On Description

Alfred Jung Lee has been many things. A journalist. A horticulturist. A husband. He’s no longer any of these things. He’s now other things, though. Things that he wasn’t before. Most notably, a widower. How he fits these pieces together—tucking some away, while revealing others, sparely but no less affectingly—makes for a remarkable puzzle box of an essay, one where description serves as both designation and disclosure.

He asked about my new friends and classmates, and I told him what I have been telling everyone: mid-twenties to late thirties, everyone seemingly smart and nice, two who moved here from abroad. I told him about my studio apartment: that there was enough room, that it got good light, about the places I could walk to from the apartment.

There was another shape formed by these descriptions. It was what my life would have looked like if things had gone according to plan, and how this current situation, far from anywhere I’d ever lived or imagined, may or may not have differed from that normal, which might also inform whether or not I was doing OK, in some process of recovery, and, therefore, whether or not my father needed to worry. It was this shape—the second, unspoken description that we were talking around—and the extent to which my present life may or may not have varied from it, that our conversation was also about.