three days before daniel died, i woke up with a song stuck in my head. not out of the usual- my OCD has a uniquely annoying tendency to embed a 5-second clip of a song on repeat for sometimes months at a time. the second i opened my eyes, all i could hear was “listen to your heart.” it was strange. i hadn’t heard the song in over a decade, nor did i ever think about it. frankly, i’d forgotten it existed at all until the chorus started playing in my head.
i couldn’t shake it. for three days, it played on a nonstop loop. “i don’t know where you’re going, and i don’t know why, but listen to your heart before you tell him goodbye.” i found myself singing it to myself as i washed my face, as i did the dishes. i thought about messaging him, “hey, woke up with one of your fucking 80s songs stuck in my head. made me think of you.” i forgot to send it. i figured i would tell him sometime. i figured i had all the time in the world to tell him.
three days later.
not long after i found out, when i finally calmed down, it was one of the first thoughts that occurred to me. really? that was the omen? it was obnoxiously perfect- we all knew and loved daniel for his obsession with 80s music. i would play africa by toto for him every time we went to a bar with a jukebox. i joked about giving him a lap dance to “take on me” just to prove it could be done. i sat on the floor, still in the doorway where i stayed for several hours after finding the news, and played africa by toto. i bawled my fucking brains out, and i laughed so desperately and hysterically that my roommate certainly thought i’d lost my mind entirely. of all the omens, of all the memorial songs in the world.
the day after he died, i began to comb through his playlists. his most recent was “gay 80s yearning.” of course it was. it nearly knocked the breath out of me to see the most recently added song, the last song he added to a playlist of his before he died. yes. listen to your fucking heart. i played the song for the first time in probably half my life, and it felt like all the air went out of the room. those campy, overdramatic lyrics encompassed the situation in a way that none of the sympathy, the “sorry for your loss”, the “it’s hard to make sense of this now, but you have to keep fighting” messages possibly could. i don’t know where you’re going, and i don’t know why.
for the first month afterward, “daniel” by bat for lashes was one of the few songs i could stand to listen to. it had been a joke for a while that “daniel” was about him. two of his exes confessed to listening to it after their breakups for some kind of catharsis. it was equally, painfully applicable. “daniel, when i first saw you, i knew that you had a flame in your heart / i found a home in your eyes, we’ll never be apart.”
the song began to play constantly, even when i hadn’t put it on, even when my queue was empty. it would play while i was listening to playlists that didn’t contain it. it would repeat itself, playing two, three, once four times in a row without being queued. fearing myself slipping into a type of spiritual psychosis, the first few times i chalked it up to the app glitching, or its algorithm being eager to please. it fought the urge to take it as a sign until i was driving to austin to help my best friend leave the country, in tears over my loss being doubled, thinking about daniel as i had been nonstop. i was listening to a playlist of exclusively japanese shoegaze- not my own, nothing queued. in the middle of the playlist, “daniel” came on, and i froze. as it ended, i again chalked it up to a strange glitch. it was followed by “daniel” by elton john, a song he’d saved to his now darkly funny “funeral songs” playlist.
as elton john lamented “oh i miss daniel, oh i miss him so much” i sat frozen in my seat, knuckles going white around the wheel, trying to make sense of what was going on. it was an app glitch, that’s all. some intern at spotify has seen me playing these songs enough that they thought, okay, let’s slip these in there. but it was too strange. feeling incredibly stupid, as the song closed, i tentatively said “...daniel?” the next song was broken social scene, “i’m still your fag.” the last time i had seen him, i gushed over his hat embroidered with “faggot” in the thrasher logo font. we talked about reclaiming slurs, our mutual love of the word. okay. things were getting inexplicable.
having a soundtrack for everything, of course i had a soundtrack for the days, weeks, and months that followed losing daniel. “you don’t know what’s going on” by exuma, “i love you” by fontaines DC, practically everything mount eerie had ever written. as i got in the car in the parking lot of a hotel in colorado springs, dressed in my awkwardly fitting suit i bought for the funeral, headed to go and see daniel for the last time, all i could think to play was “echo’s answer” by broadcast. something quiet, with little to say.
there were no words, no way of putting feelings into words as we rolled through the streets with the mountains behind us. i thought it was beautiful, in that suburban america kind of way. i could see why he liked it there, with the rockies as a backdrop. i took a photo of the view from the parking lot of the hotel, as a kind of memento. i stole cutlery from the restaurant where the afterparty of the service was held. (sorry) i needed something to take with me, to solidify the memory of having been here. answer echoes answer.
daniel’s little messages continued to come through. bat for lashes’ “daniel” played three times, seemingly of its own volition, on the drive to colorado springs. elton john’s “daniel” played twice on the way back. on the hard days, “i’m still your fag” would come on. i’d force myself to smile. i’d wish i could feel him any more tangibly than that. i’d wish he would just show up in a dream and talk to me instead of fucking with me with songs like this, but i tried to be grateful for a message in any form. answer echoes answer.
the day before daniel’s funeral in tulsa i was listening to my discover playlist and a song came on that stopped me in my tracks, “nights that won’t happen” by purple mountains. i was sitting with a mascara wand in one hand, staring into space until it finished. “have no doubt about it, hon, the dead will do alright.” i wanted to believe it. i wanted to be comforted by it.
three months after daniel died, i revisited a place in tulsa where i’d taken him the last time we hung out in tulsa by ourselves, before he moved away to colorado. a hill overlooking the river, we’d wandered unknowingly into a dog adoption event. in a video from that time, daniel is smiling tightly, almost buzzing with tensely contained excitement. i recreated the video, a photo of the hill at night, the complex and river trail empty, the cranes and equipment turning the river into a highway. so it goes. i walked along the river for hours, playing his 80s music, envisioning what i would say to him if i could. i miss you, i wish i could talk to you, i wish you’d appear to me or give me a sign. i wish i could go back to that week you spent in tulsa in october and be more of a demanding bitch about seeing you. i wish i could go back to the last time i saw you. i wish i could go back to the first time i met you, when you walked into my art class 15 minutes late, laughing and making a spectacle of yourself, sat down next to me and nodded to me in greeting, that same huge smile across your face.
“i’m still your fag” came on. i burst into tears, slapping a hand over my mouth as i sobbed out loud to the horror of several teenagers rolling by on longboards. i stopped and doubled over, trying to catch my breath. i straightened after a moment, looked up at what was left of the river, the lights of the natural gas plant across the water and the hills beyond it, the rush of the highway bridges, the slow moving current from the water and the wind through the trees. okay. i’ll take it. thanks for stopping by.