Butterflies and Hurricanes

Dear Chester,

The first line is always the toughest. Type, backspace. Type, enter. Type, delete document. I always pause, stutter, hesitate.

Writing late into the silence of nights like these, I feel like I’m laying myself bare. I think of all those letters I never posted, the emails that are still gathering dust in my drafts folder, the texts that never saw the light of day. There’s too much that should have been said, tears that should have been shed, hugs that should have been offered.

I don’t want to do that again. I need to let it out before it joins the long list of feelings I extinguished like the last few embers of a dying cigarette.

I miss you. Not in the traditional sense, no. I miss you in a way you deserve to be missed. With a force brighter than a thousand suns, slowing ebbing and billowing and flowing through me. The grief simmering beneath, but never breaking through the surface.

How silly it seems. My life is seemingly unchanged. Isn’t it?

Is it?

You did what you had to do. And I’m proud of you. People sit and pass judgements at you, they say you let them down. Theirs is the worst case of entitlement. They couldn’t deal with the fact that you were in pain. Instead of understanding your suffering, they’d rather malign you now because they can’t deal with the unpleasantness of having lost an artist they loved. How selfish we all can be. They don’t deserve you. They didn’t know you were a fighter. They didn’t know what it was like to be you.

I know you have no way of knowing this, but about a decade ago, two oily-skinned girls sat on a wobbly chair in an abandoned classroom in a hundred-year-old Catholic building and watched you growl into your mic on the tiniest, scratchiest screen in the world. You were thousands of miles away, but they loved you. They talked about your life like they were a part of it, they dissected your songs, your lyrics, talking about how it made them feel. They had a diary with your songs written neatly in them, and they used up their free time to sing along with you. They sculpted a character that had your name in their stories, they wondered when you would release the next album. They engraved your name on an old water tank near a graveyard in school, wore an earplug in each ear, and listened to you when they should have been studying for a test. To them, you were alive. You were a part of their everyday life. They grew up with you.

They spoke about the loneliness of Valentine’s Day, the brilliance of Hands Held High, the isolation of My December, the pain of What I’ve Done, the dread and depth of Shadow of the Day, the desperation of Numb, the breathlessness of Crawling. Each song had its special place in their hearts. They believed they understood you. They knew you.

How do I tell you how much they looked up to you? Your music mirrored the anxiety they felt, you gave them the words they didn’t have the courage to utter. When you crooned, your voice soothed them as they lay in bed, fretful before an exam. When you screamed, it pulsated through them with cathartic ecstasy. Between you and Mike, you were everything two teenage girls with surging hormones and a career-obsessed family needed. You were courage. You were comfort. You were power. You were love.

They dreamed of the day they’d grow up and make enough money to see you live, spinning intricate stories of how they’ll react, what they’ll feel, what they’ll say, what you’d look like standing in front of them in flesh and blood.

Tonight, it truly feels like the beginning of the end. Mortality is glaring at us in the face, screaming that people we love are slowly beginning to slip away, and that it’ll only get worse. That life is agony, and it’s fragile, and it’s unfair. That it takes away more than it can give. That it’s intensity, and despair and decline and it’s all over way too fast. That you don’t get to fulfill many, many dreams and that you’ve to learn to deal with it. That the world owes you nothing and that you can do everything to hold on to everything you love, but it all ends with a sudden, white, blinding light.

Tonight, we remember you, Chester. We don’t want to let you go. We don’t want to say goodbye.

Tonight, we ache.