Dear Black Hole

Dear Black Hole

I know you’ve always been here, in me and around me, yet I feel like I’m only now meeting you, we’re only just becoming properly acquainted.

I know you’ve inspired everything I write, create, paint and see beauty in, yet I’ve always been afraid to acknowledge your presence.

I can sense the richness, the fulfilment, the patchwork of colours, textures and jewels in you, and I can also feel the emptiness, the void, the suffering, the blackness.

You are nature: untameable, unpredictable.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid you.

You were behind every choice I made: almost everything I did, I did to avoid you.

I went to Scotland, to India, to Ireland, to everywhere in order to not feel you. In order to try to avoid your magnetic pull, yet you came with me.

Every single romantic relationship I’ve had so far has revealed your presence to me. Not a single person, place or object could fill up your vast emptiness.

I throw a thousand things into your mouth to try to satiate you and keep you quiet, but they rattle around like atoms in the universe, swallowed without trace, and your gaping mouth continues to wail for more. 

Nothing escapes you and nothing can truly fill you up, because you were never asking to be filled with other people, places and things.

… There was really only ever one thing you wanted:

Me. 

The only thing in this entire universe that has the power to fill you is me; when I drag my unwilling conscious attention, kicking and screaming to face you head on and give you my unwavering presence. Only when I send all that energy that was heading outwards back into myself to peer into your blackness and sense your edges, feeling your life force and your swirling currents. Only then do you and I feel full. Only then can I truly relax. 

You live in this specific form because you are in me and of me. I am your host.

I thought it was me, but It was you who sent me to India, to Scotland, to Ireland to wherever. You were trying to get my attention, so that we could spend time together in some bleak remote landscape. But I couldn’t be with you back then, that was why I kept moving, why I lived in my van, switching from place to place. And if I did have a house I wasn’t there long and I could never just stay in, even for just one evening, and why I never before was able to create a true real home. I was codependent on everything and everyone whilst simultaneously giving the impression of needing no one. Trying to fill you up to get rid of you. But now I have found a home, both physically and metaphorically inside myself. I share this home with you, where for the first time we can live symbiotically.

You are the reason I tell myself stories about the outside world. It’s in order to avoid you.

I’m now ready to face you and love you and see your gifts. You are my deepest pain, my disconnection from the world and from myself.  And you are also my most profound joy. It is you who plugs me into the universe and into the riches within nature. It is you who plugs me into magic.

You are why I appreciate those white powdery beaches and turquoise waters on the Scottish Hebridean isles so much: because you show me the bleak places there too and the biting cold wind that feels as if it might tear off my skin. You know how to keep me raw and open. You know I can’t truly appreciate the wonder in all of it if I refuse to see and feel the darkness.

 You are behind everything beautiful I’ve ever created.

And everything beautiful I’ve ever destroyed.

You are magnetic and destructive, beautiful and horrifying, bleak, empty and simultaneously full of riches. You are colourful and colourless and pregnant with endless creative possibilities.

And magic.

I respect that, like nature, you are dangerous, ruthless and overflowing with love all at the same time, and I do not take nature lightly for to do so would be suicide. I am still a little afraid of you, in the same way that it’s wise to always be a little afraid of, and to have reverence for, the sea.

You are the void, nothingness, stasis, restlessness, emptiness, fulfilment, chaos, equilibrium.

You showed me all of this, dear black hole.

And you showed me true peace.

Yours forever,