Dear Amanda. I don’t know if you’ll ever read this post, but here goes anyway:
Thank you, Amanda Fucking Palmer. I had the great fortune of seeing your show yesterday in Copenhagen. There was indeed no intermission, and as far as my feelings are concerned, there won’t be one for quite some time. Pretty much every single heartstring of mine was pulled, and they’ll keep reverberating throughout my art and life.
Last time I saw you was six years ago, also in Copenhagen, together with this amazing, vibrant whirlwind of a person, who would some weeks later become my girlfriend. We had secretly both bought tickets for the show as a surprise to one another, and some months later we would sing and scream ourselves hoarse along to your music during a roadtrip through New Zealand. After the show we got to talk to you. She told you that you were the reason she hadn’t followed through with her thoughts of plastic surgery, and the words you said to her in response have since etched themselves into my mind as well: “we all want to be perfect, but we’re better when we’re not.”
Out of the myriad futures that could have evolved from that moment, the one which actually manifested itself was a world in which she died from suicide about a year and a half later. Needless to say, I’ve struggled to cope with her absence in countless situations since then, but never have I felt it as palpably as at the beginning of yesterday’s show.
Your music was “our music”, we would use your songs to get inside one another’s heads. She would play me “Girl Anachronism” and “Runs in the Family”, I would play her “Ampersand” and “In My Mind”. Still, after she died, I refused to stop listening to your music. I refused to stop doing the things we used to do together. Even though it hurt. Even though I felt sad and scared and lost my creativity and various functioning-in-society skills. I’ve found my way back to art, to life, to belief in the future, little by little. Mostly through poetry.
Writing poems isn’t as hard as people tend to think. All the words are already there. In books, in songs, spraypainted on walls, in other people’s dreams. All it takes is to rearrange them, and with the sheer statistical possibilities of combinations, creating something original is piece of cake. All it takes is the rearranging, and the courage to claim the words as your own.
For a long time after the tragedy, that courage was beyond me. But it did return. Little by little, seeping in through the cracks in the sorrow, until it was the sorrow that constituted the cracks in life, instead of the other way around. I am alive today, and my writing is flourishing to such an extent that creating poetry sometimes feels more like channeling divinity than painstakingly rearranging the building blocks of language into beauty and meaning. This is thanks to my wonderful friends, therapy, and great artists like you lighting the way with mantras such as “stop pretending art is hard”.
Yesterday, during your oddyssey of things that hit me so very close to home, I felt the tightening in my chest signalling the absence of a beloved begin to ease. Fuelled by your music and your stories, the absence gradually morphed into an awareness of how all our words and kisses and memories shape the future. And in that very real sense, my girlfriend is still with me. Parts of her propagate through everything I say and write and do and feel, as do parts of every single beautiful person I’ve had the fortune of crossing paths with.
Parts of you make up a great deal of me. That’s the purpose of art, isn’t it? To help people blend into one another and create a masterpeice of life far beyond the limits of individuals. I want to thank you, Amanda, from the bottom of my heart, for the inspiration, compassion, beauty and courage that you spread throughout the world. What you’re doing is working, it really is, and it’s growing. I am so happy to get to be a part of that.
I love you.
Sincerely,
The awkward weirdo in a top hat and vest who requested a hug right after the patreon group photo and who blurted something along the lines of “thank you so much for everything you do I love you”. This is what I really meant to say.
