And In My Dreams I Still Can See Him Flying Through a Western Sky

 There are so many words. I think the closest I ever got was "Southern Gothic DaVinci" and every woman was his Mona Lisa. He had this way of capturing a sideways smile, a dimple, a glint in the eye. Not even just capturing it, but really seeing it in the first place.

He was all authentic soul. And it shone through every piece of art. Every Moon Gal and every pointy-chinned pinup half-dressed and unashamed. Teasing. Or not teasing. Just comfortable and content. Every woman he created showed how he loved women. The right way. And we all knew it. And that's why we all loved him back so hard. He showed us what he saw in us and what we all really want to be. What we all want the freedom to be. And I think what some of us have captured the freedom to be partially because of that art.

All that from a self-conscious girl who's never really felt seen. Then a comment here about "those eyes" and another about my strong arms and I saw myself a little differently. And it can't just be me. I suspect that's why his art endeared itself to so many. I bet he could do that to any living thing. And I think that's why everyone who knew him loved him so. The way he showed Patterson all long legs and a guitar over his shoulder like an axe, larger than life, the perspective from the ground like a giant, like Paul Bunyan. The time he made Cooley a literal giant cock. A rooster, that is. And how he got away with it.

The way he used his art to speak. RESIST! A big red star. Stacey Abrams in her blue dress, pinup like always, lovely and brave and strong like all his art. She became one of us. Immortalized that way. VOTE! Vote Blue. Vote for humanity. Vote for civil rights. Vote for autonomy. Be on the right side of history. No quieting himself so that some audience will not be alienated by his truth. Proud and still somehow not hard. He was one of the best among us. Something to aspire to. A benevolent star now.

I know it's an ugly anniversary. I don't want to talk about that. All that light he brought and I hate when people make the end the only part. Or the big part. The people we love are so much more than the end. I don't want to celebrate the hole he left. That's too macabre even for me.

Wes was part of the magic. He was the sight to the sound. He made all the words in their darkness and their humor and their righteousness and their sweetly Southern beauty into lines and colors. And he was so good at it that if you don't know, you wouldn't know which came first, the band or the art. And that was part of the magic too. Like he had willed them into the world by putting them on paper. They were intertwined in the Duality of the Southern Thing. Not like legend, but more like lore. Folk. Word of mouth. Tradition. And he's going to go on that way too. Wes Freed, champion of the lowly possum and creator of giants and celestial bodies and dark birds of sharp words and long-tailed playful cats and giant cocks. 

And that way of looking at things askew and seeing them differently for it. Like his peripheral vision was his superpower. And then being able to take that and make it so that we could all see it the same way. If that isn't real magic, I don't know what is. Wes was magic. And sometimes the best magic stops when you least expect it. No outro, no walk off, just gone. Evaporated. But unlike magic, no part of me has questioned whether he was absolutely real. There's a postcard of a redhead with an all too familiar sideways smile on my bookshelf over there to remind me of the man behind that smile. Thousands of pieces of art as varied in subject as the stars, but all possessed of that exclusively Wes magic.

Rest in music, Wes. Rest in the sea of all our love. You will forever be missed.