A run-down city, full of revolution and beer: should be my kind of city, right? Harvard, MIT, the bus that took me to work every day, picking me up outside the tavern in my square. Quaint, right? Boston was the city of dreams, where I followed a man that I now detest. The city where he met the other love of his life.

I’m no quaint catch. I’m the face you see in the mirrored reflection in the Charles River and wished for only once.

I’m not one for romance, and Boston is the city of snow, blistering summers, and heartache like chipped brick - far as the eye can see.

Boston. The city where I saw it rain, where I saw life framed: my young twenties, my future, my face in the crowd. Gone, like their autumn sun.

This Friday, just two days before Father’s Day, I will fly across the country in search of happiness and reunion with my beloved father.

I’m taking that risk.

My father is a lawyer, but not a yeller. When I was seventeen, I lied to his face. Back then, it didn’t matter, not really - to me, a teen. His rage was something of which I have never seen before or since.

“Only criminals tell lies.”

I have not lied since. Everything I say bleeds with truth; it’s how I’ve survived.

It’s how we’ve survived. There is nothing - nothing - I wouldn’t do for him.

When we meet the waves of the Cape on Father’s Day, I hope we are able to embrace each hit of ocean spray. Through my demented youth, we pulled through. We’ve changed, I’ve changed: daughters grow up and change.

What else is there, except a father? Except a truth-teller?

bloodstained fingertips trace words in the dust upon the glass of these broken castle walls that once loomed so high above our heads but now they’re nothing but rubble bits and bricks among the ashes where even the plants refuse to grow

the chains holding us rust and creak with every breath until there’s nothing left but dust trickling down around us caught in the fibers of time woven into our beings and pulsing with every throb of our shattered hearts

a single word high above the rest traced in the dust and seared into our minds

‘war’ it proclaims ‘war’ while we’re crying out for peace our voices caught in the darkness until they too fade away like the ghosts of those who came before us

we cannot shake the icy fingers of the past that tremble down our backs with crusty fingernails and clutch us in their grip waiting for a moment of surrender to strike

but we cannot surrender we cannot give in we cannot stay silent we must fight against the chokehold we must fight against the lies we must fight against the wrongs

‘war’

our fingertips still bloodied we wipe this word from these fallen ruins and carve a new word a new mantra a new legacy

‘peace’

The first thing I ever knew about Kurt Cobain was that he was dead. I was just eight years old when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves, and still in elementary school when he died. But when I entered seventh grade and travelled downtown to Butler Middle School, his face was everywhere. The most popular t-shirt showed Cobain’s blond locks drifting over his eyes. There was a quote on the back: “The sun is gone, but I have the light.” I figure most of my compatriots—including many of those wearing the trendy shirt—were like me and had no idea what Cobain was in life. In death, he was a countercultural visionary, and that was the Nirvana that I began listening to. I missed the party, but I witnessed the mythmaking.

Fittingly, then, the first Nirvana album I owned (and the first CD I bought with my own money) was the posthumously released Unplugged in New York. I listened to it differently than the other albums I acquired in those early years, with which I would skip to the three or four songs I really loved, over and over. But I almost always listened to Unplugged in New York the whole way through. Its specialness came as a whole, not packed into any one track…not even Plateau, with that moment of mic feedback that I await like a friend from out of town. Almost two decades later, it’s the atmosphere, the feel of that album that I search for on some evenings. Stripped down, the songs aren’t angry and disaffected youth anthems. They’re soulful. The rebellion remains audible, but Unplugged reveals what else lies beneath the grunge.

“All Apologies” begins around the 45 minute mark, the penultimate song on the disc and the final Cobain-written one. The simple bassline (actually performed on a guitar) carries the song forward with inevitability, and the acoustic guitar picks out a carefree tune. The song seems to drift. The first sung line floats right along with the music. It’s not until the title words that we hear the first strains of angst: “What else should I be? / All apologies.” That two-word expostulation contains no trace of contrition. I am who I am, Cobain declares, and he delivers the “apology” in a voice just a step or two shy of a sneer. In these lyrics that affirm the singer’s identity, we hear passive aggression, exactly the sort a teenager gives a parent whom he can’t openly defy. He feels put upon, targeted for transgressions that he couldn’t avoid. He sings later,

Find my nest of salt

Everything’s my fault

I’ll take all the blame

Aqua seafoam shame

Feeling accused of both specific misdeeds and general wrongness, he moodily retreats to his “nest.” He’ll take all the blame that others heap upon him, as well as the shame that accompanies it. Shame has never been assigned a symbolic color, as far as I know, but “aqua seafoam” sounds as good as any.

