Update:
Our memoir-fantasie has been renamed, “Lucy Like-a-Charm,”
in honour of my beloved Lucy.

Scheherazade’s Sea Website is Active! Please check out our ongoing activities, photos, musings, and works-in-progress at https://scheherazadessea.wordpress.com/ .

Above is one of my favourite photos of Lucy and myself, taken in 2014, in Sydney, Australia. We are cuddling, leaning intimately cheek to cheek, eyes closed in peaceful contentment. I wore a fuchsia pink hoodie and Lucy is wrapped snugly in a red flannel snoodie that I sewed for her. We had just moved into a dilapidated house along William Street, Paddington. It was old, and cold, but we were warm and cosy together, curled up in a small couch with a bright pink throw rug. I created a fantasia image from the original photograph, placing us in the midst of a flurry of large, round peonies, against blue sky and white clouds. The poem, “Wake Up in My Dreams”, which will also be the title of our epic memoir-fantasie, when completed, appears on the right of the image:

Dancing with my shadows,
Whispering, “Good Night!”
Humming silent wishes,
Smiling deep inside.
Dancing with my shadows,
Jarful of moonbeams!
Come, lay down beside me,
Wake up in my dreams.
(©Dawn-joy Leong, 2010)

Lucy Like-a-Charm, love of my life, and a central figure in my journey, left the mortal realm in 2023. Since then, I have begun working on the final chapter of our epic multimodal transdisciplinary autobiography. It has been a bumpy process – churning, swirling, turning, tumbling, weeping, laughing, mourning, rejoicing, flying and falling all at once. I even survived a near-death experience a few months after Lucy departed, which forced me to stop working outside of home for an entire year. Art, with passion and purpose, is never easy. And I know that I signed up for the challenge when I broke away from the Golden Cage of pampered subjugation. There was never a moment that I regretted this concerted decision and action. But after Lucy suddenly left me, I was thrown into a dark vortex, lost in a desolation I had never known before. I simply couldn’t imagine a life without her anymore. Yet, she returned to me, vibrant and resonant inside my grieving spirit, bringing resolution to unanswered questions that I had written and sung about long before her appearance in my life. Lucy continued to be my channel of Divine Grace. And thus, I continued to live, and now, I embrace the honour of a profound Grief, the other side of Lucy’s perfect Love. A grief that did not break me, but instead is holding me up and leading me gently onward, even in the midst of my yearning to be with her again. I now see life and death from a different perspective, it is as if I have entered a whole new paradigm of existence where there is no longer a clear demarcation between the two.