Let’s Talk! – Back in Black

Are you ready to switch off your screens and ponder or discuss another writing/conversation prompt from my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book? Here’s my take on it.

To be honest, I have heard this word combination before and you may want to laugh or cry that I didn’t even connect it with a specific AC/DC album that was published after the death of their lead singer. Here is the official video to its title song: .

Why is that? Because I never grew up with rock music.

One of my favorite colors is black. Some of you will rightfully say that it’s not a color, at all – that’s correct when there is a total lack of light, of course. To me, it is the sum of all colors – think of using every bit of paint in an art shop (except white, of course). Black slims a body, is combinable with any other color, and in some context cries elegance. Almost my entire wardrobe was black at a time, because I had so many beautiful accessories – and I LOVED accessories. And then, of course, in most Western cultures black is the color of mourning.

Back in black – grief is the reason for this Australian rock band’s album title. Maybe the music doesn’t sound a lot like mourning somebody. But in its own way it is reminiscing their late friend. They kept on the gig.

I know what it means to keep on going when somebody you loved very much dies. It happened to me in 2014, almost exactly to the day that I’m writing this. My mother passed away, and I had been able to say good-bye a few weeks earlier, over in a German hospital. I wasn’t able to go back for the funeral. It happens a lot to immigrants that way. Instead, I headed for work, not in a quiet office but behind a busy deli counter.

I didn’t manage to keep it together all the time. But I stayed on. Instead of hanging my head, I kept it going in the writing department as well. My mother had read my novel Islands in the Storm and had made me promise to have it published in time for the anniversary of European V-Day. I kept my promise; the publication unplugged a load of other novels. In a way, I think that this was exactly what my mother had wanted to happen. She knew I was a writer – and I had told her that I’d stop my writing business as it was back then. Very subtly, she had told me to keep it going.

I still love the color black. I never wore it for mourning my mother. Mourning happens in the heart, not on the surface. And she’ll know that she’s not forgotten, with every word I publish, hoping she would have liked it.