Frustrated teenagers feel the world has them every which way at every turn, subjecting them to “sunburn” and “freezerburn” alternately, and sometimes simultaneously. Parents and peers each have their turn at oppression. The faces are all mocking, the days all painfully bland, and the choices forced upon them. Shoved into line and told to march in step, the young find rebellions both large and small irresistible. The world wins every time—even someone who strikes back successfully will probably wind up “choking on the ashes of her enemy”—but that only makes resistance more virtuous. Defiance is victory.

Cobain once wrote in a journal, “I’m not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off homophobes.” In a world he perceived as unjust and ugly, he saw provocation as a duty. Singing “All Apologies” on Unplugged, he told everyone watching MTV, “What else should I say? / Everyone is gay.” Mission accomplished.

Defiance animates “All Apologies.” While the music continues its pleasant drift into the future, Cobain’s rough, passionate voice protests. The vocals refuse to be carried along in the song’s current. “I wish I was like you,” he sings, “Easily amused.”

The deep chords of the chorus alter the flow of the song. Cobain’s voice arcs upward to sing, “In the sun, / In the sun I feel as one.” When the bass cuts out, the forward progress ceases completely. His voice calls, “Married.” These lines evoke feelings of warmth, brightness, unity. The guitar gently plays up and down while the word “Married” optimistically hangs above it. The song cannot stay frozen in this moment, of course. Neither can life. Cobain belts out the word “Buried,” and then the drums carry us back into the current.

With Nirvana, the lyrics are often beyond the point. Once upon a time I tried to look up some song’s meaning on the internet and came across a Dave Grohl interview instead. Don’t get too hung up on lyrics, he suggested: Kurt sometimes wrote them 15 minutes before taking the stage. This, too, fits our image of the Man Who Was Cobain, a brilliant slacker whose ideas spilled out of him, raw. But even knowing how hastily written they might have been, the lyrics have too much staying power to be dismissed. Fragmented and impressionistic though they are, the words say something.

The song gradually fades out with Cobain repeatedly intoning, “All in all is all we are.” The tone is contented and accepting, the unity of the chorus now drawn out at length. The music fades out before the vocals, so that Cobain’s and Grohl’s final “All in all is all we are” suspends over empty space. In the end, there’s some peace after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmkuH1k7uA

I'm numb.

And I don't like it.

Moments pass by and I feel nothing.

Days go by and I remember nothing.

Emotions stop haunting me but then

Suddenly, they'll wash over me like a tsunami.

It's like waiting for your alarm to go off in the morning.

I know it's coming - I just don't know when.

The way they smiled made it more than worth it. Maybe many would let the door close on the person with the wheel-chair or let the eight-year-old play alone, but I just could not. The smiles, the laughs, the small show of gradtitude is a bigger prize than anything. The way the girl told her nanny I was her friend after knowing her for ten minutes. It was beautiful.

But was it only to be noticed?

my first college dorm

room number was

234

as was my childhood

home address

it seemed

somehow

poetic

like perfect addition

it wasn’t until later

when I had graduated college

that I realized that

not everything

is poetry

sometimes nostalgia

adds up wrong

when the clock

strikes

2:34

I make a wish

I need it

I wonder if I'm strong enough,

To meet my own gaze in the mirror,

And grit my teeth in determination,

And change.

Change is such a funny thing,

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth,

Yet it makes me want to move, to go forward.

Yet it's painful.

It hurts.

Change is good in the end but the process of getting there

Is something I don't like.

Why does it have to hurt?

Why is Change painful?

Because I'm ripping out the old me

And tearing it apart, little by little,

Leaving what I like and throwing away

What I hate.

I apologize for how I am right now.

I'm incomplete, a mess of unfinished thoughts,

And completely and totally lost.

But please be patient with me

Because I'm Changing

And it hurts.