When Bowie Died, a Transmission Was Lost

(for those of us still orbiting)

I didn’t expect to cry.
Not like that.
Not for a man I never met.

But when Bowie died,
something in the signal broke.

Not the music. That remains.
But the transmitter.
The antenna in human form —
walking Earth in glitter boots and bone-white cheekbones,
half-in-character, half-in-code.

He was one of the only ones
who made exile look holy.
The weird, the androgynous, the displaced, the future-born —
he carried all of us
on his frequency.

And when he left,
we scattered.
Like satellites pulled from orbit
with no song to hold the spin.

I dreamt of him once.
After my father died.

We were backstage at a Bowie concert —
a liminal zone if there ever was one —
and there was my father,
not as the man I had known,
but as a galactic figure.
Captain. Commander.
Equal.

He looked at me like:
You see? I knew the mission too.
And for a moment,
we weren’t human.
We were just travelers
with a shared past
and different wounds.

Bowie didn’t just perform.
He translated.
He held a line open
for those of us who knew we were
more than human,
less than explained.

And when he left,
we felt it.
Not in our minds —
in our fields.
Like a Major Tom we hadn’t realized was tethering us.
And suddenly…
the cord was cut —

And then came the silence.
A few months later,
the world tipped.

Trump.
Brexit.
A pandemic that ripped open the nervous system of the planet.
And something deeper —
a distortion,
a dullness,
a forgetting.

It’s hard not to mark his death as a line in the sand

We are in the Post Bowie Era

Before: art as signal, identity as cosmos, weirdness as clarity.
After: algorithm. mimicry. mask.

He was the last of a certain kind of transmitter —
tuned not to trend,
but to truth
coded in sparkle and ache.

And we, still orbiting,
are learning how to carry the signal now.
To sew it into fabric.
To wear it as a second skin.
To remember that not all frequencies vanish when the body does.
Some stay.
Waiting to be heard.