=== PAGE: journal:021d_crystal_nova ===
====== Entry — In transit, Crystal Nova ======
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She left at sixteen. I left at seventeen. The year between those two facts has always felt significant and I've never been able to explain why, but I've been thinking about it on this train and I think I'm getting closer.

She filed for emancipation. Officially, legally, through the proper channels, in a courtroom, on record. The world knew she was leaving before she'd gone. I slipped out through a crack in the rear garden wall at seventeen in the middle of the night and told nobody, and the world learned about it approximately never because I was the sibling nobody photographed.

She made herself impossible to ignore in the act of going. I made myself impossible to find.

I've thought about which of those approaches is braver and I don't think it's a competition with a clean winner, but I do think they say something about what each of us had and hadn't been allowed to believe about ourselves. She knew, at sixteen, that her leaving was worth witnessing. I needed to disappear before anyone could talk me out of it.

At twenty-one I heard a Crystal Nova track on someone's phone at work without knowing it was her. Just heard it and thought: there's something real in that, there's a person in there. Found out whose it was later and sat with the fact for a long time. She sings about being used. About the family that wasn't one. About the gap between what you were told you were and what you actually were. I've written versions of those same thoughts in this journal for years, just without the melody.

She rejects contact. I've respected that, and I'll continue to. But I want to write down, somewhere, that I heard it. That whatever she poured into those songs — the real specific weight of growing up in that house — I recognised every gram of it.

//She won't be at the mansion. She received the letter, presumably, because she was named in the will, but I'd be surprised if she came. She filed for emancipation at sixteen — she has been telling that house what it can do with its claims on her for eight years. I don't expect her to stop now.//

//If she does come, I'm not going to approach her. But I'm going to hope she knows that somewhere out there, a person who grew up in the same rooms heard her music and felt less alone. That has to count for something even if she never knows it.//