FRANK, by Amy Winehouse

It has been a long time since my last post. My words have found themselves elsewhere in the meantime. I am a very different person than I was in the early days of 2018. Tonight I return with an overflowing gratitude for Amy Winehouse. Frank was released in 2003, when she was only nineteen years old. It nursed me through my first heartbreak (age 19) with the perfect tiptoe between tenderness and cynicism. It was exactly what my fragile heart needed.

She crooned about poetry as a healing process (Maybe if I get this down I'll get it off my mind), fears about doomed destiny (I can't help but demonstrate my Freudian fate), covered jazz classics, whispered over birdsong, chronicled messy ex sex.

The album's title itself is a reference to a Frank Sinatra CD, shoved into a box of things her ex gave her. She loves Frank Sinatra, as if her music itself didn't betray that fact with every note. But it's too painful to look at. As things go.

I have a pair of my ex's shorts on the top shelf of my dorm room closet. There's no door there, so I can just glance over my shoulder to see it folded there. I'm waiting to give it to his brother or best friend, both of whom incidentally attend my university. He has some of my favorite t-shirts, god knows where. I can't ask for them back now -- it's been too long, and I know from experience that I'd just melt in the materialization of what is to me a mere memory now. When I visited him at school in the wake of our breakup, he showed me a shoebox he kept full of things that reminded him of me. It was his most prized possession, evidently. But none of those words meant anything. I have no idea if it's in the trash now.

But you made me cry, where's my kiss goodbye? I think I love you

Amy was such a mess. But she was a tender, loving, raw mess. I miss her. I wish we could have been friends. I wish I could have watched her grow through the same tribulations that now plague me in similar ways, living in a different country in a different body in a different life. I keep her poster above my dresser; her face gives me the encouragement I need to get up in the morning and get dressed and be the bad bitch she was before there was even a term for it, and in the midst of the myriad aches plaguing a heart that lived its truth even when it didn't make sense to.