songbird

Pleasure and pain go on relentlessly without the dead. I must make art not only for my job, but for my survival

I’m on a plane again, chasing the sun backwards in time. The circle of light dips and bobs under blue plastic window. Midday in New Jersey, sunset over Greenland, sunrise in Japan. We are 4 movies away from Tokyo. 7 days ago - a headline. “South Korean plane takes off in 2026, and lands in 2025 in LA”. I laugh at the absurdity of time. All we’re doing is assigning meaning to a great pile of mystical nothing in the the Great Big Milky Way. 2026. I mull over the numbers; meaningless to God and profound to me. It’s the first year of my life where you can only exist as a memory to me. You’re somewhere off the grid, swallowed by eternity, out of view. In the human realm, just an aching memory. Someone - also motherless - said something sickly sweet on their mother’s passing. One year more since you left, but one year closer to meeting you again. A gut punch I choose to ignore, for now. A phrase I’ll come back to again and again on a midnight drive, sobbing to your favorite Sufi song “Afreen Afreen”. I wonder how numb I’ll unknowingly make myself to get through the worst of this. The body knows the depths of what it can and can’t handle. Maybe I’m a warrior, maybe a little bitch.

I’m in good mood after weeks, but at what cost? I look insane. EFT tapping. I tap my forehead 19 times in the middle seat of the middle row of the plane. I am safe to receive wonderful things.

I’m restless, swimming in the pungent citrus smell that permeates all economy bathrooms. One pesky gray hair poking from a fresh root touch up at the salon this week. All trace of any pop star left in me has vanished. Embezzled, bamboozled, grieved out, tricked, humbled by the losses of life. I am on a plane, but it’s neither glamorous nor romantic. I’m a musician, and all I have left is song.

What does it mean to become a shadow of yourself? To be so ripped by loss that your voice changes shape and tone?

I write to remember and I still can’t remember. There’s a shade of cynicism that peeks under the ridge of the mountain of my heart. There is a color of youth- of freedom to feel an unfiltered joy - that I know I will never feel again. I may feel it through a child’s eyes, or a character in a movie - but likely never again for myself. Sometimes I’m selfish and I cry for that too. There was a person before, and a person after.

I look at that time in my life like a picture; drenched in yellow, sunlight tearing through, particles of dust hung in the sky. Mouth open, smiling like an idiot, surrounded by green. Worrying about all the wrong things. Worried about all the wrong people. Warped in a mirror of my own hot, selfish, youthful desire. Unknowing of the kiss of the grim reaper - the reality of the final say of God. It is not marketable or smart to be so forthcoming about my own demise - I know this. But after you lose everything, the only thing you have is honesty. And the post nut clarity of the Universe being so, so honest with you. That things end, and you must pick yourself up again. Find the will to dance again, to put pen to paper, to cry freely and ugly in a boy’s arms. Pleasure and pain go on relentlessly without the dead. I must make art not only for my job, but for my survival.

A baby coos in a mothers arms in row 44, peeking through the seats in my direct view. We were those girls once. Gut punch number two.

I’m a musician, and all I have left is song

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