To Be Continued

Ezra sighed as he looked at the small, black notebook on his bed.

He missed her.

He used to write on all sorts of things... Supermarket notepads of lined paper you could see through, single pieces of paper snatched from his printer tray, anything he could easily and affordably get his hands on when he had something he needed to write down.

It was Meira who changed that. They had met one day in their usual cafe, in the bustling city centre. The one with the orange walls and the high chairs. She was setting up an online platform with the aim of helping investigative journalists make a sustainable income and wanted Ezra as her Chief Technology Officer.

As Ezra had pulled out his frayed, worn and nearly full notepad, Meira had brought out a small sturdy black notebook with hardly anything in it.

Ezra asked her about it, joking that it looked quite expensive.

"It was. I value what I have to write" she said with a smile.

Ezra was sold. He went and bought a nice black notebook of his own the following week.

It wasn't only about valuing what he had to write, he rationalised. It was about learning to be intentional about what he wrote down. Not every thought required ink. So it only made sense to increase the cost of what he did write down, to force himself to give those things more thought.

While they had made good progress on the platform development, their startup venture never worked out. Meira's career had taken an unexpected - but positive - shift in a different direction, and they had not had many chances to keep in touch. It had been put on the back burner.

Then one morning, Ezra woke to the news on his Amazon Alexa saying that terrorists had shot a young female journalist in the city Meira lived. As he went to Facebook to send her a message, to make sure she was ok, he found his news feed full of friends in shock.

The thought of that morning still haunted Ezra. Partly because he felt guilty that they hadn’t met up in such a long time. He felt like he had been a bad friend, letting his new job - and various other ventures - take up too much of his time, not setting aside enough time for his friends.

Even after hearing the news, Ezra had tried to go to work. He hadn’t known what else to do. He didn’t get much done though, bar panicking a coworker when she discovered him sobbing into a cup of tea on his lunch break.

After work that day he went to a vigil outside the city hall, bursting into tears again at the sight of her picture on the wall. He had hated himself for turning away from it. It made everything feel too real. He didn’t want it to be real.

Then there was the funeral. Long time friends of Meira had to fight with press and politicians for seats inside the cathedral. On his way out, Ezra had got pushed up against the wall by the passing crowd.

Compared to the vigil, the funeral had felt very surreal. From the flashing cameras outside to a cathedral so grand compared to the more austere decor of the synagogues from Ezra’s youth. There was also the men in weird outfits waving orbs of smoke, and the Prime Minister sitting at the front, alongside politicians whom Ezra couldn’t help but blame for some of the circumstances leading to Meira’s death.

After the crowd had cleared Ezra had been invited to a dinner for people who knew Meira more closely but had thought it better to give her family some space. They had been intruded on enough that week. He also felt like an imposter. He hadn’t met up with Meira for a whole two years. Had she still saw him as a friend the way he saw her?

Ezra had been planning to meet with Meira that week. He had recently set up a new side business on the high street and was excited to let her see it. Plus, she had needed help with something technical and he’d been only too happy to accept catching up over a coffee in place of her initially offered payment for the work.

Meira probably would have told him he was being silly for wondering if she saw him as a friend. He felt like he knew that, yet part of him still couldn’t accept it. Ezra was capable of getting imposter syndrome in any scenario.

It also struck him that on that day, had she not been murdered, it may have been the day they met and not the day of her funeral. It should have been the day they had met. It was stolen.

Instead of the dinner, Ezra went to a pub beside the cathedral with a friend who had also been at the funeral. They had actually been introduced to each other by Meira. An American tourist had asked them if all Canadian men wore suits to the pub. On seeing the looks on peoples faces following her question, the tourist had then panicked that she might be in a gay bar, that perhaps being her only other explanation for a large number of well-dressed men in the same place.

With a chuckle at that, Ezra snapped out of reminiscing. Two years had passed since what happened to Meira. Ezra was staring at his notes from one of their meetings. He had underlined a title at the top. The name of the platform they had been building.

"To Be Continued"

It felt like an instruction. Maybe it was… and as much as Ezra worried about the risks of taking on the venture, he also thought about the fact that he was nearing the age Meira had died. You never know how long you’ve got to live your life. Besides that, he had recently come into some unexpected money. Twenty thousand dollars. Maybe he could use it to make a difference in the world.