I assume you had a life before we met

Filled with love, pain, victories, and defeats

But for me your story began when I entered into it

A transient visitor of your present

Your past existed solely in stories, your future in dreams

It’s alluring to assume that your life became frozen in time when I left, a cross-section of a whole calcified into my comfortable solipsism

.

I know now you had a life after that insular present

Filled with more pain, your victories warped to accommodate it

My solipsism violently denied

.

You bore your cross while my back was turned

Not our sins, but mankind’s shame, weighed heavy on your shoulders

Stumbling toward your needless crucifixion

.

The news of your passing is no gospel

A martyr without a cause, a death without passion

Your suffering brings no redemption; we are not yet saved

We continue to drift along without you, oblivious

Your glory exists only in the memory of the names once held by statistics

.

In gratitude for that memory,

RIP Vir Thongpheng, February 28, 1979 – April 6, 2023