Once I finally lowered the phone and muted the screen’s glow in the covers, after ceasing my scrolls trough “the feed,” once I was done refreshing my inbox, coloring in hearts on other people’s pictures, once I thought maybe now I can sleep, I began to hear it.
It sounded like music was playing,
On a night like tonight, that meant something.
Was someone doing what we had stopped doing so much earlier in the almighty name of having to work in the morning? Mourning the loss of a stranger immersed in catchy keyboard loops and singing tortured, screamed lyrics at the top of our lungs, too?  It was two am on a sleepy, quiet street. Now was not the time for such things. I was drawn to it as it was the most fitting homage imaginable.
I had to be a part of it. Even if only a nod from the upper porch.
Once I left the sound of the fan in the room below me, ascending stairs to a bird’s ear view of the neighborhood I realized it was as I expected. The fan, playing tricks again, had been singing to me. Lately, it can make a whole neighborhood full of sound but distant. The slightest suggestion and my mind fills in blanks. No one in this time and space, was grieving with me. My quiet street was asleep and it was just me on my porch, settling in to write something anyway, and one fast and foraging skunk.
Can we really call him a stranger, though? We, all of us, spanning generations, in every country. We have never been in the same room, never shaken hands, never judged him by his treatment of us and those around us. But, truly, can we call you a stranger? You chose to be honest in your art, use it as a tool for yourself. You chose to let it be raw. You chose to bleed it out.
Well, we used them, those songs, too. We used them as tools on ourselves in our darker days. We drew our own connections and enmeshed them in our adolescent memories.  What you gave us, never knowing us, meant something.
As strangers, we mourn you. The loss of you and, selfishly, we mourn what else you could have shared with us.
We will leave out all the rest.