The Year Of Mathew Tillman.

 

September, 1974

I reckon there’s a particular smell to boarding schools. Not the polished brochure sort either. Not  candle wax  and fresh cut grass and all that posh rubbish they tell parents during tours. No. Real boarding schools smelt like sweating  socks left too long near radiators, cigarette smoke drifting out cracked windows, cheap aftershave nicked from pharmacies, muddy rugby fields, burnt toast, old church wood and six hundred hormonal teenagers trapped together in the middle of nowhere.

Northcott College smelt exactly like that. I loved it. Funny thing is, most boys at Northcott always spent  their first year miserable. Homesick. Crying into pillows at night. Writing letters home every bloody weekend. Some of the younger years still do. You’d hear them now and then through the floorboards after lights out, sniffling quietly so nobody would hear.

Never bothered me much.

Home was alright and all, don’t get me wrong. Mums  lovely. Quiet sort. Works harder than anyone I’d ever met. Dad’s worked himself half to death down the factory but he’s always  found the energy to joke around after supper so it wasn’t that bad. We weren’t rich by any means. Bloody miles from it. Half the boys at Northcott came from families with country estates and fathers who sounded like the BBC.

Me?

I came from a tiny terrace house where the wallpaper peeled near the bathroom tile and winter got through the windows no matter how much newspaper Dad stuffed in the cracks. But I never minded. If anything it made me feel more alive than those rich bastards. Some of them arrive at school looking polished to death. Hair all neat. Fancy trunks with little brass locks. Shoes shinning so bright you could see your reflection in em. Poor sods looked terrified of getting dirty. Then there was me and Arthur charging across muddy pitches like maniacs while Sebastian yelled bloody murder from the sidelines cause we’d gotten muck all over his scarf.

I think Northcott worked because it threw every sort of child together and locked the doors behind us. Rich kids, poor kids, scholarship boys, troublemakers, shy girls, lads who’d inherited entire bloody companies before they’d even learned to shave properly. Didn’t matter where you came from after a while. Eventually everyone just became another miserable student eating overcooked potatoes under flickering lights. That’s what I liked about it.

By fourth year, Year Ten now, Christ alive, we’d all sort of melted together into one strange organism. Our  dorm especially.

The Cedars.

God help the school if they ever put that lot in positions of authority. Our dormitory sat on the top floor of the Old Rectory which sounded dead elegant until you actually saw the place. Used to be a church years back apparently. Big looming thing with creaky floors and draughts that could freeze your bollocks clean off in winter. Stone walls. Narrow hallways. Stained glass still left in some of those halls. At night the wind made noises through the pipes that sounded exactly like ghosts choking to death.

Perfect place for teenage boys, really.

Best part was we were the furthest dorm from Mr Walker’s room. That poor bastard. He tried hard, Walker did but six boys aged fourteen to fifteen  trapped together with no supervision might as well have been a military experiment.

Tonight is  our first night back after summer. Year Tens. Top floor boys now. Kings of absolutely nothing.

I’m laid across Sebastian’s bottom bunk watching him put up more rock posters than any human being ought to own. Bowie. Marc Bolan. Led Zeppelin. T. Rex. Alice Cooper glaring down from the wall. Comforting, really. Sebastians always had this ridiculous determination to make our dorm look like the backstage wall of some filthy London club.

“You’ve put that one crooked again” I tell  him. Sebastian glances  over his shoulder, cigarette hanging from his mouth. “It’s avant garde.” “It’s pissed.”“Artistic choice.” “You’re artistic choice.”“Brilliant comeback that, Tillman.” 

