I can’t help it.  I don’t trust these people that say you’re dead.  I keep imagining you lying face down on your bathroom floor.  What did you look like?  I wish I had a picture of how you lay, the expression on your face.  Were your eyes open or closed?

No, that wouldn’t convince me.  I can too easily imagine you getting up from that floor.  I can see the long vein running from elbow to wrist, the definition of your whole arm revealing itself, as your muscles took on the weight of your body.  You lay on my living room floor so often, I have videos in my head of you standing up—exactly what I want you to do right now.

Stand up, Sang.  I just need you to stand up.  You’re fine.  I know you are.  Sure, you died.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to see you anymore, right?  You’re still going to come over on the weekends?  You’re still going to have love and advice for me.  It isn’t a question in my mind.  I can still call you to check up on you.

You simply won’t have much to say back.  Like a book, you’ve said everything you’re going to say.  Sure, there’s an end.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t go back to all the pages you gave me to read.  Right?  … Talk to me, Sang.  You always have something to say, something brilliant and funny and endearing.  Stand up, Sang.

Sang.  Sang lost weight last year.  Sang reconnected with himself last year.  He revealed things to himself and to Charles and to me that he said he hadn’t ever wanted to think about.  He loved a woman last year.  He didn’t want to go out on New Years Eve because the roads were dangerous with drunk drivers—last year.  I don’t know what he experienced this year.  I haven’t seen him.  He’s dead.  It’s what everyone keeps saying.  Sang’s dead.  They keep telling me.  I keep saying it.  I can’t help but say everything I can about him.  It seems others can’t stop themselves either as they offer their words.  I love the words, warm and soothing like a long, hot shower.  Words haven’t made me feel this good in months.

Lend meaning to a meaningless situation.  Death for humans is the same as it is for stars.  Our matter and meaning flows from us into our universe.  Happily, we live in an era where the matter and meaning of Sang’s life can exchange phone numbers and email addresses.  We’re forced to accept our collective being can never be reconstituted, but we can exchange words that allow us to feel whole again.  Lend meaning to a meaningless situation.

∞

The Sang-Yoon Lee Tribute Page

Sang’s own words

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A girl is a word without a definition.  I’m born to live as a word no one knows but me.  I have no context, no words around me who understand my definition.  Most other words haven’t even bothered to look me up except to use me—usually, abuse me because they’re trying to tell me what I mean.  But I can’t change my meaning to suit them.  I may not know what my meaning is, but I know it’s not what they’re telling me.  They force their meanings on me, never understanding I’m a new word they’ve never heard before, so new I haven’t even defined myself yet.  I’m still choosing what words I want around me.  I’m still creating a sound and a shape, practicing being something I like, something I can live with, something that sounds strong but sweet and bears good ideas in others’ minds.

Lately, I’m pushing my meaning too far.  As a result, I’m constantly shaky, fatigued, and frightened.  The things I care about suddenly lack significance.

It sounds like depression.  I know this feeling, the desire to cry and the choking feeling around my throat; it’s depression.

I’m floating on an imaginary line      losing

focus and going from

one meaning    the next

to

stop

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Today, I remembered it during lunch when a coworker and I began a conversation regarding trauma.  I arrived home, and I very purposefully opened this book.  An hour later, I’m still reading the introduction.  I’m still on the first page, seventh sentence.  Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a prominent psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School (1992), writes:

Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The sentence surprised me with a hope I wasn’t expecting to find today—or any other day.  I had thought it was a self-help book.  But when I read that sentence, I flipped to the front cover, saw the M.D. dotting the author’s name, and read the author bio.  I googled her credentials.  It was all to confirm that someone credible in the psychiatric field had written those words.

On the first page of the introduction, at the seventh sentence, I was validated by a doctor.

…Wow.  While I wrote the sentence above, I was in awe and so excited that a respected doctor, who had received nods for this book’s argument, had validated my efforts.  I was right to explore my trauma and “tell the truth” about my experiences.  I was right.  I was doing a good thing.

However, having just typed those hopeful words about the wonderful Seventh Sentence, I already see how awful it is that I want the American Psychiatric Association, in my stead, to answer people’s whines, “Why do you want people to know these things about you?“ In those moments, I want to be able to yammer with intelligence, “psychiatrists popularly respect a theory arguing ‘remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.’”

The sentence makes me feel ticklish, and it shouldn’t.  I feel like I’ve replaced one god for another.  Much like the other god, his disciples desire money.  I think I need to get out of this country, out of this world, out of life, but I’m too well-programmed to off myself.  The psychiatric industry doesn’t need to beg for alms; it’s got a picture of sanity I need to have.

My mind travels such strange roads.  Are these the diaries of a real madwoman?

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On the one hand, it makes me sad that a good day, these days, is a day I’m completely distracted, even overwhelmed, by mindless work.  Essentially, good days are the days I best dissociate.

Damn.  I miss the girl who wanted to feel each day.  I miss the girl who saw such sad beauty and meaning in everything.

On the other hand, my mind was quiet enough to allow me to do my work.  The thought thrills me!  Maybe the Clonazepam is working.  Maybe the 30 mg of Lexapro isn’t too high for such a tiny girl.  Maybe things won’t hurt so much from now on.

I hope.  I hope.  I’m so afraid it won’t—stop.

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