Thank You Michael

She knew when a bad night was coming before anyone had said a word.

It was in the way a key turned in the front door.

The way a cupboard shut a bit too hard.

The way somebody put a glass down on the side like it had personally offended them.

Other children probably heard shouting and thought, "They're shouting."

She heard shouting and started working out where to go.

Bedroom? Too obvious.

Bathroom? Could be trapped.

Behind the sofa? Amateur hour.

You learn quickly when you grow up around violence. You learn which rooms feel safer. You learn who to avoid. You learn how to read a face before the face has even decided what it is going to do.

You learn how to stay quiet without anyone telling you to.

You learn how to make yourself small.

And if you are really unlucky, you get good at it.

She was good at it.

She could sit in a room and feel the mood change without anyone speaking. She could tell when a laugh was about to turn into an argument. She knew the difference between normal footsteps and angry footsteps. She knew that adults could be terrifying even when they were trying to act like everything was fine.

There are children who grow up worrying about spelling tests, whether they are getting picked for netball, or if their mum has remembered to buy the crisps they like.

She worried about whether tonight was going to kick off.

And in the middle of all that, somehow, there was Michael Jackson.

At first, he was just music.

A voice coming through a speaker.

A beat coming from the television.

A song playing somewhere outside the noise of home.

But it did something to her.

It was not magic. It did not stop the shouting. It did not make violent people suddenly wake up one morning with a conscience and a family therapist.

It did not fix anything.

But it gave her somewhere to go in her own head.

A way out for three minutes.

Four minutes.

Five, if she replayed it before somebody came in and told her to turn it down.

Michael's music had feeling in it.

Proper feeling.

Not the sort of song that sounds like it was written by six men in a meeting room.

His music sounded like somebody meant every word.

There was sadness in it. There was anger. There was joy. There was loneliness. There was hope, even when hope felt a bit optimistic for a Tuesday evening.

And when you are a child living in a house where grown people seem determined to make life unbearable, somebody singing about pain, love, fear, change and wanting the world to be better does not just sound nice.

It sounds like somebody understands something.

She did not have the words for it then.

She just knew that when Michael sang, she felt less alone.

Then came the dancing.

That was it.

That was the end of any chance of her behaving normally around a song ever again.

Michael did not dance like other people danced.

He moved like he had been born with a secret the rest of us had missed. Like music had got into his bones before he was even born and had been using his body as a way to show off ever since.

The sharp turns.

The feet.

The stillness.

That little flick of the hand that could make an entire crowd lose their minds.

The way he could stand there doing absolutely nothing and somehow make thousands of people scream like they had just seen Jesus himself doing the moonwalk outside Tesco.

She watched him and wanted to move too.

Not because she thought she was going to become Michael Jackson. She was not completely deluded. She had enough self-awareness to know she was not about to glide backwards across the kitchen floor and get a call from Sony Records.

But when she danced, she felt different.

Free.

That is the only word for it.

Everything else disappeared.

The shouting.

The fear.

The way her stomach would knot itself up when adults started acting unpredictable.

All gone for a minute.

She danced in bedrooms. Living rooms. Kitchens. Anywhere there was enough space to swing an arm without knocking over a lamp or smashing somebody's framed photo of a dead relative.

She danced whenever she could.

Wildly.

With complete confidence and absolutely no concern for space, neighbours, furniture or basic human dignity.

But she danced.

And for a little girl who had spent so much time trying not to be noticed, dancing was a rebellion.

You could not disappear while dancing.

You had to take up space.

You had to let your body say something.

You had to be seen, even if only by yourself.

As she got older, Michael grew with her.

When she was little, he was comfort.

When she was older, he was excitement.

Then he became inspiration.

She began to understand the work behind it. The discipline. The precision. The ridiculous level of detail. The fact that he was not just talented, he was obsessed with getting things right.

Every move mattered.

Every sound mattered.

Every outfit mattered.

Every second on stage was there because he had thought about it, worked at it, picked it apart and made it better.

And that stayed with her.

Because when you come from chaos, you notice people who create order.

You notice somebody who can take pain, anger, beauty, fear and joy, then turn it into something the whole world can feel.

You notice a person who refuses to be ordinary when the whole world is begging you to sit down, shut up and be grateful for whatever small corner they have decided you are allowed.

By the time she was eighteen, Michael Jackson was not just a singer to her.

He was part of the soundtrack of her life.

The little girl who had hidden from shouting had grown up.

Sort of.

She still had chaos. She still had feelings bigger than her body sometimes knew what to do with. She still had dreams. She still had that thing in her where music could make her feel more alive than almost anything else.

Then she saw him live.

Before social media, celebrities felt different.

You did not see them making a cup of tea in their kitchen.

You did not see them doing a "come with me to get my nails done" video.

You did not see somebody filming them eating pasta in a tracksuit while their dog walked across the screen.

You saw them on television.

On posters.

In magazines.

On stage.

They were not people you expected to ever be near. Not really.

And Michael Jackson was not just famous.

He was almost unreal.

He felt like a myth.

Like somebody who existed in music videos, stadiums, headlines and the kind of stories people told with too much confidence despite having clearly read them in The Sun while waiting for a haircut.

So to be eighteen years old and suddenly standing metres away from him was too much.

There is no normal way to explain it.

The air in the room changed.

It genuinely did.

The noise before he came out was one thing. People shouting, crying, losing their minds, trying to hold themselves together while very obviously failing.

Then he appeared.

And something shifted.

She could barely breathe.

Not in a pretty, graceful way either. There was no delicate little tear rolling down the cheek while violins played in the background.

It was more like her body had forgotten how lungs worked.

Her chest was tight. Her eyes were burning. Her brain was trying to take in the fact that the man she had watched through a screen for years was there. Right there. Moving. Singing. Existing in the same room.

