Something strange had happened beforehand. A young guy sold me my cinema ticket. Soft features, dark curls, expressive eyes. Soft-spoken. All the time he smiled as though sharing a secret only he understood.

There were other staff around, but when I bought a coffee he served me again. He looked astonishingly vulnerable when he realised he’d screwed up making my hazelnut coffee. And then he scanned my ticket when I headed into the screening.

He might have been Jeff Buckley, if only he’d known who he was.

The cinema was empty, as though this showing were meant for my eyes alone—someone who only discovered him after he was already dead. That strange, almost mystical aura: the romantic legend whose story remains unfinished. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.

A Pre-Raphaelite look—with scratchy stubble—and the whisper of a small child that could rise suddenly into a soaring falsetto, almost devotional. Was there ever anyone who captivated me so completely?

I heard the murmur of Cinema Boy: “The face that once commanded admiration and became a ruin, a tragic testament to a sad end.” That someone so beautiful would go swimming and never come back. My heart insists it was intentional.

One album—both his coming-out and his epitaph. One of the greatest albums ever recorded.

Six days. That’s all it took. A body decomposing, bloating. Skin that once felt so good to touch became pruned, pale and waterlogged—brownish, yellowish, ugly. Corpse wax. A moral fable in which the loss of physical perfection mirrors the decay of the soul.

The film ended. And Cinema Boy—who was probably called Will, or Aaron—came into the cinema to clear up after me.

He was still smiling to himself.

Jeffrey Scott Buckley. Guardian angel. Born: Anaheim, California (1966). Died: Memphis, Tennessee (1997), aged 30.