Steven Returns the Universe
The author’s uncle Steven. Photo courtesy of the author.
You can’t start with the thing. You have to start with something other than the thing. Like a stone entering water (the water closing up after it).
On January 8, 1988, my uncle Steven hangs himself with a length of rope in the basement of his home.
I am three years old. My cousin Maggie, his daughter, is two.
Afterward, I ask my mom only one question: Would you ever do that?
She says to me, from the future, that I must have been satisfied enough with her answer because I didn’t ask again.
In the cartoon Steven Universe, Steven (last name Universe) is descended from a long line of gem-based aliens with magical superpowers.
Each gem has, and embodies, a weapon: Pearl — tall, thin, and dutiful — carries a spear; Garnet, powerful and with a sense for the comic, has giant boxing-glove hands; Amethyst, playful and sharp, wields a whip.
Steven, whose gem is rose quartz, manifests a shield.
I do not know what my weapon is, at the moment. I walk down the sidewalk listening to music. I am often afraid that I will hurt the ones I love, and I take my tall man-body and shrink it down a little way smaller — not all the way, but enough so I can feel it.
Visualize the way that trauma has shaped your people, over generations; then visualize that forming a kind of collective spatio-temporal-topographic mold. Pour the metal in and let it cool.
What weapon emerges?
I do not think my people carried a rope. I wish I could know my uncle; my cousin, his daughter, has an old bike of his, and I imagine peddling very fast along an open road with the wind flying by and think that that is a weapon.
If grief were a weapon, what shape would it take?
My mom has a framed picture of Steven holding a dog in his arms. He is young and has bushy hair on his head, none on his face or arms yet.
Steven Universe has a creature named Lion, who is a pink lion with a lush pink mane that, we eventually find out, helps Steven cross dimensions.
Lion is obviously