Michael Jackson.

The person whose music had carried her through childhood.

The person whose dancing had made her want to be free.

The person who had somehow been part of her life without ever knowing her name.

He was metres away.

And she was happy in a way she had never been happy before.

Not normal happy.

Not "someone bought me a decent Chinese and I do not have to share the prawn crackers" happy.

This was bigger.

It was the kind of happiness that makes your whole body feel light.

The kind that stays with you forever because you know, even while it is happening, that nothing will ever quite feel the same again.

Life went on after that.

Because it always does.

Life does not care that you have just had the greatest moment of your entire existence. It will still send bills. It will still bring grief. It will still throw the odd dickhead into your path just to keep you on your toes.

There were good years.

There were awful ones.

There were times when life was busy and loud and full of people. Times when it felt like she was needed by everyone and seen by nobody.

There were losses.

There were nights when she lay awake with her head spinning and that horrible feeling in her chest that comes when life has become too heavy but you still have to get up in the morning because people need breakfast and uniforms washed and someone has used the last toilet roll without telling you.

There were times when she felt like there was no light anywhere.

And every time, somehow, the music came back.

It always came back.

A song would come on in the car.

A video would appear somewhere.

A beat would start and suddenly she was back in her childhood bedroom, dancing around like the floor was a stage and nobody could touch her there.

Michael was not a cure for pain.

But he was comfort.

He was a reminder that there was still beauty in the world.

That people could create something so powerful it could reach a scared little girl in a house full of fear and stay with her for the rest of her life.

He was proof that sensitivity did not make you weak.

That softness did not mean you had nothing to say.

That you could care about people, about children, about injustice, about racism, poverty, war and cruelty, and still have enough fire in you to stand in front of the world and tell it to do better.

He did that.

People wanted the music.

He gave them music, but he also gave them something to think about.

People wanted the dancing.

He gave them dancing, but he also gave them history.

He gave them Black pride and Black excellence when the world still had far too many doors shut in people's faces.

He gave them stories through film and music videos when other people were still standing in front of a wind machine singing into a microphone and calling it groundbreaking.

He gave them fashion.

He gave them style.

He gave them moments people copied for decades.

He changed music videos forever.

He changed live performance forever.

He changed dance forever.

He made people all over the world feel like they belonged to something together.

And he did not need everyone to speak the same language.

They understood him anyway.

People in every country knew the songs.

They knew the moves.

They knew the sound of the crowd when he stepped onto a stage.

They knew what it felt like when he lifted one hand and made an entire stadium lose its collective shit.

That kind of connection does not happen often.

It has not happened like that since.

Then came June 25th, 2009.

And everything stopped.

The internet was buckling. Phones were going mad. Every channel was breaking into programmes. People were messaging each other with that awful sentence.

"Have you heard?"

At first, nobody wanted to believe it.

Not Michael.

Not him.

Not the little boy the world had watched become the biggest artist on the planet.

Not the teenager with the voice.

Not the performer who could hold an entire stadium in his hand.

Not the man who had spent his whole life giving people music, dance, hope, joy, comfort and somewhere to escape to.

But it was true.

He was gone.

Just like that.

And the grief that came after was something else.

People cried in streets.

People cried at work.

People cried at home.

People who had not listened to him for years suddenly could not stop playing his music.

People who had spent half their lives dancing to him felt like a piece of their own youth had been ripped away.

And for the people who had loved him properly, not just as a performer but as a human being, it felt unbearable.

Because how could this happen?

How could somebody who gave so much be left so exposed?

How could people around him see the pressure, see the exhaustion, see the weight being put on him, and still keep the machine running?

More rehearsals.

More demands.

More money.

More people needing something.

More people taking something.

More people wanting Michael Jackson, the product, the performer, the headline, the comeback, the money machine.

But what about Michael the man?

What about the person underneath all of it?

The father.

The son.

The brother.

The friend.

The human being who had been watched, judged, praised, pulled apart, copied, mocked, used and demanded from since he was a child himself.

He had worked like a dog for most of his life.

He had given the world more than any one person should ever be expected to give.

And on June 25th, 2009, it felt like the light went out.

There are artists who are successful.

There are artists who are famous.

There are artists who sell records and fill arenas and get dressed by expensive people before saying something rehearsed on a red carpet.

Then there was Michael.

There was nobody else like him.

There still isn't.

But what he left behind is everywhere.

Every performer who treats a music video like a film.

Every dancer who learns the moves.

Every artist who understands that a live show should be more than a bloke with a microphone and a couple of flashing lights.

Every person who hears Black or White, Earth Song, They Don't Care About Us, Man in the Mirror, Heal the World or Stranger in Moscow and remembers how much he wanted people to look properly at the world around them.

He did not just entertain people.

He made them feel something.

And that is why people still miss him.

Not because they are stuck in the past.

Not because they cannot let go.

Because he mattered.

He mattered to people who needed somewhere to put their sadness.

He mattered to people who wanted to dance.

He mattered to children who needed comfort.

He mattered to adults who had spent years trying to hold themselves together.

He mattered to people who had never met him but felt seen by his work anyway.

Seventeen years later, she still hears certain songs and gets thrown straight back.

Back to the scared but comforted little girl.

Back to the young teenager trying to copy the moves.

Back to the eighteen-year-old who could barely breathe because Michael Jackson was right there in front of her.

Back to the woman who still turns the music up when life becomes too much.

That little girl never got to say thank you to Michael for bringing her comfort, joy and peace throughout her life.

But in her own way she gets to say thank you now.

She writes about him, she talks about him, she defends the legacy he left behind.

Today, on the anniversary of his passing, she remembers him, she's grateful for him and everything he gave to the world.

How do I know this?

Because that little girl is me.

Thank you Michael.