Sixteen years ago today my music idol was found dead in Seattle.
I am twenty-eight years old.
At the time I was in my first year of secondary school and I felt as if my first understanding and exploration into adolescence had been shot dead. I had a feeling throughout my adolescence of being born too late, of arriving at things after everyone else had left and after the passions had gone. This was probably born of being the daughter of two people heavily involved in various active scenes in the sixties and seventies. But Cobain’s death seems to seal it somehow. I had been aware of Nirvana for a scant six months, I’d bought my first CDs about a month previous and suddenly it was over. I was never going to see them live and I’d barely scratched the surface.
There it was then, the tenor of my adolescence, never quite being at the right place at the right time and all the frustration and tremulation I felt wrapped up in my and my sister squawling along to various tracks in the back of the car sharing our headphones.
RIP Kurt Cobain and RIP the poster of you my sister used to have in her bedroom.