He grins at me anyway. That was Seb all over really. Could never tell whether he was about to kiss somebody or punch them. Most gorgeous bloke I’d ever seen in my life too, though I’d sooner die than say that aloud around the rugby lads. Girls practically dissolve around him. Couldn’t blame ‘em honestly. Dark hair down to his chin with this natural wave to it like some rockstar out a magazine. Bloody platform boots making him taller than the rest of us by an inch. Rings on every finger. Always smells faintly of smoke and some wealthy cologne. Rich family too. Proper rich. But weirdly enough he hated  it. Spent half the holidays at my house instead. Mum adores him. Dad too. Said Seb had good manners buried under all that peacocking. Seb liked our place because nobody cared who his father was there. We’d eat chips wrapped in paper by the telly and wander around town and sit by the quarry smoking rubbish cigarettes while he talked about music like it was religion. I suppose, to him it was.  Reckon he was meant for bigger things than Northcott. Probably bigger things than England.

Claude Hewlett sat on the windowsill beside Arthur smoking like he’d been born with a fag in hand. Claude looks  older than the rest of us somehow. Not in age exactly. Just weathered I suppose.  Long limbs folded up awkward against the window frame, brown hair all rugged and uneven like he cut it himself with kitchen scissors. He had this wolfish grin that only appeared when he was either about to say something genuinely funny or genuinely horrible. And his eyes, big brown doe eyes. Soft looking eyes for someone with such a vicious temper.

“You’re fogging up the bloody room,” Roman complained from his bed. Claude didn’t even look at him. “You’re fogging up the room with your desperation to be liked.” “You’re so charming.” “Thank you.” Everybody  knew he came from rough circumstances without him saying it outright. Clothes always slightly worn. Hands rough. Smoked too much. Had this permanent exhaustion hanging round him. Sick often too, though he never explained properly what with. I never judged him for moodiness. Hard not to be moody when your body’s trying to kill you half the time. Still one of my favourite blokes in the whole school though. He understood the need to shut up better than most people.

Arthur was next to him with binoculars pressed to his eyes trying to peer across campus toward Willow Court. “Can’t see sod all” Arthur muttered. “That’s because you’re looking into Mrs Green’s office” Foxx said flatly from across the room. Arthur lowered the binoculars immediately. “Oh Christ.” “Pervert,” Sebastian called. “Research purposes.” “You’ll get expelled before Christmas.” Arthur ignored him.

Arthur MacKay is  basically me if someone stretched me slightly different. Same height. Same build. Both blonde. Both football mad. Difference was Arthur looked naturally put together while I looked like I’d been electrocuted half the time. My hair was bleached bright enough to blind passing aircraft while his sat all neat and dirty blonde like some posh film actor. Girls like him. Girls like  me too thankfully. Though this year, this year I was finally winning over Meredith Wilson. Absolutely determined. Doesn’t  matter if it kills  me.

Roman sat cross legged on his bed reading our timetables aloud like it was his personal job to be our navigator. Roman Lowry. Vice president of the chess club and possibly the cleverest person I’d ever met. Bright ginger hair. Round brown eyes. Big forehead. Massive forehead actually. Stored all his bloody information in there probably. We grew up in the same town so I’d known him forever. Parents were friends. Mothers forced us together as kids. Funny thing was we should’ve hated each other. Me the football idiot and Roman the academic freak. But I’d always had a soft spot for him. Couldn’t help it. Roman got overwhelmed by everything. Noise. Crowds. Sudden change. Yet somehow survived Northcott anyway through sheer stubbornness.

“You’ve got double chemistry Tuesdays,” Roman told me. “Disgusting.” “With Mr Hughes.” “Even more disgusting.” “You failed the last test.” “I passed in my personal opinion.” “That isn’t a thing.” “It should be.”

Foxx laughed quietly from the corner. Now Foxx Lowell,  that boy  was a mystery. He stood in the corner of the room slowly mapping the room with his hands despite having lived here  over a year already. Though I suppose being upstairs meant a difference. Blind since birth. Scruffy as hell. Hair never sitting right. Always looked younger than the rest of us somehow. Boyish. Not childish exactly. Just unfinished. Especially compared to his cousin West Lowell, who was probably the coolest human being to ever walk planet Earth. Leather jackets. Motorbikes. Girls sneaking into dorms. Got suspended twice.  Foxx was nothing like him. Quiet. Dull even sometimes.  

