I could also empathize with a lot in Amy's songs, albeit on a different level. In most of the tracks off Back to Black, she sang about experiencing the sting of guilt after making bad decisions, but it was clear that that sure as hell wasn't going to stop her from making them again. I could relate; I had lots of ambitions beyond getting stoned, watching TV, and hopping from boyfriend to boyfriend like a slutty Frogger, but I wasn't doing a whole lot to realize them. It was the latter tendency that was probably the most self-destructive, not to mention the most Winehouse-esque: if I jumped on someone else's lily pad along the way, or straddled two lanes at once, I didn't feel great about it, but that sure as hell didn't stop me from hitting the restart button and doing it all over again.

So when Amy recounted her various betrayals and infidelities, reciting a laundry list of her transgressions against the people who loved her, her biting yet unapologetic frankness felt much more organic and closer to my own experience than anything Dylan or Patti Smith or Kurt Cobain ever penned. She wore her indecisiveness and poor judgment proudly, like a full-body tattoo; even when she sang about waking up with carpet burns on her back and fucking her ex-boyfriend on the kitchen floor, you never got the sense that she was playing the icy seductress. She was more like the vulnerable, insecure girl who complies when the handsome bartender/artist asks her for a blowjob in his Bushwick studio, partially because she still hasn't learned how to play hard to get yet, and partially because she really doesn't want to play hard to get at all.

It was nice to know that there was someone else out there who had issues with fidelity and impulse control and the need to (as she wrote in her application essay to a London performing-arts school) "be the loudest voice in the room" while never feeling like you've reached more than a whisper. Then Amy began to sink deeper into her vices and addictions; her ambivalence and self-destructiveness, once charming and relatable, were now simply tabloid fodder, a joke that was a punch line in itself. She was no longer reaching for the mic instead of the needle, except when she was getting booed off the stage for cursing at the audience and forgetting the words to her songs. Still, even when she was making a mess, it seemed to me that she was somehow okay; at least making a mess proves that you're still kicking.

Of course, she's no longer around to make a mess, and now I wonder how I failed to see it coming before everyone else did. I feel sort of like the friend of a recent suicide, the one who stupidly marvels that her friend's death came out of nowhere when everyone else could easily see the cuts on the arms, the unwashed hair, the cryptic messages. Still, that glib acceptance that her death was predictable bothers me; I don't understand how someone could listen to the opening licks of "Stronger than Me," or look at childhood photos of Amy dressed as a (Jewish) Minnie Mouse for Halloween, and feel anything other than sadness at having lost someone so special so soon.

I don't want the totality of Amy Winehouse's existence to be summed up by an ironic hashtag; I want her to be remembered as someone who fucked the bartender-artists because she wanted to, who spat at Pippa Middleton because she could. (And who the hell wouldn't want to spit at Pippa Middleton, anyway?) And if she's up in dirty filthy rock-star heaven right now, trading hangover stories and tales from life on the road, I hope that she is making an absolute mess of the place, and that hers is still the loudest voice in the room.