About a year ago, I knew a poet named Tristan. Tristan Shapiro, she said (but we can never be sure whether people are lying or not). I never learnt much about her, and every time I claimed to know her she protested the fact. Quite strongly, I might add.

She went to Austria one year--she spoke German and Latin and Greek like every fantastic writer would. She wrote mind-blowing poems while she was there, and posted them on dA. In all, I think she posted around 15 poems.

Around Thanksgiving last year, she quit dA. This is what's left of her account. Three days later, I left--because of "artistic reasons", I said. She'd be amused if she knew that it was only 20% because I was fed up with trying to please idiots whose only comments were "OMG THAT'S SO GOOD LOLOLOL" and 80% because she left, and took with her a big chunk of what's worth reading on this site.

Tristan was great. She was amazing. I recommended her to every single person I could think of--she was never appreciated enough. Maybe that's part of why she left--she was starting to be appreciated.

A lot of people didn't agree with me, thought that she wasn't so hot. Hell, there were people who thought I was a better poet (which is just absurd, I tell you).

Imagine, for a second, T. S. Eliot. Kurt Vonnegut. Sylvia Plath. That was Tristan: T. S. Eliot meets Sylvia Plath meets Kurt Vonnegut, but she gave it life. Before Tristan, poetry was just a bunch of pretty words. I love pretty words, but they're only pretty, and they might as well be dead. After Tristan, words were alive. She finished for me what Pablo Neruda started.

Tristan, my friends, was amazing. It is my wholehearted belief that she will become the premier poet of our generation. Maybe one day, I'll read some of her work in print again.

But I seriously doubt that. The world's a big place, and there's no room for stuff like poetry anymore.

When she left, Tristan took with her all the poetry she'd ever written. I honestly wish I'd copied some of it into a Word file or something, because it's all gone now. Just as well, because poetry, like beauty, is not meant to be hoarded.

I don't know why I remembered it again just now, but she might as well have died. Been thrown off the face of the Earth. She's less real to me now than Kurt Vonnegut, and he died for real.

I honestly wish there was some proof that she--no, that her poetry--was alive somewhere.

I once said that I loved her, loved her like Shelley loved Keats. If she died, I'd write her "Adonais", I said. Hell, she'd laugh her arse off if she knew, but I mean it as much today as I did back then.

The only problem is, there's no way I'm that good. I have no "Adonais" to offer, so I'll offer this: every single person who passes my page, read this and remember, there was once a brilliant poet named Tristan, and she was on dA, but now she's gone.

And that, I think, is the most tragic thing in the world.