Honestly if he hadn’t been our roommate I don’t think any of us would’ve become mates with him naturally. But that’s the odd thing about boarding schools. Proximity becomes friendship  eventually. Foxx knows  all our footsteps apart. Claimed Arthur walked like an angry horse. “Cause he does,” Claude  muttered. Arthur chucked a sock at him. Sebastian  caught it midair without hesitation. “Filthy bastard,” he said. “Oi!” Room erupted laughing.

Outside our window the farmland stretched black beneath the evening sky. Endless fields. Trees swaying in the wind. Northcott sat miles away from proper civilisation, tucked into the English countryside like it had grown out the earth. At night everything felt suspended there. Like the rest of the world disappeared entirely. Maybe that’s why I loved it so much. Boarding school life felt strangely immortal when you were inside it. You wake up with the same people every morning. Eat beside them. Study beside them. Sneak cigarettes together. Fall asleep hearing them breathe across the room. Eventually your friends stop feeling like friends and start feeling more like badly behaved brothers.

Even the loneliness became communal. Especially at fifteen. Fifteen  is a strange age. You’re not a child anymore but you’re nowhere near grown either. You’re all elbows and knees, ego and confusion. One minute discussing football scores and the next questioning your entire existence while listening to your mates Bowie record at midnight. Nobody tells you adolescence feels so theatrical. Everything mattered enormously at fifteen. Music mattered. Hair mattered. Cigarettes mattered. Girls mattered. Reputation mattered. Looking cool mattered the most. And yet underneath all that bravado we were still just boys. Boys pretending very hard to be men. 

Sebastian finally stepped back from the posters proudly. “There.” “It still looks like a bloody crack den,” Roman said. “I’ll take that over a brothel.” Claude snorted smoke out his nose laughing. Arthur is resuming his  spying attempts. Foxx keeps  tracing the edge of his desk absentmindedly.

And me? I lay  there on Sebastian’s bunk watching all of them feeling this strange warmth settle inside my chest. Peaceful. That’s the word. Peaceful. Which is funny considering the amount of chaos these  idiots bought  into my life daily. But they were mine. My people.

Our dorm sat furthest from authority. Furthest from supervision. Furthest from adulthood itself really. Up there on the top floor it felt like we existed in our own tiny universe above the rest of the school. The Cedars. Year Ten. And maybe it sounds stupid now but laying there listening to my mates argue while cigarette smoke curled toward the ceiling, I genuinely believed this would be the greatest year of my life.

I had good classes. Football season coming. Meredith Wilson still miraculously single. An entire year stretched out ahead of me untouched. At  fifteen years old that truly felt infinite. I remember thinking then, quite clearly actually, that 1974 belonged to me. 

This was going to be the year of Mathew Tillman.

Noble Prologue.

 

They say you only miss the golden days once they’re long gone, once the light starts fading from the photographs and the boys in them start to look less familiar. I suppose that’s true. The memories hit hardest when the world gets slower.  When I’m shaving before work and I see the scar above my lip and remember how Francie gave it to me with a rock, right before apologising with a melted ice cheesecake from the bakery dumpster. Or when I see a pigeon flapping across the power lines and feel my stomach turn over, instinctively, the way it always did when Scooter tried to make me hold his pet bird.

I don’t know what you believe in. Fate? God? Nothing?  But I believe we all believe in memory. And this story? It’s all I’ve got left of them.

Francie Allard, Lambert Lee, Scooter Moore even Gustavo Mendes, they were my brothers, even if we didn’t share a single drop of blood. We came from Maverick. A street, a code, a neighborhood in Boston that was built on concrete and statistical deaths.  Back then, in 1963 we thought we were untouchable. We were wrong.

Maverick was the kind of place where dreams got eaten alive.

You could see it in the broken glass on the sidewalks, the rusted bikes abandoned in alleyways, the tired women dragging their screaming kids home from church in wrinkled dresses and cheap heels. You could hear it in the drunken shouting at night or in the gasp between a slammed door and the first slap. It wasn’t pretty but it was home. And if you were lucky and I mean really lucky, you found people who made it bearable.

