Supermassive Black Hole
'American' Part 2: Dad, you can skip this one | Chapter 7
August 2022
It’s in my bones. It boils in the heart and pumps through my veins to reach every cell of my body, commuting across synapses and startling every nerve without ever knocking on the door to my brain to announce its arrival. It skips the niceties and small talk and needs no introduction; it creeps up behind my eyes and provokes them into welling with the floods of the past. The unprocessed, unappreciated, past. Anger.
I am afraid to be touched, but I don’t know that. I am tense. Nervous. Holding my breath. I don’t know that I am afraid, because nothing objectively terrifying has ever happened to cause this fear. Only so many small transgressions, so many moments of tenderness turned into disillusionment and pain, accumulated over time like the cold cinderblocks of a federal building in the forgotten streets of the inner city. That is what I see on the outside, reflecting on my discomfort, at the hyper-vigilance of my rigid muscles, and lungs that have forgotten why they were placed in my chest.
Nothing objectively terrifying. There was never a moment to recognize, to step back and understand what had happened to me. It was always happening, never happened. I reassure myself “everything is fine, this time is different” and then proceed without the caution of someone who has ached so intensely. My brain might trust, but my body does not. My body knows something is wrong.
Deception, misuse, masks, infatuation. How much love is one capable of giving to a void where a heart never grew? How many lies is one capable of juggling in the face of earnestness?
My brain says this is melodramatic dribble - but this is my nerves telling my fingertips it’s time to be honest, time to reveal to the outside what the inside has been handling.
I am so angry, to be the product of a generation that teaches an idea of freedom without also recognizing the chains of this new ‘liberation’, the shackles of the evolutionary brain, the confines of these chemical changes. I was given an equation of modern womanhood and told to find the solution equal to empowerment, but I wasn’t given all the variables. It was a one size fits all narrative.
Over and over I have found myself sobbing in the dark, the threat of caring looming in my head, a brick aimed at my temple. I am ashamed, for the tears most of all, yet eagerly await the moment of my companion’s hand brushing my cheek and finding my past flowing onto his palm.
I used to think I was ashamed for the moments preceding the tears, but I have done nothing with this man except hold him. Still, the shame wells in my chest and paralyzes all that might keep me at peace with myself.
It is love itself that shames me. Love, which I have so often given in abundance with every cell of brain and body. Love and the devotion it demands of me leads to humiliation, in the event that I encounter someone whose definition of love is different than my own. In the event that I have been the object of infatuation mistaken as love, left behind like the toys of childhood. In the event that he cannot even love himself right, yet boldly claims that he can serve another unwaveringly.
It is love itself of which I am afraid, or perhaps I don’t believe in it. My sister once told me “You can be ruled by fear, or you can be ruled by God.” God is love; to stop believing in love is, perhaps, to stop believing in God. And so, I have bowed to fear. I never stopped believing in God, but I lost faith in the very core of what God is.
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I watched a documentary on black holes that showed the creation of a supermassive black hole, represented as the dance of two becoming one. It looked like love to me. Giant, cosmic displays of love in the heart of the solar system. One black hole cannibalized the other, and then proceeded to cannibalize all that deigned to enter into its vicinity. That is love as I have known it, consumed within insatiable wreckage wrought by those who lie to themselves first and to others as an afterthought.