2.15.22

I turned on the radio that day in the fall. I was driving through the Los Angeles National forest and the wind shook my car windows as I made my way home. ____ had just died a few months ago. I was in the office when I heard the news and when I did I went to look up the date and asked myself whether that date was a good day to die. I wrote it down in my journal and I said thank you and goodbye. I walked down the hall in the office and felt the wind at my back. This chapter has ended, I whispered to myself, and I felt such a strange lightness carrying my feet over the carpeted ground. There are no windows in the building but I felt such a draft of air, pushing me and lifting my arms up from my sides. Once I wrote a movie about a woman who was not myself who stood in the copy room at the end of the world. Quietly, she tried to decide how she would live. Copy paper fell from the sky all around her. 

Anyways, I turned on the radio that night on my drive home and Thich Naht Hanh's voice gently said to me from both the past and the future: "My friend, if you must go, then go." I thought of ____ and I thought of the ocean. I say hello to ____ every time I step into the ocean. ____ was my teacher and even after his death, I am learning from him still.