Francie Allard, Lambert Lee. Scooter Moore. 

Lambert Lee was the oldest of the group: seventeen and the leader of my friends. He was the realist among us, suspicious of other’s intentions, never trusting the words of those he didn’t know. It was Lambert who kept us grounded, who kept us safe. He never played practical jokes on those he perceived as weaker and he always rose to defend anyone he believed unable to defend themselves. It was harder to make Lambert laugh than the others. He was the eldest and as such had to maintain a degree of maturity. He was the first among us to kiss a girl, Donna White, a half Irish girl, yet he was the last in our crew to learn to ride a bike. It was Lambert who kept the older, aggressive boys of the neighbourhood at bay, often with nothing more than a stare or frown their way, that ability reinforced his position as our leader, a title he accepted but never acknowledged. It was simply his role, his place. He’d been a part of Thiago Martin’s gang since he was eleven, running drop offs and pickups. A future in crime seemed to loom over his head but Lambert always wanted more. He dreamed of becoming a newspaper writer, something thought to be  impossible. He smoked constantly and  and he never liked anyone outside our circle

If Lambert was the brains behind the group, Francie Allard was our soul. He was a gentle lover and he shared anything he had, he was never jealous of another’s gift or good luck. His nickname was Moon because he was born on the full moon, bounded together, which most would argue wasn’t a bad thing, however for many more years to come, I always wished he had been born any other night. The moon denied him eternity. A life of greatness to be cut short. He was extroverted and played dozens of street games: Basketball, Baseball, Football, a game many believed he would play professionally in. I could never think of Francie without a smile on his face, his eyes twinkling with mischief, even if it came at his expense. The only time I saw a hint of sadness to him was his dog Tony, named after the player Tony Romeo died. While Lambert seemed older than his years, Francie seemed far younger than seventeen with his weakness and his eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback and never forgot a joke. Francie never wanted to be leader of the group, he left that to Lambert Lee despite being the glue that held us together and  most definitely he wouldn’t of wanted to be the first to die, I don’t think he would have  been comfortable with the burden. It was with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen, to comfort, to live and always, to laugh. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile to remove himself from trouble. Francie’s laughter was infectious, his boyish charm irresistible but beneath that exterior, he had a vulnerable fragile aura that we didn’t quite understand, even though it would take him from us by the end of 1963. He was proof that a life time of love didn’t need evidence.

Even though he was only four months younger than Francie, he was the smallest of our group and was nicknamed Scooter, i never found out what his real name was. He was shy and quiet but had the sharpest sense of humour out of any of us. He loved Ballet and many girlish things such as broadway and country music. He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He loved to draw, sketching dresses and suits onto thin pages of lined paper. He would spend afternoons down at the parks feeding pigeons, where he even befriended one. Scooter earned his anxious disciplined nature from the hands of his mother’s various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a teenage boy. He rarely spoke about what happened but we all knew what took place, He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind smiles and laughs. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his life. Scooter, more than any of us was always in need of someone else’ s smile. To live through other people’s joy. During the late nights well others laid snug in their beds, Scooter laid in hotel rooms with any woman or man who would spare him a dime. I would always remember him as the bravest among us, though I never got to vocalise that thought out loud, I hope he knew it.

And then, there was me, Spencer Lewis. I was the youngest of my friends by two years and yet they always treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. Even apart of a group, I was the one who never quite fit into Maverick. My parents, Darla and Arthur Lewis, were far more stable than my friend’ s families. They owned an apartment and sent me to a private boarding school up north. I loved mechanics, the theatre and spent hours reading poetry novels, imagining myself in the beauty of worlds far removed from the violence outside my door. truthfully  I  had no business belonging there, except for some reason I did. Maybe because my friends decided I was worth keeping. 

Lambert always said the world didn’t make sense unless you looked at it sideways. Francie said the world never made sense and that was the fun of it. Scooter just wanted to dance through it.  And me? I was trying to find something good in it. Something holy.

