Afterimage

The Liaison, so far as I currently understand, had three basic categories of friends: Writing friends online from around the world, writing friends online who he met in person at various writing retreats and workshops, including some of the most committed and robust programs out there, and writing friends online who he also knew in person right here in Scooterville including myself, Sick Boy and Chess Champ, each of whom you might glimpse in the video below.

His dearest friend of all is the very sweet and deep-minded Cerulean Blue, a constant online companion from Europe, who has flown out here many times for extended vacations with him. She is a satellite member of our local NaNo chapter and our little year-long writing sub-group.

I sense that their companionship is of some special design of their own which they need explain to no one, and I sense that this was the only non-familial relationship of any significant intimacy in the Liaison’s living experience and I am very glad that he had it.

When Cerulean first appeared on the scene I was troubled by an email from her in which I sensed a pre-mature attachment to us and unwarranted worry over subtle interpretations of online encounters which I personally viewed as inconsequential. I thought it inappropriate that she would presume that we had some kind of deep friendship at stake when we’d never even met in person and I was not shy at the time to try to firmly inform her of this.

In the end, it appears that she was on the right track. I came to sense a special friendship between us and now I wonder why I have seen so little of her when she has spent most of her time here in Scooterville with brief returns to her home abroad, ever since November when the Liaison fell ill. The blame is surely my own.

Now that he’s gone and with her next return flight scheduled for the day after his funeral (in essence a coincidence) there remains for her a couple of free days and a couple of partly free days and no one for her to give constant care for.

Yesterday those of us available took her out for the afternoon, which slipped gently into the evening. We went exploring with no urgency or real agenda, with a strong bond in our hearts and common private thoughts on our minds - of a sweet boyish man whose hard-felt absence seems to have washed away the tensions of tentative friendship between we of very sensitive, but otherwise diverse personalities.

I will see Cerulean at least two more times before she goes away. Given the pain she has endured here, I doubt she will ever come back. And my own chances of ever getting to Europe are slim. It is with significant heaviness that I consider a likely-final farewell. I wonder how her life will change now, with such a significant absence, and how comfortably she might endure a continued online relationship with us, where triggers may abound.

Today the same gang will go hiking and what-not without me but with the excellent Healer and her canine companion Doctor Snuggles.

I hope they all feel the same love which I did yesterday and which I attempted to capture here: