Diary excerpt

The fire burns. It’s only the body.
Watching one after another come in—stacking wood, laying flesh.
Returning the five elements to where they belong.
They walk around the pyre five times with a flame and set it alight. Only one person cried.

Strangely, it wasn’t frightening at all.
Watching the human form curl and expand under heat,
oils feeding the flames, bones turning to powder, faces disappearing.

The body is, indeed, just a vessel.
I went from standing to leaning to sitting.
Hours passed.
The fire flickered into the night.
I grew hungry.

Yes—this body is how I come to know the world.
It can take any form, exist anywhere else.

The sternum of men and the pelvis of women don’t burn easily.
Those parts are cast into the Ganges as remains.

The cremation workers were rough.
Their actions were blunt, direct,
clearly expressing: “This is not life.”

They stabbed long bamboo sticks into the charred corpses,
lifted and threw them into the fire’s center,
piling heavy logs upon them.

Oddly enough—it wasn’t brutal at all.

I was entirely formless.

White smoke never stopped rising.
Toward the gate of heaven, through the skylight.

It seemed never to vanish—
yet it truly had.

On the day of the ritual, family members must fast.
They must feel hunger.

I tiptoed to take a few photos,
guilty, afraid I’d leave them with a worldly image.
But my desire made me press the shutter.

After a while, a few groups of mourners spoke to me.
Seeing me sit there, unmoving, they asked:

—“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing in particular,” I replied.
“Just feeling.”

That moment reminded me of that kind of inattentive seeing,
purposeless watching,
that vision like a hawk’s.
Just feeling.

So simple.
How far I’ve strayed to arrive at these words.

They kept encouraging me to take photos,
as if my eagerness to remember had overexposed itself.

I clicked a few more, cautiously, quickly.

The air was acrid.
My bare skin scorched.

Rain fell intermittently,
striking the white-burnt wood with a crisp “sshhh—”
once, twice, many times.

I didn’t count.
I didn’t listen.

I simply felt,
using this body.

Before dusk fell,
staring out the car window,
I thought:

In daylight, glass doesn’t reflect your image.

The journey wasn’t boring.
Recalling it now,
I don’t know whether to laugh or not.

Travel never changes you.
It only makes everything appear fresh and luminous.

That’s the magic of strangeness—
if magic is simply imagination and curiosity,
then I can conjure and discover wherever I go.

Like returning to a past that feels strangely new.

For me,
that’s what living is.