The Kundalini Poster Girl
After lying in bed for a while contemplating Nadia’s disappearance, I finally got up, showered, shaved, dressed, and headed out onto the streets of Kathmandu. I decided to look for her, although my second attention was already telling me that I wasn’t going to find her.
But still, my mind insisted that I search for her, so I started a systematic pattern sweep of all of the shops in town where the college crowd tended to hang. No luck. After about four hours of roaming the streets, poking my head in and out of shops and stores, I gave up.
I was definitely depressed. I mean, I had finally met my soul mate, or whatever, and after having perfect sex and falling in love with her, she had split. Major bummer.
Then the weirdest thing began happening to me. I suppose it was just subconscious machinations in visual form, but I began to see her face on all of the posters in town.
Most of the shops and coffee bars in Kathmandu plaster their walls with posters, the majority of them being of Indian and American film stars. Each time I glanced at a female actress’s poster, I saw Nadia’s face. Her clear blue eyes would be staring at me through the eyes of the different female stars on the posters, and I could feel her talking telepathically to me through them.
I got the drift already, it was over. She had her enlightened thing to do, and she had to follow her karma. She was gone. I could respect that. I suppose I would have continued looking for her, but enlightenment was just not high on my priority list at the time, snowboarding was. So for the second time in my life, my passion for snowboarding took me away from the second perfect woman in my life.
I was totally bummed. I was also pissed off at Master Fwap and the Oracle. I mean, what was the point of setting me up with the perfect woman, only to have her split on me? I thought Buddhism was supposed to help you get away from your pain, not increase it.
I drifted back to the hostel. A new crew of mountaineers, hippies, and enlightenment-seeking types had just checked in. Everyone else I had known there was gone. The hostel had heavy turnover.
Some of the new women were pretty and obviously on the prowl for more than just enlightenment, but after what I had experienced for the last two days with Nadia, I just wasn’t interested. Lying down on my bunk, I covered my face with my pillow and tried to get some sleep, but it didn’t work. I just lay there thinking about Nadia.
When I’m overtired, my mind plays funny tricks on me. Lying on my bunk, with a pillow over my head, feeling very sorry for myself, I started to see Nadia in my mind’s eye. She was dressed in a stunning evening gown, as some of the female actresses had been dressed in the posters I had seen that day. Her eyes radiated warmth and compassion. In a very odd way, they reminded me of Master Fwap’s eyes. Then it came to me: Nadia was the Kundalini poster girl.
I imagined posters of her all over the world, advertising meditation and enlightenment. The absurdity of my idea made me laugh and I began to wonder how I had managed to get so attached to a woman in just two days.
My Himalayan trip was suddenly not going as I had planned. Instead of being out on the greatest slopes in the world, carving in and out of perfect powder, I felt I was being pulled into some weird Buddhist Order by Master Fwap, and now I was lying around feeling depressed over some woman I hardly knew.
I had to change things around. I would put Master Fwap, the Oracle, Nadia, and all of this enlightenment nonsense behind me and return to my snowboarding. The next day I would hit the slopes and reboot my trip. With these thoughts in my mind, I was finally able to get some much needed sleep.