She played little rooms that smelled like bleach and hauled her gear through snow. Reviews used words like challenging and idiosyncratic. She taught lessons to pay rent, smiling while explaining the same chord progression to people who wanted shortcuts to genius. She kept rewriting songs, convinced there was some invisible switch she hadn’t flipped yet. Then she died. The obituary was short and wrong in usual ways. A photo was chosen that made her look nicer, which is a kind of erasure. And then, because the universe has a sick sense of timing, the music escaped. A friend uploaded a track. Someone shared it. It sounded unconcerned with fashion, which terrified people in the best way. Suddenly she was ahead of her time. Everyone agreed it was tragic. Everyone agreed she deserved better. What nobody quite said was this: when she was alive, they wanted her louder, shinier, more desperate. After she died, they praised her for not being any of those things.