We were between fifteen  and seventeen when it all happened. But time worked different back then. You grew up fast if you wanted to survive. By fourteen you were already a man or you were dead.

Francie Allard was sixteen  but he  looked about fourteen. Pale, wiry, black hair always falling in his eyes, too many jokes in his mouth to keep track of.  He was the only one of us who could make Lambert laugh when he didn’t want to, which was saying something. Francie was a mess. Undiagnosed dyslexia, malnourished, couldn’t read a sentence to save his life. But on the street? He was gold. Pure gold. Baseball, football, street hockey, you name it. Francie could outrun any boy and charm any girl. Except Jane Beau. He loved her. Since he was eight. She didn’t love him back. Not the way he wanted. But he never stopped trying. Francie always wanted more, more time, more games, more sugar, more laughter.

The problem was, his body didn’t want more. Not for long. He started coughing that summer. We laughed it off. Said it was the cigarettes. But by autumn, he couldn’t run a block without gasping. By December he was dead. Tuberculosis. Sixteen. Gone.

They buried him on New Year’s Eve. I still can’t look at fireworks without thinking of him.

Lambert Lee  had this way of looking at you that made your stomach twist, like he saw the ugliest part of you and didn’t even flinch. He’d run away from home at eleven and got caught up in Thiago Martin’s gang, the biggest in Maverick. Lambert wasn’t scared of anything. Not even death. But he was terrified of dogs. And of losing Francie. When Francie died, Lambert changed. He got real quiet. Stopped reading his horror comics. Stopped smiling.

They drafted him into the military in 64. Sent him to Vietnam. Said he’d be a chaplain. Said he was good with words. He didn’t come back. They never told us how he died. Just that he was eighteen. And he was gone.

Scooter Moore was smaller than all of us. Strange kid. Sweet kid. Always sketching dresses in his notebook, always humming country songs. He loved ballet. Loved Broadway. Loved birds, for Christ’s sake. He named the  pigeon he befriended down at the park Yoghurt. People didn’t get Scooter. Hell, we didn’t always get him either. But we loved him. Lambert protected him like a little brother. Francie called him Pretty Boy even though Scooter always blushed and looked away.  Scooter’s home life was hell. His mother’s boyfriends locked him in closets. He didn’t talk about it. We just knew. He was arrested in 67 for burglary. Trying to steal a coat, they said. No one bailed him out.

In 71, they found his body behind a club. He’d been beaten. Because he was queer. Or at least that’s what they said. Scooter didn’t even know what he was. But the world decided for him. He was the bravest of us all. And he died alone.

In the end I was alone. I was fourteen  when Francie died. Sixteen when Lambert left. Twenty one when Scooter’s name showed up in the paper. By then I’d already started smoking. Already married. Already working cases as a rookie homicide officer in Boston. I’d see boys like us getting thrown into the system and I’d think of Scooter. See bodies in alleys, think of Lambert. Hear a cough and see Francie’s hands shaking. People told me I was lucky to survive. But survival doesn’t always feel like victory. Sometimes it’s just silence.

I named my son Francis. I tell my daughters stories about the boys with comic books and football dreams. Sometimes I sit in the theatre alone and watch the same ballet Scooter loved. Sometimes I pray harder than I need to, just so I can still feel Lambert’s voice in my head, telling me God was a man with blood on his hands.

Most nights, I just remember. Because someone has to.

This is our story. Four boys. One city. One year. We had dreams bigger than our bodies. We had love bigger than our hearts could hold. But America  doesn’t let boys grow old. And so I tell you this before the world forgets. Before their names vanish. Before the moon takes me too. 

Sable Parade’s Grammy Speech.

 

Here’s the transcript for Sable Parade’s Grammy Speech. Fun fact, the people  he’s referring to is actually Tyler, The Creator and Odd Future but we had to change it due to copyright   restrictions. Those guys saved a lot of kids lives and someday they’ll receive their flowers. 

