AKAIZA

I used to believe that my father was the God of War.

Called many names by many people, my sister and I knew him as the one that kneeled to tie our shoelaces before school, the one that painted murals of gardens on our bedroom walls and taught us how to hold rolly pollys in the palm of our hands without crushing them. When he tucked us in to our beds at night, I remember thinking that his own hands looked as if they had soaked up a dusk sky, bruised with deep purples that blurred pink and yellow around the edges. His knuckles were always scratched, and one night they split open without him noticing, and dark drops of red fell and seeped into our white comforter as he pulled it to our chins. It was only a little stain, and I couldn’t understand why my mother screamed at him so, because my father tried to wash that comforter the next day. When he took it out of the dryer though, the whole thing had turned a rosy pink.

As a boy, my father fought to live, and even though he didn’t need to anymore, he couldn’t stop—didn’t want to. Now that death wasn’t breathing down the back of his neck, I think he needed some other validation that he was alive, the way people pinch themselves to make sure they’re awake.

After my father turned the comforter pink, I began to wake up in the early hours of the morning when I heard the front door creak and click shut with the slow care of someone trying not to make any noise. If I crouched at the top of the stairs and peeked my head through the gaps in the railing, I could see my father standing by the front door, bathed in the weak light that filtered in from the windows of the front porch. Every twilight he stood there, and I could never quite tell for how long, but I always stayed crouched on the top of the stairs with him, as if we were bound in some sort of solidarity of stillness. I’m not sure he ever knew I was there.

In the beginning, I worried—wondered where he went for hours after telling us goodnight; wondered if you can really know a person without being acquainted with who they are when they’re not with you. I think I came to understand him though, I think a kind of baptism occured at the top of those stairs in which I inherited the need to convince myself that I too am living instead of just alive. So my worry withered away. My father always came home bloodied and bruised, but he always came home.

Ever wonder what happens to a star that goes too close to a black hole? The star falls in completely and everything vanishes....

Well, actually, if the star gets close enough to the black hole, it’s gravity will pull away the outer layers of the star, or disrupt the star. While some of the star will fall into the black hole to never be seen again, most of the star's gas doesn’t fall into it. The gas that survives creates stellar tidal disruption events, which can be as bright as a supernova.