This morning I missed a lot of my Chicago friends. I'm not sure why, but I did, so I was glad when Paul wrote about his latest illustrating endeavor. Paul is one of my favorite artists, and one of the small disappointments of living in San Francisco is that his comics are hard to find here. (I like to give them as gifts, but lately all I can do is lend them.) Paul is able to convey so much emotion through his drawings; his comics were the first that made me cry. That sounds bad, but it's actually one of the best things I could say about someone's work. So I think it's only fitting that he created the cover of this Yonlu album. This collection of songs is melancholy and gorgeous and quietly intense. It sounds as though Nick Drake and Elliott Smith had a few too many caipirinhas and decided to dink around with a sampling program. It's the sort of record that made me pay attention because it sounds full with feeling; it's warm and sad at the same time.
The story behind the record is one of a life abbreviated: Vinicius Gageiro Marques, the Brazilian teenager who created this music, did so in an at-home studio. He was an only child who read Kafka and who spoke Portugese, French, and English. He was, according to all accounts, spectacularly intelligent and highly sensitive. A month before his seventeenth birthday, he poisoned the air around him and died. He left a note and some songs, and his parents discovered more music on his computer. These songs constitute the album.
I would like this record even if Paul weren't involved, even if it didn't have this sad backstory. But knowing the story brings out a pointlessly protective side of myself that wishes I could have told this boy that life can get better. I was an extremely depressed teenager, and though I didn't have this kind of musical talent, I spent hours writing away my alienation and pain through fiction that I'd then destroy. The few of you who have read this site for, what, 13 years now, have probably seen me pull myself out of that part of my life. I feel like another person now, like that was someone else. I listen to these songs and think of this poor boy, this incredibly gifted teenager with a baby face, and feel anger and sadness. Anger because I am always envious of talented people who don't see the gift they have been given, and sadness because he will never know what it's like to feel better.
Some people — always those who have never been depressed — wonder how someone could ever kill himself. I am not that person; I can feel why people commit suicide. I think that anyone who has ever been severely depressed understands that at the lowest point, being alive is so painful that death seems like the better alternative. Depression is an exhausting cycle of physical pain and emotional darkness; I remember sleeping for 17 hours a day just so I didn't have to be awake. Awake is sobbing, awake is self-loathing, awake is utterly alone. Anyone who has ever walked that thorny path knows that you can't merely will yourself out of a cavern that dark. So I can't judge this poor child for thinking that he had to die; to him, it must have seemed like his only choice. I don't condone his actions, but I understand why he felt that way.
When I think of Yonlu's short life, my heart hurts because I experienced that kind of adolescent hopelessness and despair. For me, those feelings are long buried, but I understand them all the same. But I wish that somehow, he had managed to believe the possibility that his future would be better than his present. I wish he had known that life will never be painless, but that living could have become better. That maybe he'd grow up and be 30 and happy someday. That he'd move people with his music, that a whole world was waiting for him. I'm not very articulate about this, because all I want to do is build a time machine and find him and hold him and promise him that his pain did not have to be permanent. I could have been him years ago; he could have become like me years from now. His poor bruised, beautiful, unknown and unknowable heart haunts me.
