Punk Rock Tenderness
It’s been seven years now, and revisiting his work brings beads of tears. The chest tightens, a lump fixed in the throat. His passing shook me in ways I never expected. You can’t measure the size of someone’s presence until they’re gone, until you feel the gap in the tapestry of life.
For years, his voice had faded because watching again was too hard. When A Cook’s Tour appeared in my feed, I finally pressed play. Laughter and tears followed in equal measure, and with them the reminder of that resonance—frequential, poetic—that is Anthony Bourdain. His voice had been with me during a time when I was learning who I was, teaching me through humor, humanity, and story with heart.
That spirit carried me, even in my own travels. After Fajardo came a winter birthday in New York, where lunch at Les Halles felt like stepping quietly into his world. From there, the Amtrak rolled north to Montreal—hours of snow and silence. Snow crunched beneath boots, the glow of Jean-Talon Market offered a bag of oranges to carry home, and well-dressed strangers filled the train. On the return, the oranges didn’t make it past customs, but the memory did—New York was warm, thirty-two degrees, and the city seemed to exhale with me.
Even now, revisiting his voice, the lessons linger: to keep seeking, to keep laughing, to notice life in all its rawness and beauty, and to meet the world with an open heart.
Punk rock tenderness is what I call that rare balance between edge and empathy — the courage to stay open in a world that asks you to close. Bourdain carried that energy effortlessly: sharp yet soft, rebellious yet kind, irreverent yet deeply human. Writing this is my way of saying thank you — for the voice that shaped mine, for the laughter that eased the ache, for reminding me that strength and sensitivity can live in the same breath.
When I stepped off the train that winter night, New York exhaled with me. A gust of wind caught my hat and sent it spinning down Murray Hill. I laughed — it felt like a wink from the universe, a reminder that everything, the ache, the joy, the absurdity, belongs. The world breathes with us when we let it.
