Purple Thoughts

It’s not that I have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.  It’s just the feelings keep coming and coming and they’re not going anywhere except back inside in a loop and I just need to get them out of me

Plus a tiny part of me wants him to know that I know, that I knew, I need to say it out loud narcissistically I’m not sure what this compulsion is all about, to be honest.

I keep forgetting that Prince is dead. And when I remember, it trips me up. And then I get this weird panic, like I want to hit the stop button and rewind and go back to before he died, go back to when he was alive so that I could appreciate him more somehow. How? I don’t know. It’s not like I didn’t. But now that he’s gone, I’m left wondering if it was enough.

I should have seen him on his last tour. I should have bought all the albums he released this year. I should have subscribed to Tidal. Wait. No. Lol, definitely not. But…

It’s just, I mean I consider myself a Prince fan. But now that he’s gone, is my fandom enough? Do I have a deep enough well inside me to get through something like this?

Ok that’s ridiculously melodramatic. Of course I’ll “get through” it. He wasn’t a person in my actual life, he wasn’t my parent or family member, there’s no impediment here to me getting up in the morning and breathing in and out. I know that. I know it deeply. And I don’t conflate personal loss with the loss of a beloved musician.

But.

Prince was personal. He sang his feelings so hard, his wants, his needs, his loss, his longing, all those deeply human things that made him so Prince-like. To me there was a devotional quality to  almost all of his music, a deep vein of spirituality where *everything* was god, even when corvettes were vaginas and berets were clitori and the water was warm enough and he’s boning his sister, even when on the surface it was just sex, he always, always tried to communicate how it felt. Through his words, through his singing, through his music. Even the suuuper dirty songs. When you’re in it, on your own dancing around your bedroom or driving or just listening, his commitment to the feeling was 100%. I always felt it. His music was often aspirational; wanting, reaching out, needing. He hardly seemed to sing a thing he didn’t feel, and even the stuff I did not and still do not understand (hi Annie Christian), his delivery made me feel like I should feel a certain way? He emoted from within the stereo, and in kind my…ugh I this sounds so corny…my soul was like a tuning fork. The simple, powerful sorcery of  communicating a feeling that sparks a feeling in return. That is my experience of listening to Prince. Quid pro quo.

I didn’t fully understand the weight of that arrangement until he was gone.

I love so much music, everything is my favorite, my favorite band list is like one of those plastic chains little kids suspend from the ceiling to hold their teddy bears, except I have like 200 of them full of my favorite bands. I love the way music makes me feel.

But in these few days since Prince died, it’s occurring to me that there’s no-one else that makes me ~feel~ the way Prince made me feel. That experience for me was deep and uniquely of Prince.

Questlove said something in his Rolling Stone remembrance of Prince that has stuck with me: "For the last twenty years, whenever I was up at five in the morning, I knew that Prince was up too, somewhere, in a sense sharing a workspace with me. For the last few days, 5 a.m. has felt different. It's just a lonely hour now, a cold time before the sun comes up."

Listening to Prince in my little feelings-exchange...now that there's not a living breathing Prince somewhere in the world to balance the equation, it just doesn't feel right.  

I don’t know how to end this so I’ll just stop here.