The Remaining Light of the Sunset (余辉)

(Video Games - Lana Del Rey)

Prologue

This song used to belong to me and my friend, who...

He had a rough life. His dad beat him even before knowing he was gay. I could stand between him and the bullies of our age, but I had no power against the adults. He committed suicide because of me. He was my love.

Chapter 1

Lake and Cake

It was the second year of high school. There was a small bamboo bush next to a tiny lake near our teaching building, and we would skip night study sessions and spend time there, looking at the moon and its reflection in the water. We couldn't go every night, because even though I was good at studying and didn't need the study sessions to finish homework, and I helped him do his, he still had a life to cope with on top of it, and it was tough on him.

You know, a high school student in China goes to class at 7am and leaves the classroom at 12pm, all for the utmost and singular objective of getting better grades and eventually admission from the best colleges for those entire 3 years. And having relationships is the most unacceptable deviation from that path enforced by the school and parents, let alone a gay one.

On my 16th birthday, he bought me a cake, a tiny adorable pineapple cake. We slipped to the lake and he even lit the candles for me, but for that we were soon found by that goddamn principle. They didn't do anything to me just because I was a good student, but the hell they rained on him... It was all my fault.

It was all my fault.

They told his parents, and his dad beat him even harder. He suffered through the month, and on Jan 25th, he... he jumped off the bridge next to the high school.

They couldn't find his body.

Sometimes this idea would cross my mind, that maybe he got away, to a place on the other end of the country, and led a different but free life.

Chapter 2

Ear Studs

The only thing I have left of him was a pair of black ear studs in his pen case. I had been wearing one on my left ear for years, until I got my diploma and realized his dream for him. I thought maybe as my studenthood came to an end it was time to move on and begin a new chapter in my life. Even the piercing started to close up and heal, with a metaphorical sense as well. But it turns out I was never over him, and probably never will be.

In the same pen case were his 7 pens of the gaybow color. I also took the notebook that he wrote poems on from his desk, before his parents stormed in and cleared everything, basically wiping his existence from the school and the world.

I went to college and after the first semester I came home in the winter break, I found out that my mom cleared my high school stuff out of the apartment, and those with it. And I had been passive aggressive with my mom for the whole next semester. Ha, it was kind of silly.

Chapter 3

Our Songs

He had the voice of an angel. He studied singing professionally and he would go on stage to sing those political propaganda songs or lead a choir or something. But what he loved were the English songs, and he got me interested in them. He was really good at English, even better than me at that time, and he would sing a section from a song when there was something happening that could find a reference from the lyrics. But I was such a troll I could only hear the melody, completely oblivious of the content or the meaning. It was only until years later when I started to learn to sing those songs did I realize that. Those clips of memories flash back now every time I hear one of the songs. Our songs.

We didn't have very "smart" smart phones back then, and because of how ephemeral it was, I don't have a single recording of his voice. And I was in that stage where I found myself ugly so I refused to take pictures, and in turn I don't even have a photo with him or of him. He wrote a song for me, but a troll like me couldn't possibly remember the melodies, and the lyrics were lost along with the poem notebook. Some of my favorite singers bear the resemblance of his voice, but his face eventually becomes blurry in my memory. And the only thing I have left of him were his ear studs.

Chapter 4

Heaven

In the summer of my sophomore year I went to Georgia Tech for a summer camp and I had a good time. But I had false hopes that grad school would be as much fun. So, I wasn't in a good place in my first quarter in UC Davis. The school work was difficult enough, and I was very isolated.

So on Jan 25th, I planned to go find him and be with him. I cut my leg open on the bed waiting to bleed out. I had this feeling that the senses of my arms and legs were retracting from my hands and feet towards my torso, and they converged to a point at my core. But my mind was still there. In the pure blackness I saw a silhouette of him afar. He looked back at me and he turned away. And then the senses were coming back, expanding from my center and filling my body.

I called 911.

The firefighters broke the door and took me out. I was sent to an emergency room and transfused a liter of blood, and as soon as I could walk again, I was transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

There I was among the real crazy people, who talked to the walls or wandered around without a cognition. I was terrified but the more "sane" people told me we were actually in the better ward, others having maniacs and murderers. My "roommate" was a Korean orphan, flowing through the adopting families and attempting suicide every so often all the staff knew him. I certainly did not come close to the idea of misery there.

Ridiculously I was diagnosed as having split personalities, as if my lack of physical proof of another person warranted a Fight Club situation where I projected all of my wills and wishes onto him. Nonetheless, I was held there for a week, and kept seeing a psychiatrist for 2 years and a psychologist for 3. I took medications and did TMS for depression, but at the end of the treatment I argued if I really had physiological problems with the neurons and the receptors, or it was just an emotional response to the collection of the conditions and environment I was in at the time. And it seemed more like the latter, especially after I finished my Master's thesis and obtained the degree, and became validated that I was not an imposter. At the same time, I have this outlook that part of my heart belongs to him, and I'm living for him under in this world, and he's watching over me from above in Heaven, if there's really such a place, one for the non-heterosexual though.

Chapter 5

Best Friends

His name writes as 余辉. There's also a look-alike word 余晖. 余 means remain, 光 means light and 日 means the sun. 余晖 is the dying sunlight during sunset, while 余辉 can mean the remaining part of a light wave which doesn't make sense, or the last days of a person's life, as "light" carries a metaphorical sense of time in Chinese, long before lightyear was coined. I think it's the best thing his parents ever gave him.

My Chinese name sucks though. My parents gave me such a name with a weird intonation, a pronunciation that I myself have difficulty pronouncing in my southern Chinese accent, and a rare character that most people can’t get right the first try. He really was the only one who could say it beautifully. He also gave me my English name, Arthur, from Nolan’s Inception, and he was Eames. I came to California for grad school, the place in the songs and movies that fascinated him all the time, and finally realize why. The double rhotic pronunciation when spoken by an American in the California accent is stunning, as if he’s living inside that person every time they call my name.

We were best friends for longer than we were lovers. We met on the first day of middle school, when we were assigned to the same class. I forgot how we became friends, it just felt natural. I hadn't gone through sexual awakening or been exposed to the idea of homosexuality. I just instinctively watched handsome boys in the school from afar and told him this boy got cool hairstyle and that boy got unfairly fair skin, and he would briefly acknowledge.

Until one day in the summer before high school. Usually I would be playing video games without caring much about him like a real boy, you know. But on this day, we were sitting on my bed with a blue bed sheet that had cartoon bears on it and a comforter with pineapples, and he scooched real close and put his arm around my waist, and he kissed me softly. I was... I actually don't remember much how I felt, I only know, after all these years through hookups that come and ghost, all the sexual sensations or orgasm, can't beat the feeling of a soft kiss.

Epilogue

"Heaven is a place on earth with you

They say that the world was built for two

Only worth living if somebody is loving you

And, baby, now you do"