Tsering Lama

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies

Lindsay

"They will not be satisfied with our land alone. They want to possess our minds."

My mother was not just an idea. She was made of a body, and a body is not simple or plain. It has its own will and its own mysteries periown mysteries. When it gives up, no song, no prayer can bring it back.

It feels wonderful to say yes to him. I want him to ask me more questions so I can say yes to every request, so I can spend my life saying yes to him.

For years, I've sensed this violent but hidden truth - that beyond the welcome smiles of this country lies a vast and impenetrable wall: a national self-regard that insists on a mythic goodness. This is a nation that gives and gives to the less fortunate and asks nothing in return. Nothing, that is, but our grateful acquiescence to their silent expectations.

The world has forgotten us. To the vast majority, we do not matter. How else could they pass around our gods as possessions, display them in the sterile confines of museums and private collections, as though we were already long gone?

"We could all go mad if we let ourselves," Mo said. "But you've survived, so you need to keep living. That's all there is."

Still, I can see that what he offers me isn't love. It is something more basic. He offers me his emptiness, a chance to be important, to fill him. When he holds me tight in the darkness of his house, I can feel the hollow of his chest - as if a tunnel has borrowed through his ribs and into my chest when he siyes when he sighs into my back, breathing in my smell and rubbing my skin, I imagine I'm made of cold air, that I can slip out from between his fingers.

If you let them, anyone can make you feel ashamed of your impulses. Sometimes I think that is the true religion of this country.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies quotes

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