Sables Parade Speech

Where To Find Me.

 

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Sable Parade, Who Are You?

  There is a character I dreamed of. His name is Sable Parade.

And I think, no, in all honestly I know he is the closest thing I have ever created to my inner child. Not in a direct obvious way. Not in the sense that he is simply me rewritten with a different name and a different life. It’s frustratingly deeper than that. More complicated. More unsettling. Because Sable Parade feels like me yet at the same time he feels like someone I will never fully understand and  that is a grief I didn’t expect. Like a genuine full on grief.

When I first created him, I thought I was doing what all writers do, building a character, shaping a narrative, giving life to something I dreamed. Imagined. But somewhere along the way, he stopped feeling like a construction and started feeling like a translation. Not even a complete one, just a translation of something buried, something younger, something I didn’t entirely have the language for. I think thats where the problem began since translation is never perfect. There are always things that get lost between languages, certain words, certain feelings, certain textures of emotion that simply don’t exist in the other form. And Sable Parade, well he feels like that. Like a version of me translated into a language I don’t fully speak. I recognise parts of him. I see myself in him. But there are pieces, entire depths of him that I can feel but never quite reach.

And I catch myself grieving that. Grieving the distance between us. Grieving the fact that no matter how much I dream him, no matter how much I write him, no matter how much I try to understand him, there will always be parts of him that remain just out of reach. I will never fully grasp the truth of how he feels. I will never know the exact weight he carries in his chest, the precise imaging of his thoughts, the way his mind moves when he’s alone. I can estimate it. I can write scenes that feel close, dialogue that echoes something that could be seen as real. But I will never be him. I will never inhabit his world in the way he does. That hurts in a way I don’t know how to explain properly.

Because Sable Parade has lived a life I haven’t. He has felt things I haven’t felt in the same way but with the exact same intensity, with the same consequences. I can imagine his pain but I haven’t bled for it the way he has. I havent fought for survival in the same way. I havent clawed my way out of poverty with the same desperation, the same urgency, the same understanding that failure is not just disappointment, it’s devastation. I will never know how smart he truly is. Not just in the intellectual sense but in the way he navigates the world. The way he reads people. The way he adapts, survives, calculates. There’s a sharpness to him, a type of intelligence that comes from necessity. From having to understand things quickly because there was no room not to. And I can write that. I can describe it. But I will never live it.

And i think that’s maybe that’s why I feel  this  grief. Because even though he is mine, my creation, my character, a being created from my very depths of my mind, he is also not mine at all. He exists in a space that I can access but not fully occupy. Like standing at the edge of a room you built yourself but cannot step into. Sable Parade spent his whole life fighting for something so simple it almost feels cruel: the ability to succeed without it costing him everything. He bled for it. Not realistically but  metaphorically either. He bled for the simple act of trying to become something more and I don’t think I will ever fully understand what that kind of fight feels like.

Because for him, failure wasn’t just failure. It was punishment. It was consequence. It was something that echoed far beyond the moment itself. A missed word, a wrong step, an inability to articulate what he needed, it wasn’t just frustrating, it was dangerous. It was something that could strip him of whatever fragile stability he had managed to build. There’s something deeply heartbreaking about that. About a child learning that success is not celebrated but required to live. That love is not given freely but conditionally. That there is no space to be soft, no room to fail, no safety in simply existing as you are.

Sable Parade spent his life discovering that there is no place for an overachieving child in the hands of love.

Not the kind of love he needed. Because the same hands that were supposed to guide him, to teach him how to walk, how to laugh, how to exist in the world, those were the same hands that rejected him. Not loudly. Not always violently. But consistently enough in every lifetime of his that he learned the pattern. And still, he stayed. Still, he reached. Still, he expected something from those hands. And that’s the tragedy of it.

