(Originally written November 2025)
For the past decade, my most favorite famous stranger in the world has been spoken word poet Andrea Gibson. Aside from a brief obsession with Top Chef’s Melissa King, and enduring fondness for Glennon Doyle & Abby Wambach, Andrea has been the only famous person I have cared deeply about in the last decade? Two to three decades? And “famous” is relative as many of you have probably never heard of them.
I first saw Andrea on YouTube 10 years ago.
At 2am I stumbled upon their Sofar NYC video of Maybe I Need You, watched it three times, drank some water, then watched it twenty times more.
After one minute I was enamored with this tattooed, bare-armed, messy hair, skinny jeans rock star poet. After one hour I was in love.
As in love as one can be with a complete stranger on a screen.
If I didn’t know I was gay at this point (I kind of did and kind of didn’t), my sudden, irrational full-body desperation to be special to Andrea, angsty androgynous artist who did not exist to me the day before, should have been a neon sign. But I wasn’t thinking about my sexual orientation, I was feeling something I had not felt in a long time.
Hope.
I watched and rewatched every video of Andrea on YouTube, each poem a temporary reprieve from a life that was strangling me. Their performances were lifelines extended through the screen, whispers that I would not only survive, I would someday be okay. Maybe someday I could thrive.
I will tell you a secret.
I am a poet who only loves two poets.
I want to be better than this. I have spent hours standing in the poetry section of bookstores trying to cultivate a sophisticated literary palate. But I find most of it tedious and boring. I don’t like to tease the meaning from a poem through hours of contemplation. I don’t care for haikus or sonnets. I don’t care for mundane sentences arranged in the shape of a poem.
When I get into bed
I close my eyes and hope
Tomorrow will be different
From today
This is not a poem. This is a regular run-of-the-mill sentence written weirdly. These anger me, but I’m working on being more emotionally regulated.
I also don’t care for excessive angst. The chapbooks bursting with “HOW DARE THE WORLD BE SUCH A SHITHOLE I AM SO PISSED OFF AT THIS UNFAIR DUMPSTER FIRE AND YOU SHOULD BE EQUALLY DESPONDENT AND ENRAGED!”
There is clearly a large audience for that viewpoint. I am not part of that audience.
Give me hope. Give me fear rising bravely. Give me a new lens to see the world. Give me caterpillar turned cocoon soup trusting it will become a butterfly.
That is what Andrea Gibson gave me. Gives me.
An excerpt of Andrea’s “Royal Heart” in the collection Pansy:
I’m never going to wait that extra twenty minutes
to call you back.And I’m never gonna play hard to get
when I know your life
has been hard enough already.Everyone’s life has been hard
enough already. It’s hard to watch,
this game we make of love, like everyone’s
playing chess with their scars, saying Checkmate
whenever they get out without a broken heart.Just to be clear, I don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.I intend to leave this life so shattered
there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens
for all my separate parts. Can you see how you
bring all the heavens together, to make me whole?
Can you hear god at the gate saying, Good job…
You’re finally not full of bullshit.
My dream was to see Andrea perform in person.
Scratch that, my dream was to unleash the artist that lives in me, rise in the ranks, and someday share the stage with Andrea, and hear my name roll from the tip of their tongue while making eye contact.
Okay let’s just be honest at this point, my dream was to become one of their 100 best friends. But high up. Like, top six. I’d be in a group chat with Andrea and Meg so natural I could send a picture of half-cloudy Honolulu skies and say “It’s kinda cold today, like 70 degrees” and they’d write back and say “Dude, it’s 5 degrees here, you live in fucking paradise, we’re flying over right now get the air mattress ready” and then I’d reply with a laughing emoji and go about my day.
Yes, I have thought about this a lot.
When Andrea announced their cancer diagnosis I was, like thousands and thousands of fans, devastated but full of hope. Andrea Gibson cannot die. Their work is too important, their words are too life-giving, they are why miracles exist, the Universe cannot do this to Meg and the rest of us.
And the way they handled impending death? Stunning. Absolute metamorphosis, love broken open and shared with the world. Isn’t this the purpose, then? They must have had to believe they were dying to become a brilliant light, and now that we have all melted into love puddles in the warmth of that light, they no longer have to be dying. They did their job, they get to live now.
Right?
Not right.
Andrea passed away this summer on July 14th. They had exhausted all treatment paths. They were visibly weak and suffering. And yet it was a shock. It was a wave I had been watching roll in for 4 years but still found myself surprised when it crashed, stunned by the salt in my eyes, my throat choked by its force.
I was standing in a used bookstore when Aileen called with the news. Have you ever cried in a used bookstore? Now I can say I have.
I think we all believed in the miracle. I think we all believed someone this full of goodness and wisdom could not possibly leave this planet so soon.
Andrea spoke often to the preciousness of life. Meg said one of the last things Andrea uttered was “I fucking loved my life.” For an artist who rose in part because of writing about wanting to die, they became an extraordinary expresser of how much they wanted to live. They wanted to live in any body. To be able to keep breathing and loving and witnessing. They wanted to grow old with Meg, to have the privilege of being wrinkled and spotted and grey-haired.
Andrea learned how to relish all that we take for granted. All of life, the act of living, being alive as is, bearing witness to the full spectrum of existence.
I want to understand this in every moment. I want to remember that every breath is a privilege. That is an honor to live and keep living, that it is an honor to graduate to progressive lenses, that it is an honor to worry about a child’s fever, to not understand why my check engine light is on again, to feel overwhelmed because of things like a holiday party and building a business and pursuing a dream.
I want to understand that tomorrow is not promised. It never has been, it never will be. For me or anyone else.
If this truth scares me, let it also inspire me.
There is a documentary featuring Andrea and Meg on Apple TV called “Come See Me In the Good Light.” I think you should watch it. I think everyone should watch it. If ever there has been a documentary bursting with love, this is it.
The few people who know me well know that I find death mesmerizing. Not in a macabre Wednesday Addams way, but I am fascinated by people’s evolution as they head toward the end. How priorities change, how the value of life shifts, how spirituality emerges or fades, how pretending to care or not care falls away when time is limited. I love how the end of life can turn a person into a Night-Blooming Cereus, stretched fully open in the darkness and gone by the midday sun.
I know I love death because I love life. And I know that when I look at death I am taught how to better live.
Love,
Angela
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