Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington dies aged 41

No words…

I cant articulate what this news has done to me. His voice and the sound of Linkin Park urged me past some of my darkest moments, and eventually became the recurring soundtrack to my life.
Chester screamed and sang -ironically-what i could not articulate then.
Everything feels so flat and useless to say, rest in peace, always remembered, condolences.
I’m just going to sit here crying, and pray your loved ones are together able to get through this, Chester. You deserved better.

One More Light

Watching my mother at the door of my house was disorienting. Above me on the second floor I could hear my children moving, playing, laughing.

My mother and I stared at each other, and a familiar adrenaline thinning of my blood told me I was scared, nervous, childish.

It never failed, her withering look could turn me into an infant, and even as I steeled myself to do what I knew I had to, the little girl inside me winced.

Holding on,
Why is everything so heavy?

“I think it’s probably time we called it quits.”
The irony of my conversation was not eluding me. I had never had a break up in my life, and here I was breaking up with my mother. The first connection of my life. The one connection that should have outlasted at least one of our lives.

I keep dragging around what’s bringing me down
If I just let go I’d be set free

Her eyes were tear filled, as they always were when I refused to concede a point she was determined to hold on to. It wasn’t her fault though. more than two decades of me letting her win arguments was a habit we were both struggling to break.

I was learning faster than her.

The way the rest of the year followed was bad. I struggled to eat, then I gained weight, then I lost it. I went from wanting to reach out to my offended parents to steeling myself that I never would again.

Sometimes, things are heavy. Sometimes, it takes months to wrestle demons who refuse to go down.

I found out about One More Light on a bad night, where I was contemplating the vast void that was my side of the family.

In anticipation, I began to listen to every Linkin Park album, from Hybrid Theory straight through.

I listened to Heavy. I listened to Battle Symphony. I anxiously awaited the rest.
The remixes of past albums lulled me to sleep, they serenaded my boring happy life, my inner struggling daughter guilt.

I know all the words now, from Nobody Can Save me, to Sharp Edges.

Is this album different?
Yes.

But I am also different.

Linkin Park was my first taste of poetry, and a bit of me studies the lyrics of this new album with curious, puzzled eyes.

I am used to describing Linkin Park with words like ardent, passionate, raw, furious, truthful, honest.

Maybe some of those words are not the ones I would use now, but I sure hope that I am also not described with the same handful of words as that little ten year old who began listening to Hybrid Theory.

I will find new words to describe them, because I will have plenty of time as I plan to listen to them always.

One day, I’ll get to go to one of their concerts. So help me.

One More Light has played my children to sleep on long car rides home from crazy fun days. It’s already lulled me to sleep on a tearfilled night. I’ve already daydreamed new stories and books to it’s rhythms and beats.

Like all the rest, it is a patch in the fabric of my life.

And for that I am grateful.

Much love to the band who affected my life without even knowing it.

The Hunting Party

The car was so hot I had all the windows up. The AC was blasting and trying its best to breathe cool air onto my face and the face of my two year old as we waited, and the radio played a sound tarnished but loud.

I was not paying attention to the music. The heat was making sweat glide down the side of my baby’s face. Inside the store my husband was getting ice for the cooler filled with our picnic. Soon we would be at the river, basking in the coolness of glacier melted water.

Until then, I was trying my best to get the sippy cup of water near my child’s mouth.

Absently my knee was moving, tapping to the rhythm in the background.

My baby smiled wide, perfect little teeth like pearls, half naked in the car seat his head began to bob and I found myself in a heat wave mosh pit as we head banged to the sounds coming from the car radio.

My husband coming into the vehicle laughed, watched us rocking out for a moment before passing us both Popsicles already threatening to coat us in their rainbow melt.

“Who is this?” I asked as our baby and I nearly cracked our heads in our wild grooving.

My husband listened intently. His ear was to be trusted, where I was picky and particular with my music my tastes ranging over all genres but very selectively he had a more varied palette.

After about ten seconds his smile was wide and with him and our baby smiling at me it struck me how alike they were, the same dimples, the same shining teeth, the same quirk of the brows.
“It’s Linkin Park.”

I scoffed, offended. I would recognize it instantly if it were Linkin Park. I knew every lyric, every rhyme.

I had belted out every scream.

He turned the music louder, blasting out of the speakers, and I listened, frozen in place by Chester’s familiar shriek, Mike’s pounding poetry.

My heart raced and I stared slack jawed at my now smug and grinning husband.

“It’s…. it’s….it’s….” I could not get the words out, they stuck in my throat, the excitement was buzzing through my veins.

“That’s a new album.” He finished for me. “And they sound fantastic.”

