At the Yoga Class

I met Mei-Ling at a yoga class in Dalston three years ago and we became the kind of friends who arrive early and stay late, getting in the teacher's way. She was calm in a way I aspired to and she was completely unsentimental about it — she did not talk about peace as a destination, just as something you returned to when you remembered. She gave me a book about Buddhist practice once without any recommendation attached, just "I thought you might like this." She was right.