The Image Left Behind
Note: This is a personal literary reflection inspired by Theo McIntyre, a fictional character in History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera. It is an unofficial, non-comercial tribute and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the author or publisher.
If I still think about you, Theo? Yes, all the time.
Look, there is something deeply sad about beauty. I have always perceived it, this interface that makes everything beautiful slip into a liquid, sorrowful feeling, and difficult it is to explain myself, but you understand, don’t you?
The thing is, and I never tire of saying it, you helped me with so many things, and I didn’t know that reading about what I had never experienced could help me understand so much more about myself. What a beautiful kind of universality, isn’t it? And if beauty can be so broad and limitless, so encompassing and capable, then isn’t that also what brings it closer to sadness? And if so, could everything that is poignantly beautiful also be something other than sad?
I think about it a lot, and it is a thought I revisit, revise and reconsider. You, with your cap at university, making animated films and continuing to be nothing but yourself, even after you drowned in the sea. And I don’t know how to explain it, but it is as sad as it is beautiful, so sad and yet so beautiful! Your lingering presence, dispensing knowledge about this and that, getting half the world excited about the most ordinary, trivial and mundane things, objects you were capable of valuing and elevating. Outings that might have added nothing at all, but which you somehow made meaningful. Your own boundaries around things, that shaded and delineated border that was Theo.
I have a theory, Theo.
My theory is that you didn’t move to California to study animation. No, I know. You never said it, but I know. You moved to California because it was a time that suited you better. And stepping away from the hopeful realm of meteorological time, it was a time you longed for, a time in which you could be more daring, in which more of the world could have access to you! More time in which you could reclaim your need for warm dynamism, for that beautiful kind of longing that is sad, so sad!, and that makes you travel through people, the world, things, only to feel everything, detached from your art, in a way that makes you even more of a feeling yourself.
Look, you even got a cap out of it. And if you liked caps, or rather, if you liked caps that were given to you bearing the name of a school that captivated you, your cap.
Look at how that allowed you to love two people at the same time and to conclude, despite how difficult and sad that conclusion might have been, that your worldview could still expand further, that you could reach an even greater clarity.
Look at how it allowed you to reflect on your story up until then, not to revisit the past but to redraw it. You like redrawing things, don’t you? Isn’t that what you do before you animate them?
Look at how it even allowed you to shake off a little of that impostor syndrome, because others couldn’t help but see it. But how could you not be everything, anonymous out of nothing, yet the bearer of all things, of all those things which, precisely because they were everything, were sad?
Was being so many good things making you meticulously, inwardly sad? Not the kind of sadness that pins us to the ground, but the kind that makes us create films.
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Not being sad makes us stand still, and you went to California only to find even more reasons to make room for a distant feature film, made up of pieces that could be assembled into oxymorons, odd or even, by the way. Which did you prefer?
I suppose that, assuming you knew you would die in the sea, you wouldn’t have changed a thing. You paid such close attention to life, such attention to what you gave it and what it gave back to you. And that fulfilled relationship you had with it made you religious, and made me sad, because all this time I hadn’t known that religion could be less about puzzles and more about the images printed on them.
Less about the whys, or the missing pieces, or the pieces that weren’t missing, and more about whether we choose to put the puzzle together at all, according to what we want to see once the process is complete.
Does that make sense, Theo?
Did you choose your puzzles for their pictures, and did you choose the ocean, choose to enter it, for its image?
I know that optimising what remains of the function now that you’re gone doesn’t interest you in the slightest. Tell me, it doesn’t matter, does it? When you got your cap, that one was yours, that one fitted your head, and when your head slipped into it, if everything beautiful is inevitably sad, Theo, how did you feel when you looked at yourself?
Were you aware of the image?
Aware of the image, did you look into the depths before losing your life? Did you look? Did you watch, witness, observe, confirm, attest?
Did you see what it took to move from one conditioned extreme to another? Was it like an island, surrounded on both sides, or was it like an ocean, surrounding you on every side?
Theo, was your death as sad as your life, or, being so ugly, was it somehow so happy to disappear? Death disappeared, you no longer had to fight against a movement that angered and confined you, a current, a current around your waist, rising towards wherever it was that your cap had once rested.
And then. After that. Nothing was beautiful anymore, and nothing was ugly. Nothing was sad, and nothing was happy. Words for feelings began to run out, and feelings for words. Hats began to accumulate.
There was one more hat for one less head, the only one, because that hat was never meant to be lent. It came with your name on it. You left something behind. You left a cap. You left a cap that no one else can wear. It was yours alone, non-transferable, personal, immeasurable.
It belonged to the place where you went to make a cap, creating one more than was needed. The cap belonged to the place where, after you were gone, it lost its purpose. The cap belonged to the school of films.
25 May 2023.
