A little less than a month ago, one of the most impactful spoken word poets of an entire generation passed into the beyond. I haven’t done a quantitative analysis but if I had to guess what Andrea Gibson wrote about most, I would say it was their heart. The thesis statement of their art, as I understand it, is making more room for grief, joy, and wonder. If you watch videos of them on YouTube, you’ll hear poems which mine humanity from painful and poignant experiences and offer them back to the hearer, shining. People find themselves in Andrea’s work and feel less alone and will continue to even though they’re not traveling with us in body anymore.

I came upon spoken word poetry as a specific art form when I was somewhere around 19 as a member of my college’s speech and debate team. I don’t remember exactly which poem was the first to enchant me but both poets, Andrea Gibson and Anis Mojgani, are still artists whose work I love. I have a practice of looking at my Facebook memories – it’s important for me to remember where I came from. On July 21, 2011 I posted “I would be a slam poet if I knew how.” My speech coach, Dustin, encouraged me to try. About a year later, on August 6, 2012, I won my first slam at the Mercury Café in Denver.

It can’t be overstated how much poetry slam has shaped my entire adult life, though I haven’t competed or written in the style that has become normative in many years. In perhaps the most early-2010s way possible, I met my now-ex-husband-but-still-good-friend on #SlamPoetry on tumblr because he filmed himself reading poems at the Bowery in New York. If I trace them back, many of my closest and oldest friendships have their roots in those days of writing, editing, and performing alongside each other. My political transformation and attunement to the trauma of structural inequality happened in that space. Old critique partners edited my seminary admission essay. My first long conversation with my beloved happened walking back from a tournament bout in Brooklyn somewhere around nine and a half years ago. I am who I am because of this art form. It started with the seed of impact that Andrea, Anis, and a few others had on me because I saw their videos, recognized something of myself in them, and decided to start writing.

At the center of my experience was Sunday nights at the Mercury Café. The Jungle Room with its green velvet curtain, high tables in the back, Christmas lights, stained glass, and murals held me and others as we worked to excavate our voices. We were nourished by the tea blends and organic food. We brought cash for the desserts that were half price after 10pm. It was there, on that scarred wooden stage and in those rickety chairs, that I learned how to see and be seen. It was church. A place I committed to the people and the mission and, for a few years, gave it my all.

Last night, there was a public memorial for Andrea and I wanted to go and pay tribute to the impact they had on my life, which was greater than they ever knew. We weren’t close, by any means. We met a few times. One of their superpowers, though, was encouraging people. I opened a show of theirs in Colorado Springs once – just one poem. A few years later, they stopped me outside a tournament venue, told me they remembered me and they were watching what I did with interest. It’s a memory I hold onto – a moment where one of the best to ever do it saw and affirmed the artist in me.

And I am far from the only one, judging by the fact that the staff at the Merc (now called The Pearl but will always be the Merc to me) had to carefully manage fire code capacity last night at the standing room only event where a truly star-studded lineup read Andrea’s poems and offered remembrances. I rode up from the Springs with Nico, another of my oldest friends and another gift from this community. We’d traveled I-25 together many times over the years, making our pilgrimage to ground that used to be the holiest place we knew. We’d both been hoping, I think, to see some of the old crew. To catch glimpses of who we had been in our early 20s – our wholehearted enthusiasm and energy - in the people who had known us then. What we were confronted with, though, was an overwhelming sense that this place, which had once held us so well, was no longer home.

It had been years since either of us had been in the Jungle Room and it’s impossible not to note the changes, though I’m grateful The Pearl has been slow and mindful about how they are making them. The mural of the leopard is still there, though the stained-glass triple goddess and Venus symbols are gone. We waited in a crush of people to be admitted to the upstairs memorial, reminiscing about what we’d experienced in that building and seeing fewer faces we recognized than we’d hoped. We managed to snag a table to lean on but, as we’d forgotten the Merc often did, it got hot though the day was cool for August.

