Before anyone reads this, I am sorry. This is thirteen years of backed up shit. Thirteen years of untreated, unrecognized, welled up emotion. It must seem terribly self-indulgent, but the way that I’ve lived, suppressed and numbed, it had to be that way.

I don't know where to start with this, this suicide. I've never experienced this before, this kind of odd out-of-mind experience like this. I say it like that, because it's a kind of emotional response to something that I by rational rights shouldn't. There's a lot to explain and no time to do it. And I get flustered very easily. It's hard for me to stay focused, because I get scared of staying on topic and having people find out something about me or my ideas, writing habits or otherwise, to undermine the whole thing. I apologize for that, and for using this terrible thing as the chance to finally keep from being silent, but I’ve been silent for so long, sick with it, winding down my brain, and I don’t want to anymore.

I feel something, a landslide taking down what I thought were sturdy emotional barriers, but I've never met him. At first I could only think of myself, I couldn't even think of his family. All that had come to me was the weight of his music, the gravity of his words, the poetic devotion to a craft had elevated hundreds of thousands, I would hazard millions of people with problems not quite "important" or "dire" enough to care about, but often long-standing and debilitating in their slow, relentless, drudgery, “above” the hurt all the same. I am one of those.

To put this into context, I feel that I should admit a few things. My mom committed suicide when I was thirteen, I think, and I have no idea what that has done to me. I found her behind a car, quietly laid behind the tailpipe of her running car. There was no one around, so I had to do everything that I was taught in school: call the police, get the address. I didn’t know my address at the time, so I had to run down a couple hundred feet to our mailbox to get it. I remember feeling a strange elation climbing back up the slope to where she was, something almost euphoric, like my brain was simply flushed with the opposite emotion that I should be feeling to fight off what was really happening. The rest was calling the police, dispatch-guided CPR, really, it becomes blurry after sitting in the back seat of what I presume would have been a police car, my sister mentioning that “she’d done something like this before.” After that, I know that I slowly became dull. I don't mean bored or stupid, but my world and habits became a slog without my knowledge, and many unanswered and very deeply disguised and hidden problems dug into the ground, found a home, and festered beneath the surface of a face ready to smile, lest a crack lead to another empty talk that I would yet again shield my true feelings within. The only time that I would take a breath beyond the haze and taste fresher air, crisp air, would be during something like New Divide, Waiting For The End, an every album already mentioned in these comments.

His work is beyond my capacity nor privilege to describe it. I've always been interested in the grand and the noble, but his music, that voice, the way that he brought his work to me, they found that part of me with impossible, poignant precision. They were war songs, not in the sense of being militant or propagandic, but stirring, active, sensational, vivid, and heroic. What I had said earlier about those people whose problems weren't quite dire enough: I mean it like this. Those of us like me who do little more or less than deadman float over a placid ocean of dull pain. It's not a violent roar to rouse you to flee or correct what causes it, nor is it benign or weightless. It's terrible all on its own. It's tolerable, not quite painful enough to kill, but nowhere near forgettable. It's constant, petrifying, and unreasonable. It captures who you are and invents every way to seal off the exits out of your mind until you're left to suffer Stockholm Syndrome to this new person taking control. Yet Chester Bennington, and of course the rest of Linkin Park, their music ferried us, and those much worse off, through the shit, in an unprecedented way in an unprecedented time. The genuine spirit of his music, the passion from his voice spoken by the words but enlivened by the pitch coming out of those vocal cords, it invigorated me, made me believe that passion, that good, are real. I lack a passion at times, a flag to stand beside, I have forced myself not to believe in anything. But Chester and his voice, that tremendous, honest, thunderous voice, it broke through me. It showed me that things could be different, that my listless, numb, passive life could be different. (Part 1)