The other morning, I was intimate with Eric. Afterwards, I started thinking the difference between rape and consensual sex. The difference between how it feels to have sex early in a relationship versus late in married life. The act is the same in all cases, so what has changed? It can only be me, the meaning I assign the rupa act of sex.

The thrill was max in a new relationship, when the confirmation felt freshest, novel. Middling when its no longer so fresh, when the sense of confirmation can be taken for granted, or the relationship has grown to confirm me in other ways.  Horrifying in cases of rape, when it feels like an anti-me, that I can just be used, the illusion of autonomy over my body laid bare. There it is, the proof that what I think is sukkah –sensory delight – is just the moments rupa appears to me to be affirming my story of who I am.  

I had been thinking about the SF place I rented when I used to travel NY-SF for work. Now, retrospectively, it seems obviously foolish that I believed an apartment somewhere else could spare me the NY identity. But at the time, I was so convinced that with an apartment, anywhere, SF, CT, and voila, I was no longer a NY. Having a place to sleep that I owned or rented was me, who I am.

I arbitrarily decided SFer came from having a rental to call my own in SF. Or CT was having a rental to call my own in Greenwich. That was the ingredient that made my story to myself credible. And so, once I got the apartments I was happy, I was satisfied. Of course, an apartment is just a place to lay my head when I happened to be in the city. It was silly to believe it was a tool to confer identity. 

The proof of the foolishness was that a change in circumstance –covid – meant that one day I left the SF apartment and I never saw the place again. If it had made me an SFer wouldn’t I have been able to stay? Wouldn’t circumstances of the world have adapted to and confirmed my SFer identity,  so I was allowed to remain, to continue using the place? But reality didn’t oblige, there were lockdowns and dangerous viruses that kept me from the SF apartment, and any identity I believed it may have bestowed upon me. The identity was gone, the apartment no longer usable, but the stress of dealing with the empty rupa apartment that I was responsible for continued: I had to pay for the rent. Finally had to hatch a plan, with the help of a friend, to move out and have my stuff shipped to me in NY.

I remember reading the Assaka Jātaka: In the story there is a king who is addled by grief at the loss of his queen who had died. The Bodhisattva reveled the queen to the king, she had been reborn a worm and had started a new life with a new worm husband. When asked, she said she remembered her time being human, loving the king. But it meant nothing to her now, she had a new story she had built, with a new worm lover.

Now that my story has moved on, now that I identify with new things and new places, it is easy to see what a fool I was to believe an apartment could make me an identity. Now, the story has changed, I claim and cling to new things, I have houses in Miami and Montreal to define me…

I lost so many tears mourning my move from San Francisco. The death of an SF alana and the sad, reluctant, birth of a NY alana I reviled. All that sorrow, stress and attachment, for a story that changes anyway. A story that –by the fact it is changing, based on circumstance, on forces way outside of my control, is actually proving it doesn’t prove me. It just proves the circumstances, the conditions, it is subject to. What is conditional can’t be me. It can’t be about me. It certainly isn’t who I am.

So, if I can see that an apartment doesn’t give me an identity, can I see it about a body as well? Isn't it the same: A 4 e object I claimed so I could try and use it to prove who and what I am. An object I write my story around and that I 'need' for the story to continue. For this story, rather than the object, I cling so tightly. But isn't it like the apartment, when I lose it, a new story will commence with new objects. Just like new homes, and lovers, there are new bodies as well.

For the apartment, its clear that I arbitrarily decided a home will prove my identity. Afterall, I could have just stayed in hotels when I was in the city for work or in Greenwich on weekends. But in my mind, hotels were temporary, they didn’t ‘seal the deal’ of being identified by a place. For that I needed a home. With a body, it’s less clear it’s just what I arbitrarily chose as a marker of identity because bodies are what I have the deepest habit of using  to ‘create’ identity. The supposition, the wrong view, that body I am born with=who I am has been conditioned for so long. It is harder to see this is not me or mine any more than the apartment. But it is equally true.

A lease gives me rights to use an apartment, for a time, when circumstances allow. Birth in a body gives me rights to use the body, for a time, when circumstances allow. While I am able to use these objects to perform physical feats, I am also able to use these objects to feed my imagination and to fuel supposition. I can use them to build any kind of identity the mind can cook-up. But in the end, the shifting nature of the world and objects will mean my physical use for them will end. With that end, the fabrication and supposition will need to adjust and find new objects to meaningify all over again.