You’re sixteen, standing under the soft drizzle of Seattle rain, your Doc Martens sinking into the wet grass of Viretta Park. Your name is Y/N Bean Cobain, but you’ve never met your dad in the way you wanted to. You’ve only seen him in photos, on grainy MTV clips, in the lyrics you write in your notebooks because sometimes the noise in your head is too loud, and it feels like he’s the only one who would get it.

And up there, Kurt Cobain watches you. It’s strange, the way heaven looks, nothing like the stained glass and clouds people say. For him, it’s a quiet green room, a warm lamp, a guitar in his lap, and a window that opens to your world. Sometimes he presses his forehead to that glass when you cry alone in your room, clutching a flannel that still smells like teen spirit even though you never owned it.

He sees you struggling to breathe when you walk down your high school hallway, the whispers about your last name, the whispers about “her dad.” but you’re Bean, and that means something you can’t always carry. He knows the weight. He wants to tell you it’s not your fault you feel heavy, that sometimes the world is too sharp for souls like yours. He wants to tell you he felt that too.

He sees the way you strum your cheap guitar until your fingers bleed, whispering your own lyrics into the dark, hoping he can hear. He does. Every note you play, every line you scratch out in the middle of the night, it hums through the strings of his old Fender Jaguar somewhere in that green room in the sky.

You’re afraid sometimes that you’re too much like him. You see it in your eyes, the blue that looks like the ocean on a gray day, in your half-smile when you’re nervous, in the way you love too fiercely and then hide away for days because the world feels like it’s asking too much.

But he’s proud of you, Y/N. So proud that sometimes it breaks his ghost heart that he isn’t there to say it out loud. He watches you walk down Broadway, the record store bags in your hand, your hair messy, your headphones blasting Bleach and your own demos, and he wants to shout, “That’s my kid.”

You don’t know it, but every time you laugh, every time you scribble a lyric, every time you get back up even when it’s hard, the rain that falls in Seattle feels softer, like it’s kissing your cheeks instead of drenching you.

You’re not living in his shadow, Y/N. You’re living beside him, every day, even if you can’t see him.

And somewhere, in that warm, quiet heaven, Kurt Cobain is tuning his guitar and smiling, watching you become your own person, loving you endlessly, whispering into the cold morning air:

“It’s okay, Bean. You’re gonna be okay.”