Blackstar (mirror to mirror)
Dear [redacted],
It's been quite some time since I've written! You know how busy life can get, but I offer my sincerest apologies nonetheless. How have you been? I've been pretty bad.
I don't feel like writing like I used to. My feelings are heavier. The bad days are worse. The energy is harder to muster.
I don't know when I'll write again so there's something I need to get off my chest while I know you're here.
To your past self: dark times are coming, I cannot save you from them. You don't yet know the power of the words "everything will be okay." You are incredible and unique and sufficient. You may feel ordinary—you are ordinary—but you're alive and that makes you extraordinary.
To your future self: I still love you. I always will. I hope you're there to read this. Dig your claws into everything and never let go.
To your present: everything will be okay.
Youth is a desperate groping.
We do not know the world so we reflect it, wary and shallow, morphing to each new stimulus. We try on ideologies like sunglasses, identities like hats, all smacked off by adults who know they know better. Sometimes they don't tell you to knock it off, sometimes they compliment you, and it feels good because it's a sign there's a place for you in this world. They're quick to compliment the hat they handed you. Those are the compliments that make you feel like you're dying.
You're too young for depression, you're too young to know pain, but sometimes when they tell you to knock it off it hurts. Sometimes it keeps hurting, and the pain grows, and grows, and you grow with it. And that's when the mirror starts to break.
I don't miss it, that desperate groping. I approached all art with flesh exposed hoping the next one would imprint deeper than the last. The lines between subject and object wavered with my heartbeat and each work of art could be the one that saved me. Sometimes it did. Sometimes I miss that rawness, that need to be saved from my lack of self, but I do not want it back. I was a mirror, too young to save face, too new to know why my heart beat.
Youth is selflessness. I badly wanted to be somebody so I interrogated all my passions, convinced of insincerity. I wasn't gay, I was a late bloomer; I wasn't a nerd, I was a poser; I wasn't an artist, artists bleed. Even in my youth I recognized the fault in my insecurity: there is no stable self — we are what we are told and you can tell yourself anything.
Still, I was afraid I was living a lie. I still am.
One of the only teenaged emotions I can vividly recall is loneliness. I often felt terribly alone. It stood at odds to the friends I nurtured, family I loved, and Liberal community I respected for preaching humanism as virtue. But humanism doesn't apply to abjects, so humanity was a mirror I wore for others. I'm tall and talented with my tongue — privilege and patriarchy cowed most in my presence. I showed them humanity to make myself familiar and slipped through cracks as often as possible: "Look, do I not reflect you? Yet look how strange a reflection I cast. Perhaps your humanity is only a mirror, too." The exercise was doomed because I didn't know what lay below my surface. I only knew it wasn't what was reflected.
When we are young we simply are, the world simply is. Context has not yet entered to make either anything else. Experience is too immediate, emotion is too overwhelming. When we are told who we are we lack precedent to say otherwise. Through our encounters with the world the world makes us. You have a name, heritage, and gender, a capacity for sadness and lust and alienation. There are patterns to everything, including you.
In a sense youth is death: a cyclical becoming, the self born to crash upon the world to die to be born again. But the sense is only romantic. There is no end, no discontinuity. The disorientation of teenage years derives from a past that's becoming foreign, a future that feels ubiquitous, and a present with enough precedent to suggest that this cannot be all there is. Our unformed brains cannot help but grow. Social institutions manipulate this growth toward ulterior ends and the cultural zeitgeist dictates the boundaries of subjectivity.
Confronted with an array of acceptable personhood, I could not find myself.
I was young and desperate to be inhuman, desperate for any other who lacked as I did. I knew I wasn't alone, but I didn't know what that meant. I saw in you the beginnings of my self, the cracks through which I would eventually escape. My memories with you are among the few from my childhood that feel real. I hate that that's true. It makes me feel young and shallow. Half of me wishes I hurt you, turned the whole batch sour, left myself untethered to anything but the present. The other half is weeping.
I was you. You were me, too.
We were too-young inhumans, caught up telling lies.
When I was sixteen I found the painstar. It was a quiet night balanced perfectly on the edge of summer and autumn. The moon barely waned and few clouds stalked the sky. I lived a short walk from the beach and there it was, just a few feet out from shore. Its beauty knew the depth of the ocean and the black of the sky. The moonlight caught its fractal core and in that moment I knew death.
Some say the painstar only comes every thousand years, maybe even two thousand. This is a lie to help those who fear its flame. The painstar appears before any who seek it. To touch it is to know the pain of every second you never lived. To embrace it is to realize you're alive.
I held the painstar and my mirror shattered. The glass didn't shed from my form, it just turned my surface fragmented and strange. Those around me didn't notice; we look for ourselves in every reflective surface, no matter how twisted. I've walked with broken glass on my skin ever since. I will pull shards from my guts until I die, and each will sparkle with the depth of the sea and the black of the night sky.
Youth is a desperate groping.
There is no discontinuity of self but I no longer remember who I was. All remaining ephemera suggests our similarity, yet you seem an alien. I suppose I seem the same — I'm still convinced I'm from the stars. When I'm at my most frail I return to it, that desperation, that need to be one and the same. As if a lack of difference would finally end my loneliness.
I now know how to recognize myself in a mirror.
When I look at you, I no longer need to search for myself.
Thank you, [redacted].
I know you've packed your things. I know it's too much to request a goodbye.
We're still there, you know. Huddled against the storm, laughing at the lightening. We always will be.
One day I'll join you again among the stars.
Love,