Intro

Then he asked something of me.

Not politely.

Not gently.

As though the decision had already been made long before I ever arrived.

He wanted me to remember.

To follow.

To write.

To refuse the easy explanation.

He was asking me to believe wholeheartedly in something I already knew no one else would. And if I did, it would cost me more than my peace of mind. It could cost me my credibility, my career, and every carefully constructed version of myself I'd spent a lifetime protecting.

When I was a little girl, there was one movie I refused to finish.

It wasn't because it was violent.

It wasn't because it was frightening.

It was because something about it felt familiar.

Return to Oz.

There was a queen who kept her heads in glass cabinets. Whenever life demanded someone different, she simply opened another cabinet and became someone else.

Most children probably thought it was a monster.

I thought it was survival.

I remember staring at the television and wondering how much easier life would be if we all had that choice. To leave one version of ourselves behind whenever the world became too cruel. To become whoever the next moment required. Stronger. Colder. Invisible.

I shut off the VHS before it ended.

I never watched it again.

Not because I was afraid of the queen.

Because I was afraid she made too much sense.

Years later, sitting across from that man, I found myself wishing those cabinets had been real.

One more head.

One more version of me.

Someone who wasn't sitting in that chair.

Someone who didn't have to hear what he was about to ask.

He studied me for what felt like forever. There wasn't anger in his eyes. There wasn't sympathy either. Only the quiet certainty that I had arrived exactly where I was supposed to be.

Then, almost in a whisper, he said,

"You already know."

I opened my mouth to argue.

To tell him he had the wrong person.

To tell him I didn't know anything.

But the words never came.

Because somewhere beneath the fear...

...I was terrified he was right.

Most of the world knew him as Layne Staley.

I only knew him as the man who refused to let me forget.