somewhere with Prince

Recently I was listening to the Hot Ones interview of Pedro Pascal. In it, Sean Evans (an exceptional interviewer) asks Pascal to reflect on why he would want Prince’s Purple Rain to play at his funeral. And though Pascal couldn’t quite quantify the feeling with words, he conveyed his love of the song with the expressions on his face. Purple Rain is a long song; 8 minutes and 40 seconds. Prince starts by singing, “I never meant to cause you any sorrow. I never meant to cause you any pain.” Purple Rain is a song about the things we love, the versions of ourselves we are as we love them, and ultimately, the way our experiences of each other morph and change. We lose each other via death, disconnect, and divergent views of how we’re meant to exist. Sometimes we find that love transformed, other times we find it lost in translation.

When I met Joe, I had stopped smoking but I still carried around a white lighter covered with flowers, plants, and ladybugs. I bought it when I was 22 and brought it with me everywhere, even drawing pictures of it in my journal. The first time I met Joe’s best friend, Marco, he had left the same lighter on their coffee table, and I knew I had found a home meant for me. The images on the lighter have always reminded me of the side panels that frame Prince on the album cover of Purple Rain. Eventually, the lighter started to fall apart and Joe bought me a new version of the same one. It now sits ensconced in sunlight in my vanity room, and occasionally, I can still get it to light.

Beechview

Savannah

These are my favorite facts about Prince — he was born on June 7th, a Gemini, like Stevie Nicks, my brother, Peyton, and my lifelong best pal, Madeline. He was good at basketball and he loved working with women musicians and songwriters. He co-wrote the song, Stand Back with Stevie and he loved New Girl so much that he appears in one of the episodes. When Eric Clapton was asked what it’s like to be the greatest guitarist of his generation, he responded, “Ask Prince.” He was and is undeniably cool, comfortable in his skin, and artistically one-of-a-kind. He still feels palpably alive to me, just like my mom.

When my mom died, we decided to make a Spotify playlist that would play at her funeral and calling hours. I added two Prince songs: Call My Name and Nothing Compares 2 U, because she loved him and all eighties music with an undeniable fervor. My favorite line in Call My Name is: “I just can’t stop writing songs about you, I love you so much.” It has always reminded me of Joe and my compulsive need to write poems and letters about the way he makes me feel. But now, I most often hear it when I am listening to my mom’s playlist and missing her. Lately, it reminds me of the ways my mom showed me how to love other people, with reckless abandon and enthusiasm, with art. So much art pulls me to her. I couldn’t help but cry watching Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan tearfully accept their Oscars, calling to their moms with childlike joy. There is something inside us that always belongs wholly to our mothers, a part that turn towards their love and pride for fulfillment, forever. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a movie quite literally about the ways in which we lose our mothers, children, lovers, and ourselves amid our best efforts to keep it all together. But, it is also about how, if we persist, we find each other again. How we never wanted to cause each other any sorrow / any pain / and yet.

Towards the climax of the movie, glamorous alternate universe, Waymond tells glamorous alternate universe, Evelyn:

“So, even though you have broken my heart yet again, I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.”

There again is all the pain we never meant to cause each other and the love that persists anyway, despite all the ways we come up short. I imagine all the different lives I’ll live with Joe and with my mom, how presumably in some universes we will get extra time and in others, even less. Surely in some of them we are mermaids or fairies or elephants, in others we must be creatures I can’t even imagine. I want there to be other timelines where we’ve only just begun, where we’re watching the sunset from a boat somewhere deep in an outer space meteor shower. I want it all to keep going and going forever, whether we are trees, particles, grains of sand, or perhaps, all three at the same time. Part of me feels that no matter where or how we are, we’re together still, somehow. My mom’s ashes are embedded in our sunset tattoos; our energy is embedded in my mom’s energy. We’re all together, dancing and hurting and finding new ways to love each other through the worst of it.

Or, alternately, she is at least somewhere with Prince.