less than a shadow/farewell to shadowmac

Today brought the devastating news that M. Sharon Mac Ewan, whom I met online through the social medium Eons under her username shadowmac, has died. I am doing the typical chicken-with-head-cut-off irrational things some of us do just after we get bad news like this. My office/workroom is in major disarray far beyond the usual as I’ve been looking for the portrait I did of Sharon and her mother. I have not been able to find it, though I did find this, which I may have posted on this blog before:

It is specific to Sharon in that a flamingo figures prominently. Her avatar as shadowmac was a flamingo.

I hope a future post, or an edit of this one, will include the portrait. I’d also like it to include a poem I wrote about missing her, “shadowlack.” but I can’t find that either. Times like these make me self-loathe for being so badly organized.

While I was looking, though, I found this page. It has nothing to do with Sharon, but it may serve as an odd analogy for the loss of her. For me loss of her is a loss of a little sliver of my identity. I did not ever get to meet her in person, and now I never will, unless there is more to reality than I think. This page is about loss, or devaluation, of self. The double acrostic is “less than a shadow.”

Laminate-badged America
Extracts/distills/grids identities
Slide/present/insert to get through
Soulless numbers-running miasma
Takes a life and renders it freeze-dried
Hinders perception to near zero
And devalues bowl and sparrow

I will close with new words about my lost friend:

farewell shadowmac
may your soul be borne aloft
on flamingo wings