I’m calling it Supernova because it’s the word I could never let go of. It’s what I think of when I think of you. I can’t let go of the images, either. Did you know that a supernova is a result of two stars colliding and they both end up dead? A big star and a little one, together in a celestial dance. The little white dwarf star steals material from the big one until it has too much, too much to carry and to hold, drawing both stars into a gigantic thermonuclear explosion so bright it can light up anything, anything at all. And afterward, a black hole, a rip in the lining of the heavens.

It’s late at night and it feels as though I am the only person left in a cold and deserted world, but as you know, I have often felt like that in my life, and not only in the dead of a freezing October night. I have felt like that on hot afternoons in summer when the air is clammy and the stench of barbecue smoke drifts across the city, walking down streets and through parks aimlessly, surrounded by throngs of laughing people, unseen. I have felt like that in bed with lovers, feeling their touch travel across my skin, but actually being light-years away, shut away inside myself. I have felt like that in my family, as though nothing of me could have come from anything of them; at best I was like a ball of phlegm – expelled and forgotten about, certainly not loved or missed.

But I didn’t feel like that with you. You changed everything and you don’t need me to tell you what that kind of shift can mean to someone. It was seismic. And it was dangerous. It made me believe that I could be like you, and that I, too, could have everything. Those can be dangerous thoughts and in this moment, alone and waiting for you, I wish I could have learned to be content with what I did have: health, a home, people reading my words, you. But people always want more, don’t they?

I am sitting here trying to imagine you reading these words, but can’t imagine a world in which that would be possible, simply because I know what it would mean. It would mean that you never came. Or that I’ve been hurt. Or perhaps it would just mean that after writing everything I want to say to you I’ll come to the conclusion that I’d rather send it to you than speak these words out loud. Any way, I can’t envision us ever sitting across from each other again, in that dear little room in Homansbyen that came to mean so much to me.