To the One Who Left Too Early

You Were Allowed to Stay.

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Kurt,

You left before the world could love you right.
And now we’re the ones choking on what you didn’t say out loud.

We don’t talk about that part.
How you whispered your goodbye in ink,
and we didn’t read it until it was too late to answer.

You thought we were cheering.
But we were begging.
For you to stay.
For one more show.
For one more minute of your heartbeat in the room.

I’ve listened to “My My, Hey Hey” more times than I’ll admit.
Not for the melody.
For the mirror.
For the line I still can’t say out loud without shaking:
“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

You believed it.
So have I.

I watched that MTV Unplugged set again.
I liked The Man Who Sold the World.
You covered it like you were confessing to yourself.
And I wonder —
did you believe you’d already left?
That someone else had taken your place?
That the Kurt on stage was just a ghost in Converse?

Because that’s how you looked —
like a man mid-exit,
half-here, half-gone,
already slipping through the cracks in his own voice.

And after every song, you looked down.
Like you were apologizing for being alive.
Like you didn’t think your voice was enough —
when it was the only reason some of us didn’t fucking leave, too.

You didn’t have to be a god, Kurt.
You didn’t have to martyr yourself in front of millions.

You were allowed to walk off stage.
To fall apart.
To not explain.
To just fucking be.

Frances is older now.
And every time she smiles, the world sees you.
Every birthday she blows out candles
without your hands lighting the match,
we all feel the silence you left behind.

You thought she’d be better off.
But she didn’t need peace.
She needed you.
Groggy. Quiet. Messy. Present.
She didn’t need Nirvana.
She needed her dad.

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If this broke something open in your chest —
don’t scroll past it.
Don’t numb it.

Stay.
Subscribe to read the rest.
Not for more grief —
for the kind of truth that stays
when the screen goes dark.

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