already knows we've got to "take care of the earth." The whole thing seemed like a thrown-together, thoughtless preaching-to-the-converted little speech. It left me feeling empty.

I drove back home from the temple and the heavy clouds above me moved swiftly toward the lake as if the wind were pulling her thick winter blanket across the sky. Half way home the sun burned for a moment then slunk back under the covers, left the rest of the day that day-for-night that makes winter what it is. Autumn has been coming and going this past week. One day a January day, cold and dreary, the next, a late May or early June day, the sun shining so brightly through the half-bare trees the dingy city seems to sparkle even though the shadows are impossibly long and somber.

In the dark and dreary dead of winter S left, and in those first weeks I read and watched everything I could find about war, particularly our new twin wars that are crashing down like the twin towers they were meant to make up for. I bought Purple Hearts, a book of photographs of Iraq war vets with missing limbs, faces turned into craggily topographical maps from the flames of their burned-to-the-core humvees. I watched every Frontline special I could about the wars and the "soldier's heart" over the internet and cried when I thought of S having to kill someone in order not to be killed. I feverishly read several books about Afghanistan and poured over essays and polemics about our wars and our policy, analyzing it all on my blog and tearing apart arguments I found on the web. I went to the Op Truth website every day to read the accounts of soldiers who'd come back and veterans from our other meaningless war and I knew I was there on that site reading their stories and looking at their pictures because they reminded me of S. I watched C-Span religiously because it was only there that I could hear the stories of soldiers in our forgotten wars (Then it seemed Iraq was forgotten too. Now it is somewhat in our consciousness, even if Afghanistan is as far away as it ever was.). I remember seeing an interview with a Blackhawk pilot at Walter Reed seated next to her husband, who was also in the national guard, as she cradled the prosthetic for her leg in one hand and scratched her arm with the hook at the end of her other prosthetic. A RPG shot through the bottom of her helicopter and exploded, leaving her a one-armed, one-legged woman. They were deployed to Iraq at the same time, though they had different jobs so they weren't together when she was injured. During the weeks before their deployment they had talked about possibility of one of them dying and had made amends with each other, made decisions regarding how each would adapt without the other and go on. Yet they had not talked about injury. They hadn't anticipated it and didn't know what a one-legged, one-armed life would mean. She was dead set on getting back to flying, didn't want to leave the military, but the whole time she talked her husband stared down at the prosthetic in her lap. Only occasionally did he lift his eyes and look to the camera, and when he did his eyes were water-glazed and tired.

I've thought about the possibility of S being injured in Afghanistan, and since I mull over such things and fill my mind with endless possibilities, I've had dark dreams of how we'd make our house accessible if he came home in a wheelchair or if we'd have to move. I've thought about an article I saw in Dwell about building accessible kitchens and how the countertops need to be lowered and how drawers are better than cabinets. I've thought about what it would be like to have him come home a shell of his former self, his mind blown, literally, by a too strong blast. I've imagined his skin turned into the surface of a blown volcano from a flame-fired blast, wide swaths of spilled and hardened lava, lumps and waves and craters and creases where once there was nothing but smooth skin and hair follicles. I first imagined this in Killeen when I saw a soldier whose neck was that way. The gentle dip beneath his adam's apple had been turned into a snare of balled up yarn; across his neck were raised bumps of whip-borne slashes. I've imagined buying a modified car to fit a legless S in, or rigging our computer to translate voice to text if his hands and arms were gone. I've imagined all of this and I've known I could live with it all. I've known it would be horrible, overwhelmingly so. But I've known we could deal with it.

But that question. That question.

I've thought about it ever since it was posed to me last week by a radio producer who talked to me about writing something that may or may not ever air. I've thought about that question and why it bothered me so much, why it made me want to retreat and not write for days, why it made me want to hide away and hardly do anything at all. I thought about how I was confused when she asked me that question and incensed in the way I've become accustomed these past eight months because it seemed so lacking in empathy, so insensitive, even if that wasn't the intent. I thought that perhaps the producer had never been in love, had never had a true commitment to a live-in lover, let alone ever been separated from that person. But the question didn't just anger me, it also depressed me, made the cry-at-a-moment emotion that hovers in me all the time (I feel it behind my nose and in my throat and of course behind my eyes) envelope me finally, giving me no space outside of myself.

Until yesterday I couldn't articulate why that question had bothered me so much. I knew it had, and I could articulate my anger and even my puzzlement, but I didn't know why it had made me feel so bad. After meditating yesterday morning, though, it came up in me, the obvious reason why. That question brought up the ultimate worry, the one and only worry. The one of S being gone forever, lost to me in Afghanistan and dead there.

There are only a few reasons why I'd take his name off our outgoing message: he left me or I left him, our marriage lost to that dubious statistic of "50% of all marriages fail," or he was lost to that even worse statistic, that growing number of soldiers killed in action. That question brought up the worst that could happen. It made me imagine a time when too much time had passed after his death, when I would be urged by friends and family to finally get his name off the machine, when I'd know myself it was time because it was really over and he was never coming back. And the thought of that was too much.

It seems the Latin Kings have taken over our neighborhood gang, UAC, and now they're tagging the neighborhood, leaving cryptic drawings on the sides of buildings, up and down the olive drab mail collection bin on our corner. Last week "they", those anonymous someones, went down the street with a baseball bat or perhaps a wrench or perhaps with their fists covered in gloves, and broke the passenger-side windows of five parked cars. The road was coated in the gem-clutter of shattered tempered glass until the street cleaners came. That gem-clutter was like a decorative trim next to the sewer waters that have been backing up along our curb and the dead leaf muck that is mixed with it.

Doesn't that producer know I am like a car window, really just a collection of gem-clutter pieces ready to shatter apart? That I am no different than that pile of glass pearls crushed on the side of the road?

I've still not written anything for the radio program. I'm not sure how to begin. I might go back and look at what I've written and adapt it anyway, even though she asked me not to. I'll try to settle my mind tomorrow morning and then get to work. Or perhaps decide to skip it and get back to what really matters to me, the chronicling of all this gem-clutter laying waste on the side of the road.