Georgia San Li: Urgently to You in the Past

“When I consider how my light is spent…”
John Milton, Sonnet 19

This may be my last message. I am resorting to
this after sending messages to you
for two days, you, waiting at Charles de Gaulle
for the flight to Tunis, the smell of burnt sugars and fish,
pain aux framboise at the bakery around the corner from
the Miromesnile Métro still in your memory,
mille-feuilles with your father under the cathedral glass of
Le Bon Marché. Perhaps this will be the last beautiful place

we remember now that half our days are over,
I don’t know if you will read this because you are still
inexplicably weeping, rapt by mysterious voices of
characters of the novel which you called The Mathematical
Handbook of Science and Engineers, embossed in gold
leaf lettering like a Bible, but that was before the
Jasmine Revolution and in fiction you have since introduced
the unwelcome reality of the pandemic with questions
persisting as to whether there were those who knew or should
have known that humanity, its children, would live
and suffer, reshaping the narrative into virtual realism, invisible
pain rifling through human consciousness. Despite repression
and denials: no one is spared. Life resumes as if in a natural
order of things rather than a metonymy of unidimensional

screen life, subsistence mistaken for resilience within
normalized skittering horror. Subsequent revisions settle like ash into an
Untitled: Portrait from the Tarmac, portending both arrivals
and departures, possibly a new abyss, or life on another
planet. The world continues to watch what might become of
America, more troubled and insecure and paradox. I am stock,

inventory on a shelf, with no idea of what might happen next.
Heighten your awareness. Be afraid and believe: peace
is still possible. Imagine this grave concern. Stand fast: the author
has choices within exogenous factors she cannot control in
her fiction, at least until we meet her in the final sheltering of
the unimaginable: le jardin des jardins.