you know five years ago when bowie died and blackstar came out it was probably the first album that made me really think about and absorb myself in the aesthetic and emotion of an album while also trying to piece together some obfuscated and meta-textual meaning from it.

i eventually moved on and barely touched it for years, but when it was the fifth anniversary of the album and his death a few weeks ago i came back to it and gained a new and further deeper appreciation for it.

now that i am suddenly struck by SOPHIE's death (an artist who i had listened to only a small amount of material until today but had intention to dive into further) I have to look back and feel another sort of feeling of guilt.

when an artist dies, their art is permanently stained with their death. bowie had the opportunity to have some time to mold that stain and make it into a piece of work that was truly of his intention.

though his work will be forever haunted by his death, that haunting was purposed into something.

Like with SOPHIE, bowie was an artist i had an awareness of during there life but had never paid particularly much attention to, and i had felt this stain in trying to appreciate the rest of his discography, there was a person i had only ever known in death.

now that i am sitting here today going through and listening through SOPHIE's material i feel a deep and personal dread. If i had just paid attention and explored her discography merely a week ago, it would have been a very diffrent experience, one i will never have.

SOPHIE's death was sudden and she never got the opportunity that bowie did of making something out of her death, and that makes the stain of death so much more glaring.

adding to that, the strangely poetic nature of her death (“True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell.") gives me further dread.

after spending 26 years as another unknown person, she had 8 years of an incredible upward trajectory which was all of a sudden cut off without a minute of warning to herself. to think of what it would feel like to slip like that and face death in such a position.

nyx said "this is the fate of every trans woman who makes anything of herself". slipping while looking up at the moon.

being on a constant trajectory, a transition that is never finished to reach a point of satisfaction that will never quite come and is always as distant as the moon. bowie could at least bask in the plateau for a while.

I am haunted now not only because i couldn't appreciate her in life, but also because I myself will one day slip. I may think about death a lot and think i desire death often, but i know that a death not on my own terms would be terrifying and would haunt all who know me.

nobody can die without leaving a trace, and to bring up nyx again, I am reminded her haunting piece of theory fiction "Two Essays on Recursive Sacrifice" on this issue of suicide being so bitter and leaving such ghosts.

I am just a girl who hasn't much of anything artistic to leave behind, but if i died today it would be the same moongazing slip as the rest of us.

"Just like that bluebird
Oh I'll be free
Ain't that just like me?"

(i fucked up the posting order of this thread and deleted parts of it a bunch of times but i think its now in order)