For those who didn’t know her Rae was this amazing poet, with astounding talent and this gift with words that left you filled with awe every single time, for those that knew her Rae was crazy! She was this experience, like you didn’t just talk to Rae, you experienced all the drama and the extra ness and like each time you were about to see her, you had to brace yourself because you never knew how it would end.
Me and Rae had perhaps the most complicated relationship and friendship of all time in that it came with so many ups and downs and times when we couldn’t see eye to eye and at times couldn’t even stand being in the same space but still somehow remained friends despite it all.
And it’s crazy how the very last time we hung out, she called it love, she said she saw love in the lights and the way the sky shone into my blue hair and nothing was more true than the fact that we were pieces of each other, we are all pieces of each other and we leave these little pieces of each other every single time we interact and even in all the fights, (about boys) and all the tears we shed over the growing pains of being an African woman we were these little pieces just growing together.
When we lost her, and I say we because getting that news was like seeing this fading, pulsating film where everyone had something to say and everyone spoke of her like she was their own, it was like feeling the world stop, like everything within me was fighting against this news because it couldn’t be true, she wasn’t the sort of person to just disappear, she loved the attention and you would hear people who would speak of her, like she was ‘the nicest person I’ve ever met,’ and she wasn’t, she was mean as hell and in every word that I heard from people all I could remember was how sad she was, and how lonely she felt every single day, so lonely that she continued to find solace in the arms of a man that she knew could never love her and that, that was the most painful part of watching her loss.
‘It’s so sad how so many women are taking Xanax and sipping on Chardonnay and are numbing themselves just enough to survive in the way they’ve been told should make them happy but are miserable inside.’ Jaden
See we sat down at the beginning of this year and we set out to conquer the world and we had all these big plans of what we were gonna do and we shared the common belief of being a voice for the women in our generation and at every turn life kept throwing these curve balls. She told me that after she almost died, the first time she was no longer afraid of living her life, that more than ever she was just going to let herself shine because she no longer had anything to lose but even at Hifa as we celebrated, she sat down and drank down her tears because she had still never felt love from the people who called themselves her own and she didn’t feel love from the strangers who only knew how to clap their hands when she spoke, because see I would never have dared call her my best friend because when I look back now we were these crumbled pieces of a complete poem that were only discovering how to live within ourselves and could not discover how live within anyone else.
And when we talk of legacy’s and we talk of how Rae should be remembered I think the one thing I can truly share with all the people that we knew, that knew and loved her is to begin to live! Not on social media and not for the cameras but truly stop long enough to see each other, stop this quest of chasing bottles only to numb the pain of being alive and to survive until the next dose can come but truly live and start to enjoy these moments because this is all we get and this is all we have, tomorrow may never come and for her it didn’t.
She wanted to be surrounded by people but so often we’ve only truly been around each other when we talk about where to get the next $ to go to the next function so we can drink just one more time and smoke just one more grade that has to be better than the last one.
She wanted to change the world and to be an activist of what truly mattered, to speak of drugs and speak of abuse and speak of the pain we all hide behind these thin veiled masks we are so happy to carry around because then we never have to ask each other how we are doing, we never have to speak about the pain we feel at home, if we’ve even had a meal that day, if our parents love us, if that guy who was talking to you took things a little bit too far. We are the generation who speak about having voices and having all these platforms to share them but we are also the generation that’s scared of our emotions so much so we are only too happy to pretend that we have none!
See Rae was from the sun and she was a child of the planet yellow but so often than not she laid her head in the darkness seeping tears of sorrow, drown from the shallow pits of grey.
If we are to live in her memory then we have to truly embrace the sun and all it’s light and for the first time, talk to each other and love, for we can’t only lay love upon the dying flowers of our tomb.
As for the one from the sun
May she sleep with the angels as I’m sure she’ll teach them a thing or two
