peter ballinger / one. fin

Here's the thing: you come into this world with the speed of a comet, burning itself to death before it ever even gets the chance to set down on earth. You burst forth into life, already burning.



They call you supernova, a boundless, cosmic, catastrophic collision of stars crushed into the place where your bones belong, like each little piece of you is just little bits of stardust, the web of veins under your skin nebula rather than simple iron. 

You're supposed to wear your name like a crown, but you have to earn it, the name Ballinger. 

And the longer your mother looked at you, the more she started to realize that you didn't deserve it. She used to stare at you for hours, day in and day out, eyes searching for the sort of son that she had asked for, the kind of boy that would grow up into the sort of man who deserved her husband's last name. 

You, unfortunately, refused to behave. 



You remember all too clearly the fire that used to flash in her eyes when you would send a vase toppling over on its side, shattering onto the floor. Ballingers, they weren't supposed to be wild or free things, were supposed to be self-contained and self-sufficient and while you were certainly one, constellations cannot be caged. Sometimes, when you close your eyes, you can still feel her well-manicured hands gripping your tiny little shoulders in the exact place she'd left bruises just a few days before.

(You start running when you're just ten years old, dart out your window in the middle of the night. Coming and going and coming and going and going and going and going until—one night you find there's bars on your window and a girl sleeping soundly in the bedroom across the hall, a pretty new thing for your parents to tame, a new head to bear the Ballinger crown.)

No one is really surprised when she finally turns you out, yourself very least of all.

It happens suddenly though. The two of you—you'd had an okay weekend, you realize looking back on it all now. You hadn't seen it coming, not in that moment. You'd just turned thirteen, and she's taken you into town for the weekend, took you to get pastries from that bakery you loved and she picked you out a new pair of shoes and she ruffled up your hair and leaned down to kiss your temple more than once and you.

You'd been well behaved.

You'd been kind.

But it didn't matter. She woke up the morning after you two came home, less than 48 hours after your birthday sunset, and she'd started shrieking again. You're not my son! You can't be my son! You remember ducking when she threw a chair at the wall all too well, and between one weekend and the next, you were a boy cut off from his family, from his life, from his name.

From everything that had made you who you were.

At least, that's what you thought.


Looking back, you can't believe that maybe she knew what you would spend years trying to understand, had known it from the moment you took your first steps in the middle of the night, hands outstretched towards the stars: your complete inability to behave meant you'd never be a Ballinger, not in any way that mattered.

With them, you would never belong.



Those first nights on the street, the world shifts and stutters all around you, the pieces of it strung together on flimsy bits of string, being woven together far too fast for you to be able to keep up. Things change around you at a mile a minute, and sooner than later you start to see your greatest weakness for exactly what it is: you don't know how to slow down.

You have no idea how to just hold out your hands, take the world between your steady palms, and balance each and every piece of it to be something that you can handle.

Something that you can love.

But you don't go back. No matter how many nights you would have to spend alone in a fast-changing world, stars aren't meant to be cages in a castle's highest tower.

( A whisper between wishes said the second star on the right and straight on 'til morning: "the Ballingers don't get to unmake you." )

( A dream: you might have been born without a crown, but you could be king too. )