ARCHIVING A HEART

by Agnieszka Tuszynska

 

 

It hit me with an impact I couldn't have prepared for.

Ours was not the kind of friendship that one describes in terms of distance or quality.

He wasn't my closest or best friend.

I met Okla in a graduate seminar on Holocaust poetry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Every week he walked in with a spring in his gait, filled the classroom with his presence, and quickly made me feel lucky just to be witness to his enthusiasm and brilliance. We then connected over his love for the Polish language and Polish poetry. The last exchange we had before I moved to New York was about a box of New American Press books he wanted to donate to the prison college program I was teaching for.

Perhaps ironically (but not really ironically, if you knew the cyber-Okla), I came to know him better online in the following years, following his posts about poetry, teaching, Netflix, Thai food, Pennsylvania, trains, politics, religion, knitting, and friendship. Occasionally, we exchanged  late-night messages, in which he sometimes offered to read the work of a promising student writer I'd talked about or talked tattoos or god. And I swear his nearness couldn't have seemed more real if he lived next door, but we only saw each other twice after he moved to Pennsylvania.

So this is not my loss. Not in a way that warrants condolences. I'd feel cheap receiving such. My friendship with Okla was a union of kindred spirits who remain hopelessly hopeful, but it was a matter of staying in each other's orbit more than anything. There are people out there who were brothers to him, people who breathed the same air as he did, whose life was so fused with his that they feel dazed by the void his presence left. My heart wraps around them every day.

But then it is my loss. Because it is everyone's loss. This is YOUR loss, too, whether you knew Okla or not. This is your loss if you care about other people, about literature and thought, about heart and spirit, about truth and justice.

I exaggerate on occasion, but this is not going to be one of those times. I have never known anyone in whom the fusion of intellect, passion, and goodness would be as complete as it was in Okla. 50 years from now—and I have no doubt about this—people will remember his name and read his poems, fiction, and critical essays. But how will they ever understand how much he loved this life and cared about all of us? Who can archive a heart?

 

 

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