Antara Kashyap
I was going through old pictures in my gallery when I found these photos of Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil, one with them sitting on a sidewalk looking either distraught or passionately in love and one in which he was sitting by her grave, with a bouquet, crying. I had saved them on her birthday this year, because every time I think of Amy I go to a different zone. Today it all came back, and I decided to write about it.
It’s not that I really loved all of her songs or something. I mean they were masterpieces but most of them didn’t help me. I only listened to her when I was in the zone and I only heard either “Love is a Losing Game” or “Back to Black” on loop. If I felt a little upbeat there was “Rehab”. The rest, I couldn’t even tell you about any, because my brain never registered them, I didn’t need it to. It was not “Amy Winehouse the singer” that captivated me, it was “Amy Winehouse the person”. Mostly because of what happened to her, more specifically what her love did to her.
Amy with her winged eyeliner (so sharp it could slice someone’s throat) and a “Blake’s” tattoo right above her heart loved him so fiercely that it killed her. Much to our dismay quite literally. Their love was like a fire, all consuming, and it finally consumed all of her. When I think of her I can only imagine what it felt like to love him. Did it make ecstatic or was it exhausting? When did she cross that thin line between intense passion and violence? What made them rip each other’s face and still stick together? What was it about Blake that when he decided to divorce her she couldn’t let go and “take the high road” like most celebrities like her would? Why couldn’t she find love in someone else? How was it to involve in an addiction with someone you love? Was it their love that made them do drugs, or was it all the drugs that convinced them they were madly in love? I would never know.
I grew up reading romantic novels, I grew up believing in love and I’ll never be okay knowing that love can make you kill yourself (or other people). I’m not okay knowing that love can be so toxic it can destroy you and snap your heartstrings and be the end of you. I’m just not. A part of me is so glad I’ve never had a love like that. And I hope I never do.
But a part of me deep down wants to love like that. The fierce, intense, passionate kind of love that can make you overdose on your alcohol and kill yourself. Because that’s how you know you have power over somebody and they have so much power over you too. That is exactly how capable you are to be destroyed or destroy someone. But you don’t. Well, in Amy’s case they did. But that’s how your story lives through generations. That’s a kind of love people want to have. That either makes you a hero or a tragic end. It’s what makes people write or think about you after you’re long gone. Or as a certain Alison DiLaurentis once said “It’s immortality, my darlings.”