I scoffed again.

“Of course they sound fantastic.” I wrinkled my nose at him as I scrambled to find the new piece to the sound track of my life.

Motherhood made it hard to keep on top of things, sleep, eating, proper personal hygiene. I had in the fray of parental battles not realized I would be happily listening to a new album.

We blasted it until our speakers protested all summer long, and when our second was born the baby learned to sleep through the throbbing bass.

It had listened to it relentlessly in the womb, I figured the sound must be familiar.

Even now, when we dance and make supper the glass in the windows shake while my toddlers mosh in the kitchen.

It doesn’t matter that the words of The Hunting Party are mourning, are wounded, are forlorn. The energy that courses through the halls of my house is the same that understood my fear and worry as a child in Hybrid Theory.

Tearing me apart with the words you wouldn’t say
And suddenly tomorrow’s a moment washed away
‘Cause I don’t have a reason and you don’t have the time
But we both keep on waiting for something we won’t find

The light on the horizon was brighter yesterday
With shadows floating over, the scars began to fade
We said it was forever but then it slipped away
Standing at the end of the final masquerade
The final masquerade

I sing the words, my kids dance. One day they’ll ask me why I listen to music that has words that could be interpreted as so very sad…. so very strained.

And I will be able to grin, and I will be able to tell them some stories, like the ones I have told today.

Sometimes we sing our sad, let it out, let it go.
So In the end, we can have joy.

Living Things

I escaped my wedding (with my husband) as soon as humanly possible. The food was eaten, the cake was cut, there was a dance, awkward and swaying with too many eyes on me.

My parents frothed back and forth at each other across the great expanse of their mutual hatred.

Guests swayed in the tug of war that resulted from the rippling currents of their anger.

I grabbed my husband’s hand and I walked out into the sunshine, I told him it was time to go, and his smile was at once relieved and excited, tired and tense.

We got out of there before the sun was low in the late June sky. I had wanted a winter wedding. You don’t always get what you want.

Driving away I could only sigh heavily, so glad to be left alone it hurt.

I would spend the next year and a half desperately trying to capture that freeing feeling of being left alone, while simultaneously trying to remain the dutiful daughter to parents too inward focused to realize their abuse.

Living Things came out the year of my first baby’s birth. I was pregnant beyond all sanity.

To say I was round is a savage understatement. It was impossible to forget there was another person sharing the real estate of my skin. My parents performed a miracle and seemed incapable of remembering, and soon the pressure of being their ideal daughter began to take a toll not just on me, but on the person I was so excited to meet growing within the confines of my body.

There were a lot of things to make me upset, hormones, body aches, fears about my ability to mother a human being needing my best, realizing my parents needed to forever more come last in the growing line of people in my heart.

Somehow the little being inside of me was the key to setting me free, to see what I needed was to be whole for them.

Take me down to the river bend
Take me down to the fighting end
Wash the poison from off my skin
Show me how to be whole again

Bring me home in a blinding dream
Through the secrets that I have seen
Wash the sorrow from off my skin
And show me how to be whole again

The day my husband told me that Linkin Park was playing near our home I was overly heated, red in the face from the early summer sun, excited when he brought me Living Things to listen to as soon as I was off work.

When he told me it was in September I felt myself start to tear up. We sat in the coolness of our apartment, me uncomfortable and emotional because I realized that I could not entertain the idea of going to see my favorite band at 8 months pregnant.

I was going to miss them.

I cried. Chocolate was had.
I listened to Living Things and mourned my missed concert.
It was one of many things i would willingly, painfully sacrifice for my children.
The whole mothering thing came pretty naturally to me- overall.

I had after all made a decision. I was going to live something different than what I had learned.

A Thousand Suns

I realized that I was an adult the day I looked back at the fall of the Twin Towers and realized I had been a child. Nothing but a child.

Graduation was long past, and I stared at the world around me both aghast and at the same time recognition. I had dreamed and nightmared about adulthood for so long. I had battled demons too big for my young body and mind to be truly shocked by what I saw, and yet now there was nothing in my mind to sigh deeply that this was not my place.

Adult, grown… I could no longer sit with my frightened angry emotions pulsing through me, burying myself deeper into those feelings.

I had to look around, I had to take it in the face, eyes open, teeth clenched.

The day I decided to move out of my family’s home I was still a child, untested and unsure, but the moment I finished unpacking the last small box, staring at a space that was truly my own I couldn’t help but smile.

The third floor apartment was small, the kitchen and livingroom and dining room were all meshed together, the living room separated by a wall that sliced at an angle across what was a generally rectangular shape.