The smokers nook on the corner of 22^nd and California is a portal and always has been. At intermission on Sunday nights, we’d be told we had seven real human minutes (just enough time to smoke one if you wanted) and we’d spill out the door and into the night air to catch our breath and find connection. Poets, then as now, are notoriously terrible at starting on time so, before the memorial kicked off, our feet led us there though the benches were broken and the only inhabitants were memories and specters. We were together in our alienation, feeling into the growth and change on all sides that made this place no longer the haven it once was for us.

As I said the words “I don’t think this place holds anything for me anymore” a procession of Denver local legends and nationally renowned artists came around the corner – a parade of people who impacted my early 20s in profound ways, either through their art, their friendship, or both. A couple broke off to come say hello. Others didn’t (or pretended not to – not every relationship ended well) see me. We talked about orbiting this place and the metaphor of space. How a star like Andrea going supernova changes the gravity for a while, pulling us back in for a reunion before we return to our own trajectories. How, too often, it’s death that does that. How we couldn’t have imagined a life without this place but life happened anyway, well beyond what we predicted. How you never know when your last time will be until you look back and it’s been years since you crossed that threshold. How sometimes you’re letting go and you don’t even know you’re doing it.

While we were there on the street, we heard the voices of the first readers waft through the open windows. Nico began to cry, saying “I don’t even know what I’m grieving.” The clouds joined in as we held each other outside a place we used to be central to. We didn’t go in again. For my part, I don’t know if I ever will though I know better than to say never.

In a slam competition, readers have three minutes to read their poems plus a ten second grace period before points start getting deducted. Once the scores are tallied, if there is a time penalty, it is tradition to yell “Fuck linear time!” with the special Merc addition of “You rat bastard, you’re ruining it for everyone!” in solidarity with the poet whose work couldn’t be held in such a scant temporal container. Grief, with a force unlike anything else I have experienced, puts me in touch with my rebellion against linear time. And nostalgia, as I have come to know it, is a grief. We find ourselves in the interstices of what was and what is and that position is an awkward entre into a reckoning. We are not who we were. You can’t go home again. The neighborhood changes. Things get broken. Murals get painted over. Nothing remains as you left it. You are not the same as you were when you left. Everyone keeps carrying on, just differently. Apart.

Both Nico and I grew up in the Denver area so, leaning in to the existential ennui, we did a bit of a nostalgia tour. I DJ’d poignant music and we listened to some of Andrea’s spoken word. We drove through our old neighborhoods, sought out our childhood homes, and told stories of the other places we used to know ourselves in – the ditches and greenbelts, the divey restaurants, the park that still has the purple dinosaur. Some things remain and that’s comforting. Paint gets updated. There’s a new shed in the yard and the grass is nicer than it ever was when you lived there. It’s comforting to know that not everything gets worse though it’s those very improvements that make it not your place anymore.

On the way home, Nico asked how I was feeling and the answer surprised me. After a while of swapping stories and remembering, it had stopped hurting. We’d found another inside in the outside. We’d found someone else who kept some of the same memories and who would help carry the ones we held alone. There’s something powerful about remembering – literally putting the pieces of yourself back together - together. That’s long-term love, I think. The people who know the you you used to be and care to know how you got to here, wherever that happens to be today.

I’m lucky, I think. I don’t find myself grieving the lives I could have had. Only the goodbyes, quiet and not, I’ve had to say which led me to the places I am now. It was time, I think, to let go again.

Despite slam poets and our expletives on the matter, linear time is neither friend or enemy. It just is. It does what time does; it moves forward, bringing with it the decision to be present to what is moment by moment. Time demands of us that we not remain on the threshold. It is impossible to stay there for long. Life and time have their way and we are compelled to move whether we want to or not. That movement brings change and, if we have an open heart, change can hurt even when it is for the best.

If there is one thing Andrea taught us in their final days, though, it’s that grief and gratitude travel together. That entering the portal of grief fully leads you to a pathway of gratitude and that sees you all the way through to the end. Transience is the very thing that makes experience so soul-expandingly beautiful, even when it hurts, and beauty and expansion are always worth seeking.

May we stretch, dear ones. May we become.