Jazmine Sullivan’s Lost One Became a Different Kind of Goodbye

I’m a lyric person. I don’t hear the beat at all – at least not in the first hundred listens. What I hear is the story. I listen like I’m eavesdropping in a clinic or my grandmother’s living room. Like the words were written just for me and I’d be quizzed later.

The first time I heard Jazmine Sullivan’s Lost One, really heard it, I was journeying through universes during a mushroom ceremony. Time had unraveled, folding in on itself, and I was somewhere between here and there – between the known and the infinite beside a fire deep in the Chattahoochee. The song drifted into my ears like that one girl’s tongue in 1999 in the back of her VW Rabbit.

"Don’t have too much fun without me. Please don’t forget about me. Try not to love no one."

It wasn’t a breakup song. Not to me. It was something older, heavier. It wasn’t a lover making a final plea to someone who’s made up their mind to go, but the dying to the living who, like the lover leaving, would find a way to carry on.

I felt it in my chest, that deep, aching desperation of someone slipping away while the world keeps spinning. I had seen it before – watched it happen in real time, sat at bedsides where the air grew sticky and thick with unspeakable things. The dying do not always go gently. Sometimes they clutch at the edges, reaching for the hands that can’t follow. Sometimes they beg. Stay here with me. Don’t move on. Don’t forget me. Don’t be happy without me.

It is the cruelest part of death – not the leaving, but the being left by those who will keep breathing.

Life, at its best, feels like a party where we actually danced more than sat. Where we laughed so much, we barely paid attention to who came in and what they were wearing. Where music pulsed though our skin, where our denim stained the walls, where our bodies warm with the rhythm of existing. And dying, when you don’t want to die, is like leaving that party early. Like being forced to put on your coat while the DJ is just now getting to the songs you love, while people are still grinding on each other and dancing with no one in front of the mirror. Even knowing they will miss you and everything you brought to the party, even knowing some will wish they could have carried you home, it doesn’t make it easier to close the door behind you.

Mushrooms have a way of showing you what you already know but haven’t been willing to see. And in that moment, floating somewhere between this world and whatever comes next, I understood that death and heartbreak speak the same language. Love, ruptured. Love, untethered. Love, forced to continue in one body while the other fades into memory.

Jazmine’s voice carried the kind of fracture that only comes from knowing loss firsthand. It was deliberate, aching, and unflinchingly honest, and I could see it so clearly – the unbearable loneliness of knowing you will be gone, knowing life will continue without you, knowing you will become a story told in past tense.

Try not to love no one. A last request. A selfish one. But grief gives us permission to be the kind of selfish we should have been when life was full.

I don’t know how long I sat with that song. Time was irrelevant. But even after I returned, even after the walls stopped breathing and the room settled back into itself, Lost One stayed with me.

I will never hear it the way others do. I will only hear the impossible plea, the one I have witnessed over and over again:

I have to leave. Please don’t leave me behind.

And the unbearable truth is this: we almost always leave them behind.