There were windows straight across the left wall and the light flooded it at dawn and dusk equally, making most of my time in the apartment bathed in the gold of the sun or the twinkling navy of night time.

I tried to sleep in the bed I had asked my parents to let me move with me, the same bed I had had since I could remember, which they grudgingly gave. Even still, laying on my mattress in the new space made me nervous. I listened to the sound of the wind through the branches of the birch tree outside my bedroom window, and the cars on the street beyond it and felt the sneaking fear of orphan-hood.

My parents were alive, but had cared for me so little in moments of stress and fear, had in fact relied upon me so much that now in a roof without them I should have felt free, relieved, calm.

Instead, I realized their presence had been a security blanket, a last resort in case I should be faced with something I failed at. I knew now out in the big bad world I was alone. There would be no calling them now.

You say, you’re not gonna fight cuz no one will fight for you
And you think, there’s not enough love and no one to give it to
And You’re sure you’ve hurt for so long, you’ve got nothing left to lose
So, You say, you’re not gonna fight cuz no one will fight for you

I lay on my bed that night and fished out my headphones, I tried to block out my rising panic with the pulse of a Thousand Suns, almost moving to another album for something more grating, more desperate, more anxious like I felt.

But then I listened, and felt myself relaxing, eyes half closed, watching the unfamiliar lights of the cars that passed by my window so late at night.

I had fought so hard to be where I was, had stumbled and sacrificed a lot. Had thought I would never be….well… free. And there I was, with only myself to take care of, terrified by my loneliness.

You say, the weight of the world has kept you from letting go.

I still had ties to my roots, the pressure to be the trunk supporting the vine that was my decrepit family would not lessen for many years.

But someday, the weight of the world will give you the strength to go.

When the pressure came, it was in the shape of two tiny babies, needing me more than that dying vine. They are worth more to me than the world.

I suddenly had the strength to let go.

Minutes To Midnight

The tree was the most familiar thing to me when angry. More so than my room or the slam of my door. I stalked up the hill to it’s weathered bark and with my eardrums throbbing from the sound blasting from them I started the climb.

It had been a little while since my last climb. I was not an expert climber, by any means, but I knew this particular tree. We were old friends. In it I was comfortable to get high up, thirty or thirty five feet up with ease.

My converse shoes must have squeaked against the moss as I scrambled up the trunk after picking my way through the tangled ropes of roots mossy from all the rain we had been having.

If Meteora, and Hybrid Theory and a dozen other songs had not been playing so loud in my ears maybe I would have heard the squeak of wetness between my shoes and the mossy bark?

Maybe I would have hesitated as I scampered between the branches and heard the creak of the branch?

I was twenty or so feet up in the air reaching up for the next branch when I felt the jostle beneath my feet that dislodged my footing. I suddenly couldn’t reach above me for the next branch, I had lost several precious inches of height.

Now tight roping I panicked, felt the pit of my stomach turn cold and then hot and then as I wobbled and felt the first inches of my fall the air turned to poison in my lungs, burning.

I remember hitting the branch with my torso and feeling the smack of the tree’s solidity with my ribs, my fingers scrambling to grab a hold of something solid. There was nothing. With my one of my headphones out of my ear now I strained to stay on the creaking branch. I had just enough time to realize I was going to hurt a lot before the branch cut itself loose from the trunk of the tree.

I had no choice but to go with it.

We hit the roots below from a fall of twenty feet or so, I felt it snap up into my body from my left foot up, I fell back, felt the wind knocked out of my lungs, and rolled to a stop.

Looking up at the branches and the now gruesome looking wound on the tree trunk where the branch had snapped off I was offended by the Maple. What a traitor.

In my ear Chester shouted things I wasn’t listening very closely to, to be fair I was distracted.

I was doing a bit of inventory. So far my hands were moving, and I could shift my jaw, so at least from the waist up I was somehow functional…

Wary I raised my neck just enough to look at my feet splayed on the damp leafy ground and sparse grass of the park, watching to see if my shoes would shift when I told them to.

On one hand I was relieved. Both my feet waved back at me at my request.

On the other hand I nearly screamed. My left foot felt like it was in actual fire.

It took me two hot seconds to know I had broken my leg, and it was bad. Very bad.

In the ambulance they pumped me full of something that made the pain fade and my voice sound deep and thick.

I spent a week dizzy and numb, eyes half mast waiting for the surgery that would put the metal into my leg so I could still use it. Plates, and pins, pain and painkillers.

My father showed up one day at the hospital with Minutes to Midnight, and I realized then that Linkin Park was probably one of the few things he knew for sure would cheer me up. There were other blatant things about me that my friends knew, but he had picked the sure fire one.

