kintsugi with pyrite

a micro-essay on the unmendable

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How to Dress Well’s Waking Up To Life Sometimes Feels Worse is the only way I can listen to an R. Kelly song.

Guilt still prickles me between the arpeggio of my tears.

Tom Krell (How to Dress Well’s real name) invokes the church organ’s ancestry with his synthesiser; caressing each chord with reverence, each sweet word sung imbued with the sour reminder that tenderness is practicable by monsters, too. Monsters mourn, too.

I would give it all up just to take one ride with you.

A burst-mode memory of my ex erupts in my mind. I snort with laughter.

I was 8 years old when R. Kelly’s song I Wish came out in 2000. Krell’s cover came out in 2010. Somehow, this lyric – a Faustian plea deal – cracks time and sets my attention at the feet of someone I’ve met and unmet far more recently.

‘Why?’

I drum polyrhythms on my head with my palms, trying to dislodge an answer and avoid scratching my braids.

Braids I’d always wanted; ever since I saw music videos on MTV Base where hood niggas in string vests perched on porches between the legs of beautiful women, head half-woven – in trust and at mercy.

Braids I wanted her to do for me.

‘Ah.’

We broke up before I got the honour. This year, I got braids for the first time anyway. I’m sure she’s getting what she wants, too. Life doesn’t stay still just because something breaks. But your scalp does get less itchy over time.

Come on and braid my hair.

Krell’s voice is earnest but in it croons a void, its emotional grasp never clutching more than an ersatz delivery of Black mourning, spiritually insufficient from the pallor of his mouth. The divinity of the song’s aboriginal form is retroactively shattered by Kelly’s violence, a rupture back through time.

Waking Up To Life Sometimes Feels Worse is a loophole, a way to experience I Wish’s monumental bones while avoiding the gross viscera of its architect’s monstrosity. The price is having to hear a white man wail stuff like: and if I make it out this thug life I’ll see you again some day.

Krell’s grainy falsetto is where you realise the sheer brokenness that reverberates through every echelon of this music.

Instead of y’all throwing them stones at me… Somebody pray for me.

I think of Robert Kelly, 8 years old. No dreams of getting his hair cared for. Instead, a boy confronted with death and carnal desire too early and too violently. His childhood was a cauldron with toad-feet tragedies and eye-of-newt failures thrown in to concoct an angel-throated monster. The ingredients that cooked him could’ve happened to anyone.

I think of his victims. Of those who loved him earnestly that he let down. Of the hearts, bodies and senses of self he broke through. We are dominoes of pain and desire crashing into one another. I pray the people he hurt don’t fall.

The cover ends. Quiet hollows itself out. Estuaries flow down my cheeks like they’re holding my face together.

I press play again.