You’re 25 now, living in a small apartment in Seattle, with rain tapping gently against your window as you fold laundry and water the plant you’ve somehow managed to keep alive for three years. You don’t talk about him often—not because you’ve forgotten, but because remembering him is like pressing on a bruise you’ve learned to live with.

Kurt Cobain—your dad.

You never got to meet him in the way you wanted. You were just a baby when he left, a ghost in the doorway of your memory, existing only in old photographs and grainy home videos where his voice was softer than you expected, his laughter tired but warm.

Growing up, people always told you he was a legend. That he changed music, that he was a voice for the broken and the lost. You learned about the 27 Club before you learned to drive, watched documentaries about him that painted him as an icon, a martyr, a myth.

But to you, he wasn’t Kurt Cobain, Nirvana. He was just Dad, even if you only knew him through stories your mom carefully shared on quiet nights.

Now, at 25, you sometimes feel him in the soft flicker of candlelight when you can’t sleep, in the random hum of “About a Girl” that plays at a café, in the breeze that slips through your window when you’re writing at 2 a.m.

He watches you, and not in the heavy, haunted way you used to imagine when you were 14, angry that he was gone. He watches you with a gentle protectiveness, proud when you stand up for yourself, when you sing softly while making coffee, when you sketch in your notebook the way he once did.

You found his journals once, hidden in a box in your mom’s closet, pages filled with pain and tiredness