Still Heartbroken

One week ago I was in Salamanca, Spain, drinking sangria, dancing and partying it up on the last night of my experience at the VaughanTown program. It was late at night when one of the younger Spaniards turned to me and said that one of her friends received a text message that Michael Jackson had died. I dismissed it as rumor until I was in my hotel room a few hours later, ready to watch a little Boomerang in Espanol until I fell asleep.

That's when I learned that the terrible news was true.

Until I got back to the States, there was just a weird surrealness to everything, including the HORRIBLE, lacking coverage of that sorry excuse for a reporting organization, Sky News. I knew the reality of the loss would hit me once I got back to my parents' house.

The first thing I did after putting down my luggage was start looking for my Michael Jackson records, jewelry and paraphernalia. I found everything right away, then downloaded the single my friend, Cynthia, sent me via iTunes gift certificate, "Blame it on the Boogie."

Since then, I've been listening to his music, watching YouTube videos and feeling sad as the reality sinks in. Michael Jackson is gone.

MJ was the center of my world for an intense couple of years of my early teens. I was seriously obsessed in that screaming, hormonal girl-crying myself to sleep wanting to meet him- kinda way. More than that, I look back and realized that the Michael Jackson phenomenon was responsible for a shift that occurred when I embraced and became proud of my blackness.

Before that magical moment when I saw him perform "Billie Jean" on "Motown 25," to me, my race was more about painful history a la "Eyes on the Prize" and cultural burdens than it was about "black is beautiful." I distinctly remember thinking how I came to believe that my racial identity was a gift that I shared with some incredibly talented people that made me proud that night, and on all those subsequent afternoons and evenings for months afterwards when the VCR (or perhaps it was Betamax?) tape got a big workout every time anyone would come to the house to visit -- of course we had to show the tape and share the pride.

As I got older, I grew out of my Michael obsession and shifted my attention to Prince, then to other things. I came to mourn the Michael who inspired such emotion and passion in me, as the man he'd become had pretty much ceased to look, sound or act like the man I'd admired in the early 80s.

But now he's gone, and that judgment and disappointment has gone with him. I just wish his later years let him see as much joy as he deserved.

R.I.P MJJ.