(Little things give you away)
All you’ve ever wanted
Was someone to truly look up to you
(Little things give you away)

It made me feel curious to know he had noticed this one thing about me. Almost glad for the fall.

I listened to Minutes to Midnight for months straight, confined to my bed, eyes closed trying to dream up stories and books to write, even as the painkillers also murdered my ability to dream.

Even now when I put that album on I shift my leg uncomfortably, feeling the metal pins and plates that still hide beneath my skin.

Meteora

Entering high school was terrifying, I could feel my heart beat in my ears. I looked at all the students. Boys so tall they looked like trees, girls more womanly than my mother even seemed to me.

I stumbled through the halls, with my fists tight at my side, listening to my CD, the one I had scraped up enough change to buy over the course of several months of berry picking and couch cushion searching.

I was 14, wide eyed behind my glasses, tight jawed and short. School was the place where I not only grated on people, I also didn’t know my place.

At home there were expectations, there was the side stepping of the parents, the careful handling of the brothers.

Here it was all landmines, and I was no good at careful detonation.

In my head the lyrics ran through, from the point of leaving my house and taking the long bus ride into the school district furthest from my middle school to avoid the people who had taken pleasure in beating the crap out of me.

I was 14 and scared.

My parents were confused by my choice to go so far away, when a school ten minutes from our house would do just fine. They still didn’t know that walking those ten minutes posed more of a threat than taking a 45 minute bus ride home after dark.

In our peeling blue painted house the fights had slowed and almost stopped. Instead sickness took over, first in the form of headaches from my mom, and then hospital visits.

In the chaos of it all my parents asked me to trust them, not once but twice, three times. I lost count.

Trying not to break but I’m so tired of this deceit
Every time i try to make myself get back upon my feet
all I ever think about is this, all the tiring time between and how trying to put my trust in you just takes so much out of me.

But there’s one thing a kid learns fast, that’s who to trust and when. And I knew better.

I worked hard, when they asked me to get a part time job to pay for my own clothing and needs I did not question it. I knew eventually they would ask for more, and when they did I was ready. Unhappy but ready.

But that was okay. Not yet, I wasn’t prepared for the tearing away of my world, for the growing and the pain that came with it. I knew where I was headed though. I knew what needed to happen. I just needed time.

I will never know myself until I do this on my own
And I will never feel anything else, until my wounds are healed
I will never be anything till I break away from me
I will break away, I’ll find myself today

There was not a lot I had plenty of growing up. Thankfully, I did get time.
And my Linkin Park to listen to in the dark.

Hybrid Theory

We lived in two story townhouse, with faded blue paint. It got hot in the summer, to the point where I would lay on the carpet floor of my room and sweat, eyes closed.

I could watch the light move through my eyelids, making them peach colored petals in the sweltering heat.

I was ten years old, the oldest of three, lost inside my head full of stories and ideas, nightmares and dreams.

My house was filled with screaming, crying, a mother who slept a lot and returned from work with brows furrowed and a hate for summer.

My father tried, and failed and got tired of trying.

I lived in the wariness of not knowing when I would be presented with a problem too big for me to solve. So far, I had managed to solve all the ones presented to me thus far, somehow.

I worried about the day when I couldn’t.

I found the CD in a stack of others. Mariah Carey, U2, Eric Clapton, Switchfoot.

I was upset about something, although what I’m unsure. There were plenty of upsetting things in my life at that point.

I put the CD in, I listened to Chester scream. I mouthed the words I read off the cd booklet and tried to keep up with Mike’s rhythmic snarling poetry.

I recognized something in their sound, in the rapid electric beats, the screaming of the guitar and the throbbing of the bass. I felt the drums draw my heart into their beat.

I listened to Hybrid Theory until I knew the lyrics better than I knew my multiplication tables. I listened to it until I could snap out words at the same speed as Mike, until I could scream as long and loud as Chester.

I lay on the ground in my room watching the light through my eyelids, listening to my parents fight wondering what I would do if things got ugly to keep my brother’s distracted…. And when they did get bad, I put Hybrid Theory on as loud as I could, I locked my bedroom door with my brothers on either side of me and focused on their lyrics while I tried to keep them from listening to the shouts downstairs.

I figured out one of those times why my parents did what they did.
It didn’t change the fact I hated it, or that I was hurting or that it was damaging but I understood a little better.

You like to think you’re never wrong
You like to act like you’re someone
You want someone to hurt like you
You wanna share what you’ve been through
(You live what you’ve learned)

I was going to learn something different. I was going to live different. I was determined.
I became a Linkin Park fan at age ten.