Yesterday I went on a walk with my friend Leon and I was thinking about the waves and the ocean. I heard this metaphor at a meditation talk recently. The idea is that the waves are whirling and crashing in a storm, but the ocean is always there, calm and unbothered underneath. The guy talking – this white dude vinny ferraro – said that everything in life is just a wave, and that it’ll all dissipate one day.

Recently, I was also reading this article in the New York Times Modern love section. It was about a woman whose child was still-born. She found out later in the pregnancy, so gave birth to the child, who they called B. The author, Mara, was so devastated she wrote a letter to her husband in response saying they should divorce, and that their marriage was a failure. They stayed together and now have two kids. But Mara still has flashbacks to the child, to the grief and horrific shock of losing someone so special to them. She said that on a recent road trip, she saw a pickup truck go by, and thought about how it might crash into their family car and she imagined her family all dead. And she mentioned this to her husband, who also lost B, and she said, “what did you do with the letter I wrote you?” and he said he kept it in a shoebox, along with a toy penguin they won at a fair, and a book he had bought for the baby.

A few months ago, I went through a very difficult breakup. It was the kind of relationship that took your hopes sky-high and dashed them moments later; a break-up so tumultuous I couldn’t bear to be around the person afterwards, even though we were the closest of friends for the time we dated. I told Leon that it was so difficult losing this person that I felt grief as if she passed away. vinny is right that these things do pass, but sometimes a wave feels more like a tsunami, and its shocks reverberate through the passage of time.