The Sound of Her Wings

These are the things that I remember.

We use art, as a people or as an individual, to speak a collective language, to be moved by a common visual or a remembered turn of phrase. Moreover, we use that bit, the memory of the Mona Lisa's smile, the oft-spoken shakespeare line, so often that it becomes a cultural meme, embodying far more than it originally had. Can we help it that those of us who read comics find ourselves drawn to these stories, and we can call up the covers or individual panels that moved us with tremendous clarity.

A good friend of mine died tonight. I return from sitting shiva by his body in the hospital, and I'm responding by dealing with it the way that I choose to: listening to a slow blues by Led Zeppelin, and hearing bits of dialogue from Neil Gaiman's Death in my head.

"Is that all I get?"

"You get what everybody gets. A lifetime."

Steve never read Sandman, he believed that Pop culture pretty much stopped at 1956. But whan I arrived, there was no question that She had been there, and that the part of him that leaves with Her had already gone.

These are the things that I remember.