Her birth is a marriage mismatched. It is a union between puny flesh and a giant soul. She is an enigma: how long could this profound spirit reside, in comfort, within scrawny earthly confines?

Many times over, nature has been tested to hold that which is truly divine; it has failed, as many times over, to bear genius over the full course of a long winding road. But we must know greatness in this world, however fleeting, to give us a glimpse into the exalted realm of impossible things. We must know it, at the expense of destruction to a bag of bones, so that we can believe. Believe in a beyond that begs our own transcendence. Believe in God - that transcendental being of ultimate completeness.

When the bargain is made, it is determined that her time would be short. She would not be the gentle breeze that touches people politely through the long suffering day. She would be the violent tempest, tearing across the face of time - unflinchingly, shockingly - the devastation that can only be taken in little pockets - briefly or by halves. But she would bear her talents in full. She would not be made for love. She would be a window. To show coveted wonders that will not be bought for coins.

Her genius - her very dissatisfaction - will be her terminal illness. It would be her ceaseless torment. And its product will be music. Beautiful, familiarly strange perfection. But, in the aftermath, its lingering symptom will be a restlessness craving to be stilled. With alcohol. With opiates. With sex. And after all the tonics have failed in turn, her dangerously wild soul will devastate her body.

Promptly recalled to preserve some of the mysteries.

And in her darkest night, with the ironic sun high against an indifferent sky, her body is discovered propped against a filthy toilet bowl. Covered in blotches of her own vomit to defy the deathly chill. Sightless eyes open wide, the legacy she leaves behind is not her own. It is a testament to the magnificence of being. A transformation of rotting flesh into the eternal elegance of music.