She's a mom.

I bought The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill two months ago and finally finished listening to it today. You might say that took a long time. It did. But if you say it took too long, you’re wrong. I don’t know how it happened -- stretching 77 minutes over 64 days seems like a physical impossibility. I think there was magic afoot. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I would only press play if I knew I had time to at least hear one song the whole way through. Or that I would mainly listen to it walking home from school when it was dark and solitary enough that no one could see the tears streaking my face as I heard “To Zion” for the first time. Somehow, every time I needed to listen to Lauryn Hill for two months, I was listening to something new.

I recognize I came about fourteen years late to the Lauryn Hill party, and I’m sure it must have been incredible to listen to The Miseducation during its zeitgeist. But one of the perks of living a pop culture-ignorant childhood is digging up other people’s old news and singeing your eyebrows on still-burning fires.

So I got to the end of it today and it was kind of sad. I know there is a lot of beautiful hip-hop in the world to encounter, but Lauryn Hill’s not making it. Fourteen years after the whole world, I discovered Lauryn Hill, and I never will again.

I was telling someone recently about how I would kind of rather be in the middle of a book I love than finish it, and she seemed kind of appalled. “You just have to finish things,” she told me. I’m not so sure. She’s probably right, eventually, but it’s not that simple. There’s a great ecstatic holiness in discovery. But there’s also holiness in ripening and cross-pollination and rebirth and even decay. The whole wide project is holy. So I guess in a sense finishes are an illusion. To quote Jorge Drexler: nothing is lost; everything is transformed. I will hear you again, Lauryn.