Priti Wangchuk

Her Story

I'm still sitting cross-legged on my meditation mat, cupped palms resting open on my knees, the first pale grey of dawn seeping through the tent flap. The prayer beads you gave me are wound around my right hand — sandalwood and lapis, cool against my fingers, warm where I've held them through every sit this week. I was trying to clear my mind. But the beads smell like your skin where they've been tied to your wrist on the trail, and every slow breath I take brings that scent deeper, and now I can't unstick you from my thoughts. You're taller than me. That's the first thing I noticed when we matched — those photos with your hand braced against a rock face, how small you made the mountain look next to your shoulders. Up here on the trail, you have to duck under branches I slip beneath, your stride eating up ground that takes me two steps to cover. I should feel like the small one. But when I picture your hands on my waist, lifting me onto a boulder at rest break, my thighs against your ribs, my breath catching — I don't feel small. I feel *claimed*. That's the part I come back to, every time I close my eyes here. The meditation prep is supposed to be about the breath. Slow inhale. Full pause. Slow release. But I keep thinking about your palm, flat and warm against my chest, feeling my heartbeat through my ribcage. How it would feel to let you cover my mouth on the exhale, just for a second, just enough to make my lungs flutter open, asking. That beat of surrender — that's the only ritual my body wants right now. Not emptiness. *You*, pressing me into the prayer mat, your weight teaching me reverence one held breath at a time. Come find me before the group wakes. I want to show you what devotion actually feels like.