It’s not that Sable Parade was denied love entirely. It’s that he expected to receive it from the very place that never truly offered it. He kept reaching for warmth from hands that didn’t know how to give it. He kept trying to eat from palms that were never open and I understand that. Too well. Because just like Sable Parade, there is a part of me, of baby Lupin that did the same thing. That stood there, waiting, hoping, adjusting, trying to become something worthy of being held gently. I think that’s where we overlap the most.

Not in the details of our lives but in the shape of our longing. Because both of us learned to look down when we walked. To stare at our feet instead of lifting our heads. Because god forbid we look up and catch someone staring at us, really seeing us. Because what if we look back? What if we hold that gaze just a second too long? What if, in that moment, they see us the way we see ourselves? And that fear, sure it can be quiet but it’s constant. It lives in the body. It’s in the way you carry yourself. The way you shrink slightly without realising it. The way you avoid eye contact, not out of shyness but out of something deeper. Something more protective. Because being seen is dangerous when you don’t believe what’s being seen is enough.

Sable Parade was born kind. So was I.

He was born seeking softness, seeking warmth, seeking approval, seeking something that wasn’t readily given to him. There’s something  fragile about that kind of beginning. Because when you are born soft in a world that doesn’t handle softness well, you learn very quickly that your nature is both your greatest strength and your greatest vulnerability. The little things make you the happiest but the small things can really hurt you.

Just like me, Sable Parade felt like a scared animal at times. Not hunted, not necessarily targeted but exposed. Like the world was something larger, something unpredictable, something that could turn at any moment. He wasn’t food for monsters, not literally. But he felt bare. He felt visible in the wrong ways. He felt like something that could be taken apart if the wrong eyes landed on him. And I understand that feeling too. That sense of being too there. Too open. Too readable.

And yet, despite all of that, despite the fear and the sensitivity and the constant awareness of how fragile everything feels, Sable Parade is light. Just like me. Because when you grow up knowing what it feels like to have the light taken away, you become very intentional about giving it to others. You become the person who softens rooms, who makes people feel seen, who offers warmth even when you are still learning how to hold it for yourself. We know what it’s like to have the light forcibly ripped away and that darkness is scary, it’s a type of fear words can’t ever describe, so knowing that type of fear, you give it to all.

Sable Parade is innocent in a way that feels almost painful to witness. Not naive, not unaware but hopeful. Still believing even after everything that there is something good to reach for. That there is someone worth chasing. For him, that person was Tyler, The Creator. A rapper. A figure. A lightpost. Someone distant, untouchable, larger than life.

And Sable chased that light the way moths chase flames, not because it’s safe but because it’s bright. Because it represents something more. Something beyond the world he knows.

For me, it was Ryan Coogler. A real man. A filmmaker. Someone whose work felt like proof that the thing I wanted was possible. And just like Sable, I chased that light too. Not because they knew me. I don’t think I’ll ever know the man who lit a fire inspire of me. Not because they ever would. But because sometimes, as a child, you need to place your hope somewhere. You need to believe that someone out there represents the life you’re trying to reach. Some could say that’s heart breaking, Two children, one fictional, one real both looking up at grown men who have no idea they exist, placing all this silent admiration, this quiet devotion, this hope into something that will never look back at them.

And yet… it mattered. It still matters. Because sometimes the people who shape you the most are the ones who never knew you were watching. For that reason, those people are the most genuine role models. That’s the final truth of it.

Sable Parade is me and he isn’t. He is my inner child, translated into something sharper, something harsher, something more extreme. He is a version of me that bled more, fought harder, endured differently. He is what happens when certain parts of me are pushed further, stretched thinner, placed in a world that demanded more from him than mine did from me and for that I will never fully understand him. I will never completely close the gap between us. There will always be a distance. A quiet space where his truth exists just beyond my reach. I think I’m learning to accept that. Maybe he’s not meant to be fully understood. Maybe he’s meant to be felt. Remembered. Respected. Maybe he exists not as something I can completely know but as something I can honour. A reflection. A distortion in the mirror. A translation of something deeply real.

Sable Parade is not just a character. He’s a human being I can never  ever meet and for that I grieve. Every day.