I remember it was on the night of October 12, 2010, that I learned that FireLemming died. The bulletin said she died on 2010.9.1, now it has been a year. Even though I never knew her personally, her death rooted in my head and takes on different meanings from time to time.
The first thing I realized right after reading that saddening news was that, I would never know her personally, she would never reply my comments or emails. A possibility is lost forever. I realized I need to seize the possibilities while they are still there, and from then on, I started to explore around in TLKFAA, and left many comments, and enjoyed moments of delight more frequent than before.
The thought bugging inside me during the days after that was this: why did she have to die? Isn’t it too unfair for such an innocent good young lady to die? This was a hard problem, and I bore it in mind for a long time. It slowly became clear, that there is no reason in the Grim Reaper. Thing just happen, not because a God planned this, not because some mysterious destiny, not because they did something bad, there is fundamentally no telos behind things, and there is no one to rant at. To say it was unfair was thus meaningless. To quote Sophie’s World, “We are let into a wonderful world. We meet one another here, greet each other, and wonder together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.”
I checked her last uploads. On TLKFAA, it was a new comic page, and the last one of an amazing comic which would never be finished. On DA, it was a journal in August, so typically gossipy and all small talk, which makes the following tragedy only 13 days later almost surreal. There is a technique of writing dramas, which is to make the viewer know some character is going to die, but helplessly watching the character goes on unwittingly right into his/her demise.(Mr Beans almost always do that then narrowly escape) As I read her last journal, I wanted to go back and tell her to go to treat that cold immediately, like I wanted to shut to Simba in the gorge “Run! Your uncle wanted to kill you!” But you can’t change the past. I was also reminded of the pervasiveness of death. Who can know dead sure whether s/he can live to see another day? Never should I live as if tomorrow would come for sure.
The whole thing feels surreal still. We seem to feel that death is just something that happens just in news stories and novels, but when it happens to someone we know or care, it becomes surreal. There seem to be no concept in the mind for the death of someone you know, it is unfathomable, intangibles, yet it is true.
That night I couldn’t go to sleep, mind buzzing with thoughts. I finally gave up and crawled out of my bed to text to my best friend. I told her about my sadness, and told her I feared maybe someday I would die, so I wanted to tell her that I love her and was glad to have her as my friend, while I was still living to say it. She replied that she knew how cruel death was, but even if I die, she would remember me, and as long as someone was remembered, s/he was never dead.
I smiled and went to sleep.
The event of life is wonderful, yet ephemeral. If the whole history of the universe is compressed into a one-year-long movie, a human’s lifetime is a mere 4-frame appearance (a lion’s a pathetic 1-frame appearance). Even though humans keep a good deal of history, 99.999999% of all the humans ever lived sank into almost total oblivion. (Try to name 1000 deceased famous people, and that’s 0.000001% of all the people ever lived) It would be too optimistic to say any of us here, or tthis forum, or TLKFAA and its best artists, will not sink into total oblivion. I have come across many deserted early fan sites during the years, and it’s creepy to crawl through stuffs that has been abandoned there for 10 years, even more creepy when thinking that there used to be a lot of people. They are relics, and relics MLKForum and TLKFAA will inevitably become, if lucky. I am reminded of this every time I come across some old pics, with the last comments dated from 2001. It is depressing, evocative of existentialistic despair, to cheerfully comment and fav BooYeh/Nadra/Koraden’s latest pics, then suddenly started imagining how they will leave here one day, and I will leave here one day, and these fresh pics and comments will gather a thick layer of dust.
Time beats everyone in the end.
(and here's korukron's nihilistic Simba)
“Gone to sheer nothing,
Passed with null made one!
What matters creative endless toil,
When at a snatch oblivion ends the coil?
It is bygone! How shall this riddle run?
As good as things have never had begun…”
——Mephistopheles, in Faust
End note: I started writing this memorial on September 2, planned to end with an upward emotion, but as days went, my true feelings about life demanded the ending to be written in this much more pessimistic, even nihilistic way. If you hate sad endings, you can stop reading after the sentence “I smiled and went to sleep.” That’s how I originally planned to end.
Kopa Leo on 2011.9.5 11:17
