After nine years of being attached at the hip, Lyric and Prince finally split. Now, on the road to recovery, she learns a new way to view life as Prince is forced to face the music of a song he never wanted to played aloud. Join them as they learn a...
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July 4, 1994 Monte Carlo, Monaco
"This is it." I exhale deeply.
Nights like this, I wonder what I can possibly do during my hiatus that'll give me this kind of a rush. I've come to realize nothing can beat this. Stages give me a different kind of oxygen to breathe into my lungs. Yet, I'm still willing to see how long I can stay out of the limelight. I'm hoping to go as far as the new millennium. I'd at least like a beautiful break of four long years. Let's see what the last number one record in the country from Pause can do for me.
I stand in the center of the stage as a single act. My microphone is on a stand and my dress is sleek, slim, sleeveless, and pink. The night's theme has most gravitating toward black and white, or some other neutralizing color, as I stand in a bright, bold flamingo pink gown with an ostrich-feather trim, each feather dyed pink, hiding my heels. It's the boldest way I know to go out, going completely against the grain as I sing the tale told on track 9.
Most of my music is autobiographical as I'm most often who has written it. WhenThe World Falls is the most transparent I've been in a while though. No innuendos, no generalizations. Me, the panicking freak, belting for four minutes about my anxieties of what will happen if I stop doing or feeling any of the things I do to afford myself the life that I live. If I stopped all of this, will the world fall? I'm stopping right now and I still don't know.
They tell you sing from your diaphragm but I choose to sing from my heart, my heart that's been taped back together lord knows how many times. Half of those times I did the stitching up myself. It's not an easy patch job but it seems to be working for me right now. Halfway into the set, I can feel my ears beginning to ring as my nose stings. I'm going to cry before this song is over. Even as I've lost touch with reality, my heart weighs down the strings to my Frankenstein heart. I don't really hear anything or see anyone.
Sure, I see all the faces but they're just faces for the time being. I can feel everything. I feel every color, emotion and the spirits in the room. It's an entirely different level of awareness. It's the same awareness that tells me the inner corner of my left eye will drop my first tear.
Feeling my heart rate increase as my bridge enters, I feel a sense of freedom being exploited through my vocal projection. My eyes fall to the row I know Whitney sits in with her mother, Cissy. After finally allowing me to explain how much she misunderstood Eddie and I, we're in a good place again. Her vision included, everybody's eyes are on me and only me.
And there he is... I felt him before I even saw his face. I can feel his presence in the audience from all the way up here. Explaining how is most often where I struggle. It feels like a special set of eyes are on you, something to likes of a monster watching you from your closet except you aren't scared. In fact, after a while, you wait for that feeling because it's expected. Every time he was across a club watching me, or coming down an empty hallway, or sitting in his car outside my house, that's exact what I've felt.
