It's as if I'm seeing everything in these last two weeks in Lhasa through glasses that have the opposite of their intended effect and blur things. A tint of something sad shades nearly every moment and little weights attach themselves to my words so that they sometimes, unexpectedly, stick in my throat. Though my walls are almost bare I can still see the places where the pictures had hung.
I have not yet dusted off the suitcases.
***********************************************
I walked into my student's relatives house only to be greeted by an ensemble of Tibetans that looked as though they might have walked right off the plateu away from their yak herds not an hour before. I sat next to one smiling woman who grabbed my hand and leaned towards me, in a moment of mutual vulnerability, to tap my forehead with hers. There is something about an embrace of foreheads that is uniquely endearing and I vowed to do it more often.
As I and she and a small group of her relatives piled into the car another woman leaned in the window and grabbed my hand drawing it teary-eyed to her forehead. She is sad because this is only her first time to see you and you will leave soon my student offered as an explanation. All the people I only met once flitted through my mind like ghosts of butterflies.
When we arrived at her small village in the middle of gentle looking mountain ridges and fields so green they made your mouth water we filed out of the car and into the kitchen where her mother, an older rendition of my student, stood pouring fresh, warm milk into small bowls. I would later meet the cows.
My first moment in the kitchen time stood still. Her mother's eyes watered over and she pinched her mouth shut and the look that she gave me tried to speak, speak ten thousand beautiful things, that I couldn't understand. It was as if all of the stories her daughter had likely told her about me just materialized in front of her and she couldn't decide if I were real.
When her brother bounded into the kitchen moments later and caught sight of me, he leaped backward out of the room in a nervous giggle. It would take the rest of the day as he, like a nervous animal, would watch me from a distance and alternately come too close to me and then dart away before he decided I was, relatively, safe.
We walked around the garden, ate too much bread, drank milk that tasted like every good thing I had forgotten, or never known, that milk should taste like, swished flies away, watched her mother work the loom, laughed and took pictures. It felt so natural, normal, peaceful, to be just a part of a family again, even a family unlike any I have ever been a part of. Her mother disappeared for a moment and came back with a bundle of cloth.
My mother worked very hard to make this for you. Try it on. Does it fit? She had never seen you so she only guessed. This takes a long time to make. I think it fits well. Never wash it with water. Do you like it?
And I found myself in a Tibetan jacket made just for me which smelled exactly like the sheep's back they sheared the wool from. And I took up the mother's dye stained, calloused hands in my own and I couldn't look her in the eye. How could anything I've ever done deserve the amount of labor from this one jacket of infinite worth to me?
We walked down the empty nearly paved streets to the local monastery to visit her uncle, a monk of thirty years, and became the first, and likely last, foreign guest to ever visit the tiny place. Obviously proud, her uncle and his monk friends showed us every single room and we drank tea and were kadad in a room reserved for their highest teacher, should he ever return from exile and show up in the middle of the countryside for a visit. The chances are much higher that I would return. A wrinkled, grinning grandfather whose ears stuck out at odd angles neglected his endless rotations around an oversized prayer wheel for a moment.
As we piled back into the car hours later full on milk, and laughter, and sunshine, and family, my student's mother stood by the car window. I clutched the bag of jacket like a precious jewel in my lap and opened my mouth to say anything at all. And I couldn't. My words had made a swift getaway somwhere between the last drop of milk and the car. And I blinked hard several times and her mother waited, and before I could make a second attempt she patted my hand through the window and said, Zeama, it's time to go. So we left, making dust clouds in the otherwise clear and spotless day.
I leaned into my student and couldn't speak until we had arrived back in Lhasa. And I can't now remember anything I said then.
When I got home I immediately put the jacket on again. It does fit well. And I even found some sunflower seeds in the pockets like memories of too many odd things now heartbreakingly familiar...
... like all the things I can't take back with me.
