Kurt Cobain’s birthday is a great day I guess. I like to celebrate the birth of one of my most intricate sources of inspiration. Before I heard Kurt’s music, there was a part of me I couldn’t fully understand, and I found out how to express that fragment in Nirvana. The lyrics and the music made sense to me in a way I could never express with words, like a glimmer or a shadow of understanding. I discovered it in the song Lithium, where for verse upon verse he just screamed, “I’m not gonna crack”. It was exactly how I felt, it was the words that my soul could never find but understood in this single, solitary verse. I understood so much more about myself in this one line, where after all the shitty things I’ve ever been through, I decided that no, I am NOT going to crack. One sentence, written years before my very conception affected my life in such a way, that I allowed myself to rely on it when I thought I couldn’t carry through. One man, whom I’ve never met, whom I’ve never even had the pleasure as living in the same time as, touched my soul and taught me to understand my surroundings in a different light. And for that I am eternally grateful.
