A month.
The particular, quiet quality of duration that has been lived rather than endured — the Garden of Eternity providing its specific, unusual category of peace, the kind that exists not in the absence of complexity but in the particular, rare condition of someone who has complexity around them and has, for the moment, chosen not to act on it. Wang Chen sat on the meditation cushion with the specific, inward quality of someone whose attention has been turned toward the interior landscape of a space he is still learning to read with the particular, thorough precision it deserves.
The Garden looked calm.
