“No, no, no. She’s jailbait,” he said, genuinely surprised. “I’m talking about the dancing. What do you think of the dancing?”
Over the following months, he and I fell into an easygoing dialogue that covered every conceivable topic. The tone ranged from silly to spiritual. He welcomed the opportunity to educate me on the music that meant the most to him—James Brown, The Staple Singers, Chaka Khan, Sly and the Family Stone—and in turn, I taught him about ballet and Middle Eastern folkloric tradition. We laughed a lot and told each other our stories. He didn’t call me every day, but we spoke on the phone several times most weeks. It was rare for more than a couple of days to go by without a call, and I regularly received cassette tapes in the mail, along with letters and drawings, many of which I still have.
The ones I don’t have—those were destroyed years later. They were burned, along with everything that was mine or that reminded him of me or of our son. In some sad, painful moment, he had it all burned, as if fire could cauterize this deep wound he couldn’t close. I wasn’t there to witness it, and I can’t bear to think about it now. I’d rather think about that summer when I was sixteen. The warm, white popcorn in the palm of my hand. The veiled doorways and lava lamps. The sound of his laughter and the sudden certainty that I had, and had always had, the soul of a princess.
??four
August 12, 1990
Dearest Arabia,
Rather than not send u a letter, I opted 4 using this strange stationary instead. Please 4give me. Thank u 4 the present from the restaurant. I have fun watching it. U’re so pretty. It cheers me up if someone tries 2 ruin my day. Many do.
Today is Monday. It is now 5:15. I’m lying on a very big bed in a room about the size of the one in Frankfurt. One never knows what one is gonna encounter in life, does one? Thank u 4 coming into my world. U seem so kind and unaffected by this heartless planet we live on…
This letter makes me laugh, remembering how he tried to make that Arabia thing stick, even though I kept saying, “Sorry, Charlie. Not gonna happen.”
It felt weird to call him Prince, so I never did. There was, in my mind, a disconnect between the icon I’d seen onstage in Barcelona and Mannheim and the funny, soft-spoken person I’d come to know. I confided in him things that I’d been afraid to speak out loud to any of my friends, simply because their lives were so different from mine. He confided in me things that I will never share with anyone. It’s no use trying to explain the connection that existed between us. People will draw conclusions based on their own belief systems: cynics will be cynical, romantics will be romantic, people who believe in fate as a river will see how its current carried us along. I honestly didn’t overthink it at the time. I simply allowed it to be.
The “strange stationary” [sic] he refers to was a regular sheet of notepaper, which would have been completely normal to anyone else in the world, but Prince had an affinity for fancy notepaper—embossed and flowery with scalloped edges and elegantly lined envelopes—designed to resemble his grandmother’s notepaper.