Richard AmmonRichard Ammon, GlobalGayz
Laguna Beach, CA
The sun went down across the horizon this evening on this commemorative day for people lost to AIDS. A small candlelit gathering on the beach in Laguna (California) named friends, family and lovers who now live only in the memories of those who spoke. The prayers offered were a slight balm to survivors; the eternal waves lapping on the sand, a full moon and a slight evening chill over-arched the remembrance. Life and loss on the edge of the ocean. The faces, the laughs, the wit and sexiness of the departed flickered up, held for moments of silence, then released into the blur of individual memories.
It’s hard to wrap life around death for long; there’s so much to do tonight, tomorrow and next week. The busyness of being sentient doesn’t really know what to do with permanent loss. How do I hold the long-ago body and soul of a lover in my vision; “how do you hold a moonbeam in your hands” as the musical line went.
Clinton Bleecker (photo) was such a person in my life for a while and he was very alive with his ethos… and then sickened and passed away at the age of thirty four. Too young.
Now I am ‘old’, as he would have been, and I feel the shortness of my own life. How we both regretted his shortness far too soon… Remembering is easy, being mortal not so, either long or short. Sic transit gloria mundi.
