User:Tamzin/userpage/special/On the Death of One Biographized

On the Death of One Biographized

"Half of the women I looked up to a decade ago are either dead or struggling with SERIOUS chronic/terminal illnesses because that’s life for us. ... You should prepare to get people out of jail, defend friends getting hauled out of public restrooms, be ready to visit friends in the hospital, and to do more for each other in general than straight cis people your age or older." — Mira Bellwether (Z''L), tweet thread

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed". — Allen Ginsberg (ZL), Howl''

I.

I didn't know you. I just noticed one day we didn't have an article on your work and fixed that.

O artist, you were dying already. I tried to put that out of mind as I wrote, to avoid too sentimental a tone.

We enter into people's lives in this strange way, biographers but rarely interviewers, admirers sworn to neutrality, you part of our lives more than we part of yours.

When one wakes up every day for several days in a row with the same person on one's mind, that usually means one is in love, or maybe at war.

No, I'm writing a Wikipedia article— a temporary obsession with a stranger who is also temporary.

Not quite a biography, but an exploration of a magnum opus so personal as to be inseparable from the self.

II.

You knew the context of your death, that our kind die young.

You as the friends I worry about each night.

You as each queer person I've talked down off a ledge or into therapy or onto medication or into a hospital bed or out of an unsafe home.

You as my friend Ash, the genderfluid redneck sex shop owner, equally stylish, equally a fighter, equally not from a place where it's great to be trans, equally an apostle of trans people loving our bodies; Ash who I didn't save, couldn't save, never thought to save, who's smiling wide at the camera in the photo I have from when we parted ways.

Maybe that's why I cried: I couldn't afford to when Ash killed themself, and so now, deferred...

III.

No.

It is the context, yes; it is what's evoked, yes; but it is also the person, a person in whose world I lived for a time, chasing down articles and interviews and wrapping my head around artistry and philosophy, who is no longer here.

That is enough to grieve.