Sang died.  Heart attack, or something.  I’m holding up well but barely, glad I don’t believe in an afterlife.  His great questioning is over.

I have words, but they’re not ready.  They need to be as near perfect as possible.  See, my idea of perfection has a ghost in it.  The very idea has become a ghost, dead beside him.  I need to resurrect one of them.

Tomorrow, when my eyes aren’t swollen red and dry, I’ll have something worthy.  Below is the first of what will be many drafts.  It doesn’t say what I want, but it says enough—for now.

♥

In Mourning

In Memory of Sang-Yoon Lee

Querido, ya

te extraño.  Deja

tu mentira.  Despiertate.

Te espero

afuera.  Acuerdate,

no aguanto

el frio.

Soon after I heard Sang died, after I had cried and screamed out enough of my grief to make room for my sanity, it occurred to me, there’s now a ghost in my ideal life.  Less than that!  A memory.  Imperfect.

In a time when so much is possible, the impossible is suddenly the only thing that seems to have any meaning at all.  Death, in particular, has been invading our consciousness with images of late.  Whether it’s Harry Potter’s Voldemort or CNN, Death pervades our thoughts, even our fetishes.  Deeper even than our sexual psychosomas, Bella and Edward signify many things, not the least of which is our primordial wish to defy time and space—life itself.  Our survival is no longer dependent on our progeny.  Instead, as highly individualistic animals, we’ve decided as a culture to forget the race; we must preserve ourselves.

But there is no preservation.  Writers know that.  That’s why we write: if nothing else, these words will carry us to others.  We only ever live in the minds of others.

I wept until I remembered he had left a bit of perfection behind.  His writings are imperfect in some ways, but they are imperfect in the perfect way he was.  They reach toward the idea of perfection in exactly that overworked and restrained way he had.  Though an atheist, I find it comforts me to think he’s survived in some way beyond my imperfect memory.  I feel I can relax my grief into the comfort of knowing his actions carried meaning during his life; his words will carry meaning in his death.

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