Last night, I had a dream about Nirvana. You were their second guitarist as planned from the days of Bleach. I had scribbled two extra “H”s and an extra “N” on Dave’s kick drum and everyone absolutely loved it. You and Kurt were like Lennon and McCartney in the way you harmonized and sang to the chorus of Spank Thru—I told Kurt it was my favorite, but I saw he never told you that. He also never told me that you two and Courtney were going to record Asking For It all together with Hole, and that the two of you planned a dual solo together in Drain You. Indeed, I woke up singing “you’re my vitamins” to myself and my mom’s voice echoing “Chris died! Hannah, Chris died!” in my mind. I sighed as I knew it was all a dream: Kurt’s gone, Courtney’s still as controversial as ever, and you’re still out of sight, out of mind, and quite frankly, I don’t blame you.
I wrote a letter to you again, last week, but I neglected to send it. I wanted to do something for your 50th year of life here on Earth but I felt it wouldn’t be good enough. And I value your privacy, a strange, almost alien concept in a society that expects the opposite from me—it reminds me of the first line in Dumb by Nirvana: “I’m not like them but I can pretend.”
You soundtracked my darkest hours. I came to you when my broken thoughts started to sew themselves back together. I opened to you when I couldn’t do it with anyone else, when I lived in my private hell alone. I told people about you, and whether or not they believed me was up to them: those who did supported me; those who didn’t challenged me. I protected you and your privacy from those who challenged me. And then, like magic—slowly, but surely, you opened up to me.
You will always make my toes curl. You will always make my heart hammer inside my chest. You will always put that tickling feeling in my tummy. I will never not want to touch you, to hug you, to feel you against me. I still want you to model for me: to strip yourself of your clothes and let me draw your beautiful body, because I’ve long known that my pencils do the talking more than my lips ever will. I recently considered merely flying up to Bainbridge Island to find you, and the two of us could have lunch or a cup of coffee together. Just you and me, but I don’t know how you’d feel about it, and who knows? Maybe Mama Shepherd would want to join us. I still want you to write a song about Chris and I’m hoping Matt and Kim have aces high up their sleeves for what’s to come in the remainder of this decade and beyond. But for now, there’s this.
This is honest to God my favorite picture of you. I’ve had this picture forever it seems. When I lived in Oregon, I had it positioned in such a way that you were the first thing I looked at when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I saw before I fell asleep. I’ve drawn it a total of four times and I could never comprehend why I’ve always been so fascinated by this one. But about a year ago, I came to a consensus that it showed me you are not “the angry rocker”. You are not that unfair label of the enraged little pissant who likes to throw his basses and flip the bird at unruly audience members. This picture showed me that you are soft, that you are tender, that you have a soul, that there is more to you than just the strange, scandalous motions on stage and the cathartic screams in Otis and Mike; there is more to the 6′5″ intense behemoth behind the curtain.
There are four things now that I associate you with:
first and foremost is Nirvana. Every song, be it from the Fecal Matter demos to Teen Spirit; every aspect from Foo Fighters to Hole to the Melvins to Kurt saying “I think ‘oh, oh, oh’ means ‘shut up, Krist’; I associate it all with you, the man who nearly made my namesake, one of the most famous trios in history a quartet.
The second thing is this song. I can’t explain it but it always makes me think of you.
The third thing is this picture of me. Originally a black and white photo, I played with a bit to fit into the autumnal color theme on my Twitter. I was going to send the black and white version to you. I washed and brushed my hair and then put on my pink flannel over my favorite bra. I wanted to look sexy for you.
The fourth thing is this quote from Lemony Snicket:
“I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I’ll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I’ll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out, and the stars will fall from the sky.”
You crawled forth onto this beautiful planet a half of a century ago, in the heart of the psychedelic era, in one of the most turbulent years in history, and yet you came out the other side, still tall and brooding like the Headless Horseman, a Byronic hero straight out of a Charlotte Bronte novel, still everything to me.
All of my love, nirvhannah
