Stardust

Leave Me Your Stardust to Remember You By

Stardust: Leave Me Your Stardust to Remember You By


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    When Skylar woke up the morning after Christmas —  the alarm beside "his" bed set an hour before the Conners awoke —  he couldn't help but feel like it was his last day on Earth. It was as if he had been diagnosed with some terminal illness and his life expectancy was near its end, like the last grains of sand in the top of an hour glass. He hated being dramatic — that was the last adjective he wanted to be associated with, — but he couldn't think of a better way to describe it. He always heard people say that when you're about to die the time slows down, but that wasn't the case for Skylar. The grains of sand were falling in rapid succession, and by the time Louise Conner knocked on "his" bedroom door an hour later to summon him for breakfast, he had only gotten through the third of the letters he was to drop off before his train's departure later that night.

    The white of the first letter's envelope had been discomposed by Skylar's characteristically chicken-scratch scrawl in the forms of Jake Gallagher and the corresponding address. He said all he had to say to Jake the day before, but he had gotten too close to Jake to leave without at least one more goodbye. It was short and sweet, but he felt as though it was the perfect epilogue to their whirl-wind friendship. He wrote, Like the northern star, you were always something I could rely on.

    Skylar was never particularly fond of expressing his feelings or the way in which his mind worked, but there was something in the way Jake would do that unlocked the gnarled, beaten door of Skylar's innermost self. When he wanted to open that door, which was as much of a rarity as seeing Halley's comet, he could rely on Jake to listen. Even when Skylar didn't want to talk, he knew that he could still count on the simple presence of Jake to shake the dust from the knob and the cobwebs from the hinges. Skylar would never write or speak those words out of fear that his door wouldn't open wide enough, but he trusted that Jake understood. As much as Jake didn't want to believe that he contained the capacity to fathom the things people do or why they do them, he did, and Skylar knew that.

    The second letter was for Leah, and the first half of it was a sequence of apologies. When it came to Leah, he had a lot be sorry for. He apologized for not being able to love her like she loved him. He apologized for being the reason behind her and Brennyn's feud. He apologized for cheating on her with Andrea. He apologized for being a sorry excuse for a boyfriend. But mostly he apologized for not letting her get to know who he really was. He wasn't that person. He wasn't the guy that played with her heart strings, came between her friendship with Brennyn, and cheated on her with her best friend, but unfortunately that was the guy she got to know. Oh, how he wished she would have known the real Skylar, the sober Skylar. In his sobriety, she was the only girl he ever came close to being in love with, but the majority of their relationship was a series of nights whose only element he could remember was sneaking away while her back was turned to snort a few lines beside her bathroom sink. A large quantity of Skylar blamed Jackie for that. If it weren't for his inheritance of Jackie's despondency and the need for temporary happiness in grams and syringes, he could've really loved Leah. It was in the second half of the letter that he tried, as best he could, to explain that. He hoped with every atom of his being that Leah would understand.

    The third letter went in much the same rhythm as Leah's, only it was for Matt. Skylar apologized for outing Matt in front of his father. However, Skylar couldn't honestly write that he regretted it. Yes, he acknowledged that it should have been Matt's decision to reveal his sexual identity on his own terms, but Skylar could no longer bare witness to his best friend's emotional breakdowns whenever the topic of revealing his sexuality arose. He couldn't handle hearing Matt cry one more night, or having to whisper whenever Matt's father was in the vicinity. But, mostly, he could no longer watch as Matt became a different person —  a lesser person —  in the presence of his family. Skylar would never forget the night he ate dinner with Matt's family during their eighth-grade year. Somehow, Matt's parents turned the conversation into a debate about God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Natasha, Matt's older sister, argued that there was nothing wrong with people freely expressing their carnal individuality, but Matt, keeping his own orientation in deep cover, gritted his teeth and muttered, "The faggots deserved to burn." For the rest of that night, long after Matt's parents had retired, Skylar consoled a sobbing Matt on the bathroom floor. After that, Skylar made it his business to free Matt of his father's homophobic conditioning. Now, look at Matt. He's slowly gotten on speaking terms with his father, and he and Rob are in an official relationship. Skylar couldn't take credit for that, but Matt was happier than he'd ever been and that was all Skylar wanted.