Sophomore year I asked you what the point of life was and you told me it was love. I objected: how like you. Love isn't enough to vindicate every long day, people mostly seem little deserving of such a thing; and plus, it's hard. You said no—you wanted to live for love.

 Senior year—just a few weeks ago—we were about to graduate. I asked you what you'd do with life and you said you wanted to create; you wanted to make art. You looked serious. “I want to write.” I nodded—how like you.

 You were a terrible speller.

 You wrote brilliantly: the New York Times published you, NPR aired you, and New York put on your play. You'd pound out an essay caffeinated out and days later casually announce the writing prize it had won. When you wrote—hunched over your MacBook somewhere between 12 and 6AM (did your professors ever suspect?)—you'd occasionally look up at our suite. “Yo. How do you spell 'aggrandize'?” Normally you asked only after several right-click battles with Word not recognizing what you were going for. You were a brilliant writer—but you were definately, defanitely, definitely a bad speller.

 That's how I want to remember you. You were everything good that everyone's been saying: so talented that you intimidated us, and more creative in your sleep than most people are awake (I defer to the Sufjan Stevens dream). But de mortuis nil nisi bonum captures a shadow of you; you, grey. It isn't you wild, brilliant, and color. Those of us lucky enough to be around as you typed out your genius knew: you couldn't really spell. Those of us lucky enough to be around as you did your everyday also knew: you were human. You were 'impossibly promising'—but you also schadenfreude'd and had fears and insecurities and sometimes you said things that made people sad or mad.

 Nobody was more aware of this than you. I went back and reread our emails—pages and pages of collegiate confusion spilled over from late night bunk bed talks or Saybrook dinners that made us late to section:

“I would like very much to become a better person. I'm not sure how self improvement occurs other than true desire. Awake and on my laptop in the middle of the night–I worry that I am in Slytherin. How else could I disrespect... How else could I neglect... How else could I entice...?”

 “Articulation is not vindication. I have an immense skill for deprecation and one that I worry excuses my actions to myself and to others. Understanding one's faults do not possibly reverse them – and trivializing my 'sins' is not something that I would believe. Sometimes I do mean things. I often think too highly of myself. It is [these] things that I wish to improve on.”

 “Do you ever feel like you're a bad person? I feel like I'm a bad person sometimes.”

Junior year, we emailed about “human weakness”; you added the parenthetical: “(or perhaps, human uniqueness.)” Yes. That. All those things, all of it together, made you you. Marina Keegan: brilliant writer, terrible speller. 

So I want to remember you in your imperfection because that's how you did it. You wanted to write and you wanted to love. So you did them together, with and for human weakness (or perhaps, human uniqueness). “People” are an altogether messy group and sometimes look a little too selfish, petty, or prideful for love. What you decided sophomore year—that you would “live for love”—goes beyond naiveté only after one recognizes this fact and carries on regardless. That's how to get to love—not infatuation, which is pleasant and easy, nor idealization, which is not human.

 So you who were no pale shade of perfect wrote for this weak-unique bunch. You wrote your flaws and fears into everything you wrote. And we the lucky readers read along and feel a little less lonely, a little less bad, a little more hopeful. All of this is hard when the one who loves and the one who's loved are both painfully human. You knew this—you knew all this:

 “[I] fight away my insecurities with lists I could well add to my resume. This fall I became president of the College democrats and my play was selected for Dramat production. Yet, you're right about the fundamental uselessness of such things. I DO feel most fufilled [sic] and most happy when I am loving and experiencing love from others. I think my biggest challenge in this regard is my own selfishness.”

 —yet carried on regardless:

“What happens after or beyond this life is impossible to know, so I will focus my energies and love towards this life and the human race which inhabits it.”

That's to say: you wanted to write and you wanted to love. Even despite the strange and still incomprehensible fact that now you do know what's “beyond this life,” by age 22, you managed to do what you wanted. Maybe not exactly as you'd envisioned. Like everything else, your corpus is not perfect: the feeling that there ought to be more of it chokes up all of us reading your work now. But it's what you leave us in that characteristic imperfection of human love, which makes us love it all the more. In a way then, still: how like you.

Yena Lee, Marina’s First-Year Roommate and Friend