All week I’ve been waiting for her to arrive in my dreams, and last night it happened. She came alone to the room I used to rent in New York City during my last year of musical theater school, when I was cracking through that husk and starting to write my own songs. In she clomped with her ripped jeans and ragged Docs, her collarbone visible through the holes in her t-shirt. My thin mattress barely moved beneath her as she sat down and sliced me with her gaze.
Her eyes, of course, were luminous. She smelled strongly of cigarettes and some kind of weird, oceany perfume that made me think of beach embers in Vancouver. She told me that 18-20 (the age I was in New York) is when women form their superpowers, and I thought how corny. But she grabbed my hands and her dirty silver rings cut my fingers, don’t forget what you know!
Sinead, I am not a forgetter. In fact, I remember too fucking much. My childhood secret was the same as yours, and somehow I must have sensed that kinship, because I ran right to you. Your voice grabbed my pain and held it away from my body so I could breathe a bit. Exhausted and grateful, I sang along with you, my small voice shielded by your massive roar.
For more than 10 years I lived in your songs and felt known, or at least unalone. But I couldn't stay close. You were too hard to love, too savage and fire-plagued. I’d already seen what that state of beingness had done to women in my family, and I was determined to avoid the same fate. For my own survival, I had to abandon that archetype. I had to let you go.
But I never stopped respecting you, or what you stood for. I’m sickened by the way you were gaslit and cancelled and treated as a sexist punchline. God knows you were right about everything, and people were starting to reckon with that in the years just before your death. I wonder if that was any consolation to you, or if it just re-triggered your demons. I wonder if you ever, for one moment of your life, felt unalone.
The expression rest in power makes me feel jaded, but in your case it applies. The earth is still wounded, maybe mortally. Politicians are still corrupt. Women are still being oppressed. Children are still being abused. We might not make it, but not for your lack of trying.
I don’t know, Sinead. Find love where you can. Find peace, or rage on forever.
Just do what you need to do.
My top 5:
-Emperor’s New Clothes
-Nothing Compares
-Troy
-The State I’m In
-He Moved Through the Fair
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What a powerful visit you recieved! Thank you for sharing this beauty.
So beautifully written! She was a legend.