How are you there?

I took the garage out to the ground later tonight. It was surprisingly warm outside. The blacktop was still wet due to earlier rain. I raised my head and the moon looked dim behind the clouds. I wasn’t able to find one single sparkle from the stars. Still it was warm. It felt like those freezing blasts were all gone and spring is approaching.

I was getting a message from the internet. Someone sent around a story conjecturing that Leslie Cheung is still alive, saying who saw him meeting who where balah balah balah. I don’t believe it. I guess we all don’t, more or less. Yet the story itself is too lovely to be got rid of. I know none about you. But for me, I don’t even think I can make myself admit that someone simply made it up.

This is the second story I’ve heard since Leslie left us three years ago. The story simply gets itself look more and more convincing (if you could appreciate the art of the mentality behind it). They even got pictures of Leslie meeting that someone for it this time, reporting that they are working on a new film or something like that. Every time, when something indeterminate comes up, the writer would say things like “It is not impossible that Leslie wasn’t dead,” or “It is very likely that the person they met and saw was really Leslie.”

Yap, Leslie was probably tired of the life he went through and decided to change it totally. Actually, these talks are all the same. They are saying only one thing, though in different wording, that is, we wish it were another person who leapt from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on April 1st, 2003, that we could still expect new performances, new songs, and new concerts of Leslie some time, some day.

It was true that he must get tired of something, probably all things. It doesn’t matter whether he’s in the heaven or on the earth. Either way wouldn’t change the fact that there won’t be new work heard from him. The hard part to take is that– we miss him SO much and it won’t get stopped. Since there is no future in it,the only thing we have with him is these memories which cannot be let go.

[PHOTO: Leslie Cheung in Passion Tour. From Passion Tour Photo Book (Japanese Version)]