Isn't that generous?

rushthatspeaks woke me around seven-thirty because they were doing terribly. They were doing terribly because David Bowie died.

I said stupidly, "But he just had a birthday," thinking but he just released a new album, but he just released a new video, but he's still making art, he can't be done.

Twelve years ago, seeing a photograph of Bowie at still startlingly beautiful fifty-seven in the Boston Globe, I remarked to my mother that he must have sold his soul to the Devil. No, said my mother, he is the Devil. I couldn't argue. The trickster Devil, of course, the lightbringer, the shape-changer, the mesmerizing stranger at the crossroads, familiar as wanting something forbidden and suddenly possible. The fire from out of the sky.

I came to Labyrinth (1986) late by the standards of my generation. I was just out of high school. A girl on whom I had a tongue-tied, brain-melting crush, who had heavy dark hair and shared a name with Jennifer Connelly's character, showed it to me. I had known Bowie acted; The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) was one of my father's favorite movies. I had grown up with his music in the house. I watched Labyrinth with someone I wanted so badly it made my skin burn from her nearness, just like in Sappho's poetry, which I had not yet read in Greek—the first person for whom I had ever felt unambiguous physical desire—and with or without David Bowie's legendary area, I think that film would always be suffused with sharp edges and shadowy dreams and wanting without knowing quite what and then knowing, liminal and initiatory, which is a pretty great thing to be able to say about any production that stars Muppets. But it did also star David Bowie, unforgettably, with two immediate and permanent results. The first is the usual thing: it was the role that made me see him, so that afterward he would always look to me like the owl-haired king of the underworld even when he was being Nikola Tesla or just himself in the news. To this day, I have no proof that every thirteenth hour he was not something other than human. He took on so many shapes in his lifetime, why should the most apparently enduring one have been any different? It took years for me to notice the second: that despite the coming-of-age coincidence, despite the fact that I was the target demographic right down to the tendency to interpret my life through the lenses of favorite stories, I did not see myself as Sarah. We watched the movie and we were not a couple, nothing she did showed that she looked at me as I looked at her, hopeful and electric; by the time the white owl took wing into the night over the credits music, it was myself I saw on the other side of the window. I had no power over her. It's not just that Jareth is an attractive figure, although he is; that you know Sarah made the right choice, and you would not have her renounce it, but you still wonder. Something in Bowie's performance gave that window of vulnerability where a different actor might only have been sardonic and tempting and mercurial and menacing and all of the things I did not make the mistake of thinking that I was at age seventeen and in lust for the first time—it is not strange that the Goblin King should be sympathetic, but it is usually a bad sign when the would-be Hades analogue is the metaphor for your love life. I always imprinted on outsiders, hardly ever the center of the story. I should have remembered sooner that Bowie, whatever he did, put that alienness front and center, made it the thing to identify with rather than the fragments around the edge.

I went to see The Prestige (2006) for his Tesla. It was not a mistake. I still wish he and Derek Jarman had made their film about Akhenaten together. I can't imagine what it would have looked like even after reading the script, but it would have been otherworldly.

I am glad he lived long enough to make his last music as he wanted. Right now I still feel as though a constellation is gone from the sky. I liked living in a universe with David Bowie in it. Then again, the songs never promised that he would stay.