Prince Made Me Do It
Prince died, I cried for hours, and ten years later I went back to see what the hell that was about.
7 min read
Oh, Prince.
About ten years ago, I opened a journal entry with:
My eyes, previously wet and red, are now puffy and dim. I’ve had many bouts of crying uncontrollably and inconsolably the past few days.
Prince died three days ago.
Today, those last five words still do something to me.
I’ve read them several times this morning. Each time, I feel a slight jolt in my chest.
Nothing dramatic. Just enough that I noticed it happened again. And then again.
I’m still a bit shocked that I didn’t feel much of anything when I first heard the news of Prince’s death. I was sad, but it hadn’t hit me just yet.
Three friends from school thought of me when they heard. Two of them I hadn’t seen since high school, and we were in our mid-forties by then. One tagged me in a Facebook post saying we were both heartbroken. Another commented that I was the first person she thought of. Another texted to say she was sorry because she knew how much Prince had meant to me.
In my journal I wrote:
Wow, I really was a Prince fan back in the day.
And underlined really was.
Oh, honey, if you only knew.
That night in 2016, before falling asleep, I deliberately thought about Prince, hoping I would dream of him.
I wrote:
I just wanted to envision him while being controlled by the power of my subconscious, or whatever we are controlled by when asleep.
I still appreciate the or whatever.
I left room for not knowing. What mattered was that, for a few hours, I wouldn’t be the one deciding what appeared.
I just hoped it would be Prince.
But I didn’t get to dream about Prince.
Instead, I dreamt about my first husband, for goodness sake.
And that morning, I started putting on my makeup.
And THAT’S when Prince penetrated.
I started crying.
And not just a little.
I was completely taken aback by it. I mean, I hadn’t seen Prince perform live. I’d never met him. And by then, I hadn’t even really been a part of his life for years.
When he turned more toward religion and began dismissing some of his earlier music—particularly the sensual stuff—the teenager still living somewhere inside me apparently took it personally.
In 2016, I wrote:
The teenager in me decided to let him go, just keeping him on an extremely long leash in case I felt our paths ran into each other again.
The leash sorta tightened at various points through the years as he released new albums.
None of that explained the mascara running down my face though.
So I kept trying to understand it.
Where in the fuck is this heartbreak coming from?
It’s like Prince’s death is the boyfriend breaking up with my 14-year-old self.
At fourteen, I was living with my mother after my parents had divorced for the second time.
She took me to see Purple Rain twice.
I’m pretty sure I told kids at school that she’d taken me more times than that.
I wanted to sound special.
My home life itself was more complicated.
Alcohol got the best of my mother for several challenging years, though there were bright moments too.
Thank goodness I had my own space.
A bedroom with a lock on the inside of the door.
I put a great deal of faith in that tiny contraption.
Turn it, and I could magically wall the rest of the world away.
Inside, I danced. I read. I listened to music.
And I turned the music up.
Way up.
Apparently, I liked having the world on the other side of a door. Still do.
Prince entered my world somewhere around this time, and I fell hard.
I loved his music, but I was fascinated by him too. He seemed shy. He was funny. Emotional. Beautiful. Strange. His screams could somehow be both harmonious and completely unhinged.
He wasn’t afraid to be an individual. He wasn’t afraid to show various versions of himself.
Or at least that’s how I saw him.
In 2016, I wrote:
I had fallen madly in love, shaved his love symbol in my head, which started a new look consisting of oversized shirts, skirts, lace hose, and cut-up tennis shoes.
It was my inspired look. It made me feel important because I got people to look at me rather than seeming like I didn’t exist.
I don’t really remember thinking, I want people to see me because I feel invisible.
I remember wanting to look fucking cool.
Both can still hold true.
In 2016, I wrote:
Thinking back, I don’t recall sharing much of his music with others.
But, apparently, I shared enough.
Someone wrote in my yearbook that she hoped I would get to meet him someday. Someone else called me Princette.
They knew I loved Prince.
Prince’s music was something else.
I spent hours by myself writing down his lyrics and trying to decipher them, hoping to uncover more of his magic.
