Supernova is Sad
Written in November, 2020, performed during a night of intimate readings in a performance of the same name at The Crypt Gallery, April 2023.
The supernova on the second floor is sad.
“but it hurts” he said
And lifted up his bruised and purple
“where?” I asked
The round wet of his gaze rotated slowly to lock onto me
And spilled
And I watched it all slam shut
First the lids of the eyes, lashes sweeping down with a metallic clang
And then the rest
I’m not a native user but I’m always game to play
And when it’s an unmapped and blank person
Well, you have to do your best with that, don’t you
I can still feel the weight of their round and curling backs inside of me
And outside of me when my belly turned to fabric and they continued to grow, attached like migratory barnacles slowly sliding and crawling around my clinging midsection
Two large d rings on my shoulders
My hand skimming along the multicolored fabric
The specific combination of hoist and pull
And tight into my beating chest I could feel
The unwritten book of them
I had been the bag
And then I wore the bag
And then the containers were warm dark wood and tapestries
A kind of disheveled hominess of the nomad
Evertything was draped in batik and sari fabric to hide the fact that our bookshelf was milk crates and our coffee table was cardboard boxes
And after all of that now, when it matters most,
I sit on the edge of the bed in our hollow clean white “home”
and it does not feel like a sling
and there is no beating heart when you get pulled in close
Just the sound of breath being held and faces pressing against the glass
Or the sound of nothing, of a house full of headphones and screens
I pull them tight across my chest
And watch him howl as he loses the fight
again
I don’t recognize the moment he is in.
It doesn’t look like any of mine, though I do recognize the fear and the fury
I’ve leafed through the instruction manual of my lifetime so many times
Its worn and ragged and taped back together
But so few of the lessons I dog eared to bring to them seem to fit
That is it, really, isn’t it?
When I reach into my satchel toward all of the curated and collected, all the stacked and paperclipped and dog eared, licked, annotated, stuck on, taped together, gathered, shoe boxed, and labeled the moment my fingers touch the brittle edge they disintegrate
At least my fingers come away coated in something
like stardust
It is beautiful but it tastes like stale tears coated in radium – problems from and for another era
How can I help when I have no tools
The tool I’m supposed to employ – the eject button, is broken. I’m not ejecting him into the vacuum of London, we all know the air will kill you
And, hand hovering over the button, I replace the safety cap and power down the machine and look at him
At the unfairness and at the fact that it doesn’t matter
(I hope)
(maybe I can love them back into health after/during all this?)*
I stroke his still plump cheeks
I run my fingers through his hair, damp
In the shimmering moment when their bodies flicker
Before, when he was only half awake in the morning light, before consciousness reminded us
That the days of running and squealing in the sunshine
Mango juice running down his chin
Are over
Before I watch the glistening bubble of possibility come into range of the death star of the animistic howl of being seventeen
Which happens every morning at nine-thirty
Like watching the scheduled murder
Of the swelling unsupressable joy which bursts across your chest after a deep and cold winter and you see the vibrating purple crocus, just newly unfurled
Before I watch this happen every morning, in the tangle of sweaty hair against soft pillow
the trusting heart sleeps
the face lets go of its mask
and he is there
I don’t want them to be my heart walking around outside me
I don’t want to care this much
Its distracting
And terrifying
And I thought I’d be immune from it, as I said, I’m not a native user.
“mom!”
Oh shit, that’s me. “Coming!”
I thought they’d pout a bit and smoke some weed and then go off to university and bump along and come home when they got broken up with and I’d come home from the studio and wash their laundry and hug them and make a pie and it would be fine and it would suck a little but in the end the good would outweigh the bad and we’d always have each other.
But flickering bodies never age
And all the tears and triumphs his swollen aching heart can carry
Leak out from under his door and creep up my stairs and twist into sinews which whisper with rank breath in my alert and sleeping ear:
It hurts.
I have to wonder if he wasn’t confined to this third container
What the wound would be like
My seventeen was so many things
But the moment that lasted, that seared, that formed and forged
Happened around four pm on a school day
In Kris Faller’s mother’s living room
He held his hand up
I held my hand up
We watched the light go between us
We marveled at the warmth of our connection
We marveled that we had found each other
We marveled that we knew we weren’t in a hurry
There were no mashed lips and banged teeth
There was this suspended silver threaded moment of time shattering otherness
It was marvelous, worthy of marveling
I don’t even remember if we kissed that day
Or the next maybe
All I can see is the dust suspended in the light
And the light around our hands, held against each other
And the feeling in my chest that I was accepted
As I was
My brusied and purple boy
When he can slide out of the gravity well of his bed
Ricochets off the walls of his heart
In his favorite straight jacket
Knocking over art supplies he never opens
For fear I will say “Oh good. You opened them.”
Why this fear is stronger than not being prepared for class
Is one of the great mysteries of the universe, but at least that’s
Within the range of expectation. That’s seventeen. That’s stubborn, sure, obstinate, control, appositionally defiant. That’s something.
This is something else
This is a curling tunnel to nowhere
Instagram DMs glowing near his face at 2am
Somewhere out there are his friends
Never one he held hands against in the sunlight and felt the impossibility of life’s crushing defeats being lifted, like entering oz, the impossible color spreading slowly across the landscape in one glittering reveal
The rest can be shit, but right now, I am feeling at 11.
I go to 11.
My heart goes to 11.
Someone values me at 11.
I can be loved, even when I am at 11.
Where is the one, the net, the sling, the capture, the fingers braided together, to boost, to lift, to lock together and loop over shoulders to pull close
To capture the round wet gaze and take the mask and drop it casually to the ground
To shatter
So they can see him clearly
In my mind, he stands open for the viewing
Luminescent in the sun of first stupid love all armor stripped to the floor
What absolute morons we are at that age, to trust so completely
What lucky fucking morons
To be ready to be read by the fingers of his lover, mapping him, mapping that which he hides even from himself
I know my moment
In the sun
With Kris
Formed me, the me that carried my children, in the carrier bag of my skin and bones and in the carrier bag of the slings, two of them, one for the infant and one for the toddler
Crossed at the bosom, one tit for each
Swoop and pull, run hand down curled back
Pop the foot comes out of the sling
Pop my breast, exposed and leaking in line at Starbucks but my hands are full
And honestly, I don’t mind
But I worry when I see
A shaft of magical light coming through the mist in Bushy park
Where we walk with friends, none of whom are seventeen
That this hollow
Empty container
Full of the almost familiar
Floating precariously on a random street in Clapham
Is not painful enough
To temper him
What happens during heart breaking time
If there are no hearts to be found
To throw against his
Or sit in the sun with
How will he be forged into that bright star
Screaming across the universe and leaving stories in its wake
If no one ever holds together his broken pieces
And tells him they are beautiful?
*Sadie came out as a transgender woman a few months after this was written. This was written during the second lockdown in London.