---

So as the leaves change and the years fade and empathy drags me off the shoreline
I can see the boy I was drowning behind a glass wall
Reaching out for me to save him
Time; so remorseless, so relentless, so unavoidable
Human life is a trauma factory
^{Nothing, Nowhere. “Trauma Factory”}

---

ACT ONE

You were anoth­er in a long line of burned out suns, flick­er­ing in the periph­er­al ether. 
I still remem­ber my first dead star, 
fill­ing the void with all it could have been
in anoth­er time,
had we met in a moment clos­er to home
if I had been giv­en a way to explain to you
the sever­i­ty 
of a sun’s death in the ether. 

You were the sun,
like the oth­ers were suns,
brief bringers of light 
into a moment so total­ly gov­erned by emp­ty space.

Is the fault with me? 
Have I mis­judged the sun’s capac­i­ty for con­stan­cy?

You were the sun,
like the oth­ers were suns,
and you, like the oth­ers, implored me
to kill you in the ether.

Blood colours the atmos­phere in red.
I spend a life­time wash­ing it off my hands. 
You have made of me 
a sunkiller, 
slow­ly drown­ing out love.

(I am for­ev­er changed.)

ACT TWO

(I nev­er con­sent­ed.)

ACT THREE

Lone­li­ness cov­ers me like a sec­ond skin.
I leap into con­nec­tion because I’m starv­ing. 
While I’m dream­ing, I’m soar­ing, bare­ly teth­ered to the ground. 
Vio­lence rup­tures the sky in half—
It shat­ters every world that’s in the mak­ing of a map of light.
I fall fast between drops of blood.
With pre­ci­sion I cut into my skin and sev­er the sun from me.
Maybe to live, 
or per­haps there is no oth­er pur­pose to pain but that it demands to be felt.
Now there is war in my home.
The ether has momen­tar­i­ly dis­ap­peared. I am nowhere to be found,
but trau­ma taints a sunkiller’s eyes like blind­ness.

There is no life in the blood filled void. Why can’t I unwant love?

ACT FOUR

Of course I endure. 
My resilient skin, my heart, a wound­ed lover that just march­es and march­es and march­es until she col­laps­es.

ACT FIVE

I’ll endure, but so does grief. 
The cost of sur­vival is high. Each time a sun van­ish­es and blood wash­es over me, sur­vival asks me to carve out my flesh. I am less each time. My sur­vival runs on bor­rowed time. 

Knife in hand, I car­ry out such vio­lence against myself, as they lav­ish what was nev­er mine onto fresh lovers. When the sun asks me to drown its light, it sub­jects me to that same hard­ness. The girl I once was van­ish­es, her dreams bleed­ing into indis­tin­guish­able hues.

ACT SIX

The lover in me is also the child in me, and I cov­er her eyes when I slaugh­ter anoth­er could­have­been. But she still sees. Every­day, it becomes hard­er to explain to her that the sun’s inabil­i­ty to love her does not make her a killer, that she will always be a lover even if her love can­not be received.

But she sits and waits and drowns each time, forced to live in the after­math of death. So accus­tomed to its lan­guage and its dance, I am slow­ly los­ing mem­o­ry of who she was before I was made into a sunkiller.

Who am I when each blood­bath has dried up, when the last words have been spo­ken and books returned, when I sus­pend my dreams and with­out my love, suns become peo­ple again, los­ing their place in my sky, who am I, this killer of suns, in this nar­ra­tive? 

Per­haps pic­ture me as grav­i­ty itself, 
if my uni­verse was any­thing like Earth. 

ACT SEVEN

I am every moment of this uni­verse, all the days past and all the days to come. 

ACT EIGHT

I didn’t choose to change peo­ple into suns, but isn’t it a spec­ta­cle? Wit­ness­ing some­one trans­form into a sun is a glimpse of the sub­lime. I let them shine light into all my dark­est parts. 

Con­trary to what you might believe, the sun­light doesn’t inflict the same pain as the burn­ing inten­si­ty of a sun’s death in the ether; even if it touch­es my vul­ner­a­ble skin with raw hands. It mere­ly unveils a stark, unwel­come real­i­ty. It’s but a moment’s reprieve from the suf­fo­cat­ing dome of grief and lone­li­ness which cov­ers this island of mine, con­cealed in the shad­ows, where nobody ever goes. The dark­ness is a haven, famil­iar and secure. I have a home here and lone­li­ness wraps around me like a lover. 
In this dome, fash­ioned from glass to mock me with visions of what I’ll nev­er pos­sess, the walls are impen­e­tra­ble. I’m a pris­on­er by fate’s mak­ing, made to gaze
into a world where love is abun­dant while its lack is felt every­where in mine, 
where every­one has some­one they care about deeply, while I am an unknown ghost,
or where peo­ple seem to find solace in fleet­ing, ephemer­al romances
just beneath the sur­face of things.

Reach­ing out my fin­gers, always left long­ing, crav­ing some­one to come and fill up this part of me that’s half emp­ty, some­one who infus­es my days and makes me smile in the gro­cery line just from think­ing about them. 
See, I need some­one who knows my scars like they’ve lived through them, some­one I can come home to when the day ends. Some­one who gets they’re talk­ing to the lit­tle girl that lives inside my chest and makes it heavy some­times. Some­one who knows how to speak to her direct­ly but still knows there’s a grown up liv­ing there too. I want to pour my love into some­one, have it pull them clos­er, not push them away. Some­one who finds a way into the glass dome,
and makes it the only place
where I love instead of kill.

ACT NINE

Who am I in this sto­ry? 
Who am I when I don’t kill?
The inten­si­ty of love, once draped upon a sin­gu­lar sun, seems teth­ered to them. My skies, suf­fused with lone­li­ness before the sun’s ascent, return to an abyss when the sun van­ish­es. In the absence of light, every­thing becomes vio­lent again. Every wak­ing minute, I drown deep­er in my grief. In the embers of each dying sun, I had thought, “this will nev­er return.”

“This was it. This was the most I had ever felt and noth­ing that will come will ever feel like this.”

And it’s true, noth­ing will ever feel like this. Because while my heart makes suns and looks at them with all the inno­cence of a child, my love for each sun feels dif­fer­ent. With each con­nec­tion lost, I have lost some­thing irre­place­able. A colour, a touch that will nev­er return. And that I will nev­er look for in oth­er peo­ple. Some­thing so raw lives under my skin for­ev­er. And there are bits and pieces in the world of all the peo­ple who touched me, and as grief changes into mem­o­ry, the world becomes irrepara­bly changed by my life. 

But it doesn’t mean that I will nev­er feel a sim­i­lar love. A very dif­fer­ent love. A love that is none like the oth­ers but moves me just as deeply. I know because that love lives inside me always.

ACT TEN

I had nev­er want­ed to kill a sun, to see its lights go out and my sky go dark. I live in the night sky, amongst the depths of the moon and the secrets spilling out of 4am con­ver­sa­tions. My love is for­ev­er, even if it lives only briefly. My touch is for­ev­er, every line I paint on skin, I mean it.

Lek­to­ri­ert von Luke Shiller.

Snkllr (Mer­cy Fer­rars) is a philoso­pher and writer based in Berlin.