When my romantic relationship of fourteen years broke, I learned many new unnecessary things. The way dust accumulated in a pattern on the floor of the empty closet. The texture of silence, how stirring the long-handled spoon in the soup pot echoed in the kitchen. The scent of the shower water bereft of the man's soap. Though a psychologically literate person, I didn't know what my actual feelings were. Yet I wanted to hold onto something from those burned-out flames of desire.

In an illusion of coincidence, my grown daughter returned to stay with me while her apartment building was being renovated.Always things coming together and falling apart, she said.

Her head shaved, she dressed in saffron and crimson robes like a monk, and her skin emitted a glow. She wore a look of bewilderment that didn't express her personality. I remembered her as a girl riding her stick horse through the hilly yard, galloping on her own two feet, her flame of hair in a tail behind her.

Only dogs and babies love unconditionally, she'd once said.

She moved into my sewing room and created a pallet of thin blankets, where she slept, upon the hard floor. The days passed; her round cheeks thinned and grew pale. She carried bruised bags under her eyes, dark eyes that burned in her face.We had in common a strong meditation practice, mine perhaps stronger only by a longer history, and we experienced the same vanishing of time as we sat. But lately I had begun to doubt the veracity of the practice. I no longer experienced a sense of oneness with the universe.

One morning I came across her outside sitting in lotus, the white arches of her feet gleaming in the dawn, her long eyelashes resting on her cheeks like flickering shadows.

All day she would sit in the garden.I was filled with desire for such certainty as she.I would not meditate, I decided. Each hour my refusal strengthened. Late afternoon, I tried to nap. When I closed my eyes I discovered I could barely remember what my ex looked like. Behind my closed eyelids objects appeared as streams of particles disintegrating. Everything decomposing. I rose shakily, a sudden need to make sure of my daughter.

At my approach, she sat blinking mildly at the streaked purple clouds, the rose bushes flaming in the setting sun, the evening sky shutting down around her.

She spoke to say she loved me, a deep crack in her voice.I saw the truth of her loneliness, of her striving to banish desire. We were the same and different, fearing what drove our animal selves, and we neither loved unconditionally nor maybe even knew how to live as loving beings.I placed my hand on hers, her tender parched flesh stretched over bones. She made a sound between a sigh and a repressed sob. I wished it would rain, to quench something.