A Falling Star

After a long, psychologically draining day, my dad told me that it was the night of falling stars. For a few minutes, before about a hundred mosquitoes decided to feast on my blood (just as the soul-sucking men had been doing for the last couple of months), I lay side by side with my dad and cat in our garden. We were all looking up at the sky, hoping to see more than planes, and I felt a little nostalgic.

I remembered the long nights we had spent on the Croatian coast, sitting on uncomfortable deckchairs while my mum explained where the Big and Little Dipper were. My sister and I, amazed by our parents' knowledge, nodded along, pretending to know exactly which stars they were pointing out in the endless sky.

I was never sure if the small light that I saw out of the corner of my eye was a falling star, but I hoped it was, as it could grant me a wish.

My wish was always the same, whether I had just blown out the candles on my birthday cake, found an eyelash and put it underneath my shirt, caught a ladybug and let it fly, found a four-leaf clover, rung the bell of wishes on the local hill, or supposedly seen a falling star. I wanted a cat. I used every single wish I could to try to get one. I quickly gave up on that (but then still got one a few years later). Then, when I first fell in love with a classmate, like every other pre-teen girl, I wished that he liked me back. That was a lost cause, though, and I was left feeling empty. I knew wishing for everything I wanted was foolish; my parents had read enough stories about people who lost themselves due to greed and I somewhere picked up the ideat that wishing for limitless or thousand more wishes was somehat "illegal". After much thought, I came up with the perfect wish that surprisingly aligned well with a suicidal little girl's needs: I wished to be happy. Over and over again, I asked for happiness. Years later, when I first entered a Buddhist centre, I discovered that my wish was almost perfect.The only thing missing from my wish was consideration of other beings; it was quite selfish.

Today, as I was lying comfortably and a little shiverily on the sofa in my short pyjamas in the soft, chilly breeze, I saw a light move quickly out of the corner of my left eye. I excitedly whispered to my dad, 'Did you see that?' He hadn't, so it was probably just a plane, but he still told me to make a wish. My thoughts went from 'I wish my injury would heal as soon as possible' to 'I want to finish the marathon in under four hours this October' to 'I wish I could find romantic love' to 'I just want peace' to 'I want to be happy'. Then I stopped and took a deep breath. In the bigger picture, all of those things are more or less meaningless. Healed knees and a solid marathon pace mean nothing, and inner peace is unachievable in the current rocky state of the world, while killing and torturing animals for pleasure is still normalised. How can I be happy when thousands of children are being killed in genocide? No, I wish for all beings to be happy.