i was a supernova and he was a black hole: end of a friendship
i wished he could see: this light streaming out from my being, this light you want me to suck back up inside, this light has always been me
you made me feel like an equal
but iโm better than you
and you should know that by now
(phoebe bridgers, boygenius: โletter to an old poetโ)
i tried and tried and tried to make him understand my feelings: the black hole was gone, the nothingness of my being had vanished and the stars were shining right through me. i was harnessing that light now, no longer smothering fire into darkness. my own inner radiance was spreading outward in infinitely divisible spectrums.
i was a supernova and he was a black hole. he had only ever seen the darkness. even after orbiting around him for all these eons, not even i had ever seen the radiance he kept tightly contained. he did not accept my light as the truth.
i wanted to tell him: i am not a box! i am not material you can suck up and crush! i am the light streaming out from me. i am all those colors you hope to obliterate with the darkness of manhood.
he tried to stop me from letting out that light. unable to engage with my emotions, he ignored every message i sent him about my actual feelings and instead he appealed to empty constructs: adult, responsibility, maturity, fatherhood. he had such logical arguments rooted in these uninterrogated first principles which he took as real, and he rejected the authenticity of my personal feelings whenever they clashed with his understanding of how i must behave according to these concepts.
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he used these meaningless abstract concepts to try and control me because our friendship itself was never anything more than a meaningless abstract concept grounded in the meaningless material objects and barely-discussed art which we used to artificially connect with one another.
photo my own
we were both black holes, so immersed in the nothingness of our friendship that we took the nothingness for something beautiful and special. โbest friends!โ but the strength of our friendship was the product of the ever-intensifying gravitational forces with which we obliterated ourselves and each other in the name of being men.
i could feel the force of his gravity. that gravity had been there all along, our entire friendship i had always felt how it tugged at me, how his masculinity kept me small and tiny, how his aversion to the light kept me repressing myself around him.
he approached me like a man wants to approach me: a man wants to construct me into a man. but a blackhole cannot construct anything. his desperate attempts to construct me into something i wasnโt: these were simply his own unconscious projects to crush me up like any other piece of meaningless material he had absorbed into his world.
i wasnโt a black hole anymore; again i was a star, my true nature: a supernova. somehow, defying the laws of physics that he wanted to keep me inside, a supernova had emerged, uncontainable, and the black hole was gone. a sweeping spectrum of firey light burned right through the cardboard concepts in which he tried to keep me. i could not have stopped myself if i had tried. once that light came out of me, i saw the truth: that he was nothing but darkness. as my light came into contact with the light of other beings, vibrant and unrepressed and radiant beings, i felt a mix of sadness and indifference toward his rejection. a black hole has nothing to offer me.
โseventeen years,โ he says, reprimanding me for โmaking him the villainโ in my โre-discovery story.โ think of the stacks of pictures! yet more materials we have added to our orbit, the smiles on those faces nothing more than moldings on mannequins. he cannot appeal to how he makes me feel: he rejects my feelings. he is uncomfortable with how i express my feelings. so thereโs only one thing he has: pictures that arenโt even physical, pictures lost in the depths of social media feeds, pictures we will never look at again. all he has is a quantity attached to those smiling faces: seventeen years.
we sucked things into ourselves and imagined we held them in common, but the meaning of these things was the light now streaming out from me itself, the light he never wanted to see. he let me play with my girly toys and listen to my girly music in secret: but that light inside me, that warmth i was so desperate to express and release: i sucked this light down into myself and wouldnโt let it out, all so i could be his friend.
i am not nothing, but i was nothing to him, and he wanted to keep me that way: keep my light deep inside the black hole, never able to escape, never seen at all by anyone, not even by me. we know these people: they want us to keep our own light so thoroughly obscured that none of them will ever have to gaze upon the radiance of who we really are. i felt that instinct with him: i am repressed and he is repressing me.
always i had that sense with him: the strength of that crushing gravity, the power of my own crushing gravity smothering me up into nothingness so he would love me.
but i was so determined to be a black hole myself that i did not even see my own light. i believed i was a black hole.
i did not believe strongly enough in my own self worth to reveal that self to him.
i did not make a logical choice to let my radiance out. i exploded. my emotions built up steadily overtime until i saw them finally, clearly, and they could not be contained. i understood that while we are not our feelings, the full spectrum of my feelings was so much more real than the meaningless materials my friend and i used to define our entire friendship. in a sense i was my feelings; i am the feelings i choose to embrace. somehow this feels true to me even as i know i am also not my feelings. all i know for sure: my feelings and my connection with my feelings are the source of my light.
he wants to look at me and see the nothingness of a man again. but what he did not understand was that my darkness was never me: this light was always me. always. and now, after all the memories we shared together: when i see his face in my mind, there is nothing there. there is nothing there but a collection of meaningless material.
i love the feelings streaming out from me. not all of them: sometimes i am sad. but i love being able to freely embrace, express, and connect over my feelings.
i love all the other beings who love my feelings. i love all the other beings who show me their feelings and help me process mine. i love how they let me be me.
i refuse to be ashamed of the beauty of my feelings.
i refuse to contain the way in which i want to express them: because the way i want to express my feelings is beautiful and i am in love with the light streaming out from me.
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This is so beautifully written and so powerful <3
Beautifully written supernova โจ your words are so powerful you deserve to shine bright and my darling your light is beautiful.