mistressofmuses | Miss you, Mark

The one good thing about not being able to go on the trip with Taylor and mom was that it meant I was in town for Mark's memorial.

It was organized at one of the main goth clubs, for a couple hours before the club night itself.

There was an amazing turnout - so, so many people came out. While many are people we don't personally know, many of them are people I recognize from "back in the day," when we were out at the clubs three+ nights a week.

They set up a table with all of the merch he had left. Mostly Voicecoil, but a little bit of Gravity Corps and even some Synapse stuff. It was all "pay what you want, please just take it." We chipped in some money for the fund for his roommate, and took some shirts and stickers and things.

There was a slideshow of all the pictures of him that people had shared. They had a mic set up so that people could go up and share stories about him. Lots of people did. So many about what a colossal asshole he could be—and was, lol—but also how despite that, he was also very kind and inspirational and supportive to so many people. So many people had stories about the times they saw him when the performance was off, or at least turned down. We concluded basically every story with a hearty shared "FUCK YOU, MARK SOUSA!" toast.

(I cried. Several times.)

I think he would have loved it.

And there were plenty of jokes about how much he absolutely would have loved having so many people gathering together to focus on him. And so many people did! But it breaks my heart that he maybe didn't know how important he was to so many people.

PJ, his partner of 16 years (though they had broken up), gave us the bust of him in the picture above. She thanked us for always being such strong supporters of all of his projects, and good friends to him. Another of his friends had designed and printed the little busts. It's also how Mark would want to be remembered, ha.

I miss him, and am still having a hard time fully believing that he's gone.

The festival coming up in May replaced Voicecoil on their lineup poster, though they'll also have a memorial for him at the event. That hit me hard. As delighted as I of course was for the headliners at the festival, getting to see him as one of the openers was one of the many things I was so looking forward to. It's hard to realize that... there aren't any more Voicecoil shows. I'm so glad for all the ones we went to, all the times we did hang out with Mark at the club or at his house or after a show... but I really wish there was another. And another. And another after that. I still don't feel ready to think of the last show as the last one.

Miss you, Mark

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