Stardust & Supernova

Prologue

"Your skin is made of stardust, supernovas and every terrible thing ever to happen." That was all that he left for me, scribbled on the back of an almost forgotten ultrasound photo. The ink had faded with age, sitting in a box for almost exactly 18 years had turned it into a muddy brown splodge that was supposed to be me, though the handwriting was as pristine as ever. As if it was cursed to remain as clear as the day I found it.

"Your skin is made of stardust, supernovas and every terrible thing ever to happen."

The question I often found myself asking, of course, was what the fuck was that supposed to mean?

Tucked away between the vintage pages of an overdue library book, the Iliad to be precise, the photo sat undiscovered for years. The book itself was buried in some forgotten box in the equally unmemorable basement that sat quietly underneath our house.

With a twitch of my fingers, lit only by the waxing moon and cheap fairy lights hung lazily across my ceiling and wrapped around my bedframe, I turned the small scan in my hand once more. The perfectly quiet handwriting glared back up at me. Then, with another twitch, the words disappeared. A bad memory inked onto the underside of a photo of me. It was only a second and a twitch, and the writing was back again.

We flicked our Y's and curled our S's almost exactly the same way, him and I. Letters folding in on themselves, reaching out, holding hands with their neighbours. His handwriting was on every page of the book too, the book he must have forgotten was not his. Pages filled with Y's and S's and some letters in between. Our A's look remarkably similar as well, though only as capitals.

The ticking of the hallway clock broke through the persistent quiet of night, as my eyes roved over the open pages. He spelt Ὄλυμπος wrong, he always used the upper and lower cases of epsilon interchangeably, and he never even bothered to learn the uppercase for pi. It was all so... amateurish.

The cool night swam down to my lungs and made my bones shiver inwardly. I had read this exact book over and over now. My retinas had absorbed the same misspellings, careless grammatical errors, and mindless commentary nearly every day for far too long. I had given myself until my 18th birthday, the remainder of my legal childhood to figure it out.

To figure out what the fuck he meant. To figure out why I was every terrible thing that had ever happened.

It was 90 seconds to midnight and my fingers twitched and twitched and twitched. You are every terrible thing. And twitched and twitched. You are every terrible thing.

I learned Greek. And twitched and twitched. I learned the upper and lower cases of omicron and theta and tau and zeta. And twitched and twitched. I memorised ᾍδης and every epithet bestowed upon him and onto every daughter he ever had. Yet he doesn't even know what my name is.

The seconds crawled closer towards midnight with broken legs. Slowly and painfully, desperately reaching out for the next day. Though, it wasn't at 90 seconds to midnight that I figured it out. I just twitched my fingers and read the words that had wormed their way under my flesh and in between every third breath I took from the first moment I had read them and realised they were made for me. Stardust, supernovas, every terrible thing.

Every terrible thing. It was me in that photo. Probably around 5 months into my conception if I was correct. I was made of stardust and supernovas. All things exceptional, beautiful, unreachable, heavenbound. I was above faded polaroids and vague metaphors. I was above it all like the stars in the sky. And yet.

I rocked back in my desk chair, the photo still between my fingers. Even in the mercy of the moon's light, the photo and I were both naked. Exposed skin bathing in the light of moons, stars and all the celestial bodies that did not care enough to make themselves known. All the light on me and this photo and the Iliads open pages and his perfectly neat handwriting and my dark supernova flesh.