Snippets From A Film

He approaches me as I'm donning my coat, in the hallway of the party on the thirty-eight floor. The city glimmers in the distance. With vivid urgency, he leans in. You should tell your stories, he says. You never know who might need to listen.

I smile politely, feeling the ground beneath my feet, as my hands adjust my scarf. He leans in further.

(What I remember from this evening is how open his eyes were at this moment; wide-eyed, not in urgency or desperation, but in clarity, as if trying to hand me something, as if wanting me to recognize the gift in his hands.)

As I make to leave, he says, you could save a life.

I look at him, again.

You could save a life, he repeats.

We sit around my kitchen table, a cone of light falling on top of the surface. Maybe we're holding mugs of tea in our hands, gradually cooling, to be lifted back up into warmth with another whistling kettle.

I'm just not sure if I'm ready, I say.

Looking away, you say, simply: You never know how life is going to go. Who knows? K might die suddenly. I might have to take care of O. You never know how these things will go.

In the clear, matter-of-fact tone of your voice I hear an unmistakeable truth, as if you've pulled a rock from your pocket to show me: a real rock, from a real desert. Here it is. Do you see? All we have are each other.

And then, you say, looking straight at me: We don't have to decide all of that, you know. We can figure it out as we go.

Here, too, something reverberates in your voice that I recognize as truth. Busy listening to these reverberations, I cannot say anything yet. You play with the mug in your hands, swirl it in the silence.

Weeks later, I walk around the streets of Seoul and Brooklyn, these scenes replaying in the cinema of my head.

I follow behind her in her slow, deliberate walk. Here, the monks seem to wear only crimson. She's a focus of vivid color amidst this monochrome winter trail.

She stops, and looks up. A small bird, dancing on bare branches. I notice her, noticing.

After we circle the pond, she stops. Smiles, and points. Ask your question here, she says.

I look at the frozen pond, covered with snow.

I might as well. I orient my whole body towards the pond's center, and ask, wordlessly.

To my surprise, an answer comes back.

Suddenly serious, she slams her open palm onto the table.

이 공부는 깨어있는 공부입니다!
This practice is the practice of being awake!

She says it with a matter-of-fact fierceness and clarity, looks me in the eye.

It's golden hour. Aside from the two of us, this table and two chairs, the room is empty, spacious, filled with sunlight.

After the seatbelt clicks closed, I wave out of the truck.

My friends say byee, and her son says byeee, and his daughter says, byeeee, and this entire hilarious tumbling kind ambitious sweet joyous family all says, byeeeee.

As I wave I drive off with seeming resolve, as if driving to a clear destination. But a minute later a roiling gurgle rises in my body, as if to vomit, and I need to stop.

In the foothills of Los Angeles, I pull over in front of someone's house. I shift to park — and cry, and cry, the truck still running, me, sobbing for my life, as if something suddenly melting. Not lava cooling into rock but this time in reverse, hot molten rivulets start running out of my chest, down my body, onto the inside of my thigh, that I carefully wipe up with my finger and taste: the taste of yearning; the taste of something newly molten.

We're standing in the tent, wearing dust-smeared clothing.

(She starts telling me about her story; a physician specializing in substance addiction, going to find and rescue her first love from his own opioid-induced devastation. A story unspools out. She is, against all logic, dropping everything and buying a plane ticket for someone she hasn't seen in a decade.)

As we talk, there are other volunteers working around us, moving around in the tent.

(She is buoyed by the grief of what it means to love and have loved someone, and the intangible clarity of having known the truth of another's being. She searches in the streets of a dangerous neighborhood, alone, without any clear plan, simply following an invisible current.)

Our sense of focus narrows in. A container is already being created, settling into place, gathering around the two of us, so that we are not stranger and stranger but in some other connection, here, for a moment. I am is reverence, in recognition of the kind of story that Changes A Life.

(Somehow, a series of incongruous coincidences unfold. She finds her former love on the street, lost and confused. He looks at her with wonder, as if seeing a dream.)

She continues.

(The scales of a life begin to tip.)

At the end of her story, I look at her, her eyes brimming from recollection. Around us, I know there are other people, this tent, the city and its merry pranksters, and the desert. But here we are.

Dana! I exclaim.

She looks at me. So do a few other people, but my message is for her, in the space of a story that we stand in.

Dana, I say again, looking straight at her, in recognition.

I know, she says. Thank you, she says.