The Hot-Take is Dead: The loveburn map that Andrea Gibson left for all of us.

Andrea Gibson died and so did the piece of our hearts that were all sixteen-year old, love-punk junkies who were angrier than hell and also so full of love for this life.

Do you remember that part of you? The one who drove around endless summer nights, smoking joints, riding shotgun, and singing along to Big Head Todd’s “It’s Alright?” The you who wrote Pixies quotes in Sharpie on your favorite pair of jeans during your ceramics class when you were sick of the endless, lopsided wet-clay failures spinning around and around on the wheel?

There’s no hot take that will appease our grief from losing the part of us that goes when our heroes go. These heroes of ours—these chosen goddesses were the people that we weren’t lucky enough to be related to, but by some manner of sheer magic, we found them singing or reading their poetry or doing their art online. We could love them from the cheap seats through our phones, gathering their medicine into our hearts as we learned a new way of living—ways that many of us could never have imagined based on the grids handed down from our families or the overculture. Our heroes are the figures that create the templates for living a life that we never had mirrored back to us, and we would be dead or deeply dismembered souls without having found them.

The hot take is dead. It leaves no space for us to digest the love that comes when a dog rests her head on our sullen,  cancer-filled bellies, or the haunted look in the eyes of the children’s emaciated faces in Gaza, or the true genius that underlies the South Park commentary on Trump’s “tiny dick policies”—the perfect metaphor for the continual, egoic ballgame of “swing-and-miss” from this administration. The hot take leaves no room for the paradoxical wound and healing of learning that once again, public lands are for sale in the US, while New Zealand passes laws protecting bodies of water as well, bodies.

There’s no fast-food-paced remembrance that will do our grief justice, or spackle over the goddess-sized hole in our hearts now that all we have left are pictures of Andrea’s boots and Megan’s Substack updates on Squash’s midnight ramblings. It’s a slow burn, babes. It’s a slow, long burn in our hearts and it should be.

The moment where we lose a part of us that goes when our heroes go is foundational to our growth. If we “hot-take” it away, we will have missed the point of having heroes, entirely.

The hot take keeps us from feeling it all the way through—from letting the story burn through us like the medicine that lies at the center of the gaping wound. What would happen if I let myself look at the pictures of the emaciated cheeks of Palestinian babies for more than a scroll-second?

The love that comes into deep relief when we experience loss of life, is worth feeling all the way through to the other side of this burn. The loveburn will change our DNA and our capacity to heal and feel. When we stay—stay—-stay and walk and sing and hum and dance and weep and wiggle and crawl with the ache of all this loss—something miraculous occurs. It must be a mixture of magic, psyche integration, biologic evolution, and soul transformation because it is ONLY the slow-take that creates an ocean of deep wisdom in our bodies.

That well of oceanic wisdom was one Andrea knew well. Maybe because they didn’t turn away from it—or “hot-take” their pain or the horrors of the world away. Instead, Andrea let it in for the full, slow burn and felt it all. They made something beautiful for all of us from this agony and from this love. They made a map for how to live fully, so that dying is well, what the Dalai Lama says, just a change of clothes.