2003, a year of phoenix-like rebirth for me, gave us All The Things She Said, an oddly hypnotic song by a Russian girl-duo called t.A.T.u. I love the chaos to the music – it sounds like what fear and frustration would sound like if given sound. Mix that with the timid, broken-English of the singer as she meanders through this chaos and it becomes a song that mirrors what I was feeling at the time. In order for a phoenix to rise, it must first die. So much of me had died between 1997 and 2003, but, as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So maybe the phoenix analogy isn’t the best one, but whatever. I was finally free to live the life I wanted and this song was my strange anthem: a song of tortured, trapped, denied love.
From the historical writing archive. Original date: November 26, 2019. Recovered from local source material; editorial review is still in progress.