His albums seemed to have unique personalities. I attached myself to each of them differently. I studied and played them over and over.
And:
I kept our relationship rather private, just him and I.
The grammar could use some help.
The sentiment can stay.
I know Little Red Corvette was my first exquisite Prince experience.
And once I’d discovered him, I wanted more.
Somewhere in there, I scammed Columbia House.
Twice.
A girl needed her tapes.
And I remember the first time I listened to the Purple Rain album on my Walkman.
I fell madly in love.
My intense connections were vast in multitude with both the movie and album—they enticed every sense of my being. Even in taste and smell.
Even in taste and smell.
I have absolutely no memory of what Purple Rain tasted like.
But she apparently did.
And then there were the parts of adolescence that didn’t fit so neatly inside music and looks and wanting to be fucking cool.
I wrote:
Prince was always there through the total shit I felt I had for a life.
Some of it was dark. Some of it was lonely. Some of it was reckless. Some of it was just being fourteen, skipping school and having sex for the first time.
And Prince was there for all of it.
Behind my locked bedroom door, I could turn his music up and go somewhere else for a while.
In 2016, I wrote:
His music was my release and a way for me to escape and join him in Prince Land, my true sanctuary.
Good God—she HAD to call it Prince Land.
Yeah. But she wasn’t lying.
Parade is still one of my favorite Prince eras, and Under the Cherry Moon is still one of my top movies.
But in 2016, I wrote:
Unfortunately, I don’t recall much of Parade. I recall seeing the movie and secretly loving it while critics treated it harshly. But it was also a time in my life where I had withdrawn deep inside. Home life had worsened.
I don’t think I was forgetting Parade.
The girl living alongside that era seemed harder to find.
And when Prince died—
I went looking for her again.
Currently, I find it confusing and strange to be shedding so many tears over his death. I fully understand I had a deep connection, but literally hours of blubbering?
Literally hours of blubbering.
I guess she was still annoyed by it all.
After the morning’s emotional eruption the day after Prince died, I went to work and confessed my “idiotic bawling” to my two coworkers, calling myself a freak for crying over a dead celebrity.
I kept trying to make the amount of grief match the relationship I thought I’d actually had with him.
But I was unable to come up with a reason.
And yet there I was.
Blubbering.
I called our relationship profound. Emotional. Passionate.
Even mystically heavy.
And I kept writing.
About ten years later, I found the journal.
And here I am, reading what they left behind.
At the beginning of this original journal entry, above PRINCE, I’d scribbled something about Love Symbol and the possibility of falling in love with the same person a second time and having it be as good as the first.
I’d been listening to the album then.
So this morning, I put it on again.
I wanted to hear what I’d been hearing while I wrote those pages.
And see what happened, if anything.
When Love 2 the 9’s came on, something caught my attention.
I’ve heard that song God knows how many times, but this time I started paying closer attention to the words.
Joy fantastic.
That’s Prince.
He had a way of putting words together that was slightly odd and somehow completely natural coming from him.
But it was the rest that held me there.
He was singing about love as something magical and mysterious. Intoxicating. Fantastic. Fascinating. The kind that takes all of you—body, mind and soul.
I looked back at the journal.
Madly in love.
Every sense of my being.
Profound. Emotional. Passionate.
Mystically heavy.
Apparently, neither of us had ever been talking about anything small.
Then Damn U came on.
And I remembered the cassette.
I knew I still had it somewhere.
So I went looking.
And there it was.
A cassette single I’d bought in 1992 and somehow carried with me, along with about thirty other tapes, for more than thirty years.
I brought it back and set it down on the journal, directly beneath the title:
PRINCE MADE ME DO IT
DAMN U
I took a picture to remember the irony.
A little later, Segue II came on.
Prince claimed he was into his fifth soul.
Perfect.
I was already trying to keep track of three versions of me this morning. The young girl who experienced it, the woman who journaled about it, and the one who is looking back at all of it.
None of those versions has quite the same relationship with him, yet we all are experiencing Prince.
I looked at the journal in front of me while Prince was still playing.
Listening to his words for more of him.
Reading mine for more of me.
I kept listening.
And I kept reading.