Take me out to the field on a still, moonless night. I want to be there, up there with all the beautiful far things, up where the weight of the world shrinks into a twinkle and a flicker. You could spend your whole life running, go as far as your legs and dreams can carry you, and it still wouldn’t be enough. But if you made it up there? Somehow? No one could ever catch you again.

All my life I’ve loved beautiful things, because beautiful things are easy to love. I surround myself and hope by osmosis it all somehow soaks and seeps into the soul. Is it not natural? For a boy who loves beauty to want to be beautiful too.

But beauty is pain and desire is a kind of ruin because to want something is to admit you do not have it. Best a boy learns this early. Life will be full of delusions and illusions but this will not be one of them. A boy is not born beautiful. He must make himself so.

This is the Faustian art of alchemy, to take a life and painstakingly transmute it into beauty, to give everything in search of it. Then maybe once you succeed, with what little remains, learn to extract from beauty, the rest of what a boy needs.

So pull at the fraying stitches and seams of you. Coax strands of sorrow from the tangle of your grief and comb through the knots of dread. Unravel. Weave singing strings with threads of warped morning lies and spin your ghosts into gossamer and gingham. Craft from your despair, something smooth, something comfortable. Something one slips into with ease. Hem with lace, dye black.

Scent your sadness with sandalwood and cedar and all things evergreen that also never die. Ply your demons and dead dreams with jasmine and citrus, lilac and tonic. Run your tears through sieves and charcoal, pull till they flow clear, pure, iridescent.

Douse your anger in ice water till the skin separates, cracks and peels white. Cut the pith from the flesh, bury the soft, unspoken parts with the seeds. Temper yourself so that when you break, your wrists snap clean like crisp spring peas and shards of lustrous dark chocolate.

Fashion, around the soft warm animal of your heart, a fortress. Adorn its walls with murals and mosaics, emeralds and amber. Forge for your secrets stained glass cells draped with empyrean tyrian. Drown your desires in decadence while wearing your god-fearing, faithless Sunday best.

Spend your days picking salt from the earth. Strip and sand down your bitterness, your fear, your resentment so your flaws lie flush. Let their touch trace the contours of your body and when their hands linger around your throat, may their fingers find nothing but birdsong and honey. This is what beauty takes, a necessary violence for this tampered fate, this trick of the light life.

Look, my dear boy. Don’t you see that this is how your life will be? Don’t you know that the sun only shines while he’s burning himself alive? That a son becomes a star only when it’s up out there, far away. That beauty is in the distance from the burning.

So wreathe yourself in starlight, in flowers and furious silk, in all things beautiful and sweet, until you trick the world into loving you back.