MJ

It didn’t really hit me when Michael Jackson died.  It washed over me, registering with a vague sense of sadness and no shock whatsoever.  It even took me a long time to figure out why.

I finally realized it’s because I’d already finished mourning for him over a decade before he died.

He was one of my first crushes ever.  In recent years people would look at me like I was crazy when I said I used to be obsessed with him, but that’s because they’re forgetting the boy I fell in love with when I was twelve.  This boy:

The boy with the ready smile and bright eyes.  The playful clown, the dreamer, the dancer, the absolutely incomparably brilliant artist.

The man who would earn, loose and give away a fortune to others over the course of his lifetime, desperately trying to heal the world when he couldn’t heal himself.

And no, I don’t believe that he ever hurt anyone.  I don’t think he could.  I do think he never grew up, was never able to, and never became able to cope with the world.  He never had normal.  How exactly can someone be expected to relate the same way everyone else does when they never for one second got to live like anybody else?

Over time he turned into something that was painful for me to look at.  I don’t know if it was a physical or mental malady that caused it – I don’t really care, I just couldn’t bear to see him anymore and I missed the boy I loved as a child.  I never, ever stopped listening to him though.  I never will.