The noises in my head at a silent retreat

OF COURSE, THERE WASN'T A PLUNGER. THERE'S NEVER a plunger when you need one. But there's always an audience: in this case, three women sitting on the other side of the thin bathroom door waiting for their turn to use a toilet that was now horribly, hopelessly clogged.

- DORIE CHEVLEN

I sweat over the lid trying to devise a solution, but could barely hear myself think over the chorus to Leonard Cohen's "Closing Time," which played a relentless loop in my head, as it would every day of this retreat, at a perfect-acoustics, full-volume blare. I was three days into a 10-day silent meditation retreat, and absolutely at the end of my rope.

"Sorry to break the noble silence," I finally told my fellow meditators. "But that toilet is clogged." It was the first thing I'd said in three days. The words felt like poetry on my lips.

When I told friends my plan to attend the program, they were justifiably incredulous. "You can't shut up for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days!" they protested. (They were-and remain-correct.) But my then boyfriend was an avid meditator, and had raved about the program since we first met. Vipassana, a meditation practice originating in India over 2,500 years ago, had utterly changed his life, he told me. It made him calm, self-connected. I had just quit my day job to pursue writing full time, and all I could sell was an article about how to make latkes. I had time to kill, is what I mean.

I said "OK!" to the 10-day Vipassana meditation for the same reason I said "OK!" to moving to Chicago with him. Because I thought there was something wrong with me for instead thinking, Run! Love, I speculated, was the noble pursuit of making two people fit together. My pieces didn't quite squeeze into the jigsaw puzzle of our relationship, but I thought this might sand down their edges. My boyfriend was so good, I thought (still think), and I desperately wanted to be good too.