The Brightest Birthday

Johnny was nearly eleven when he realized he was just like everyone else.
His father had always told him he was special, but when he said it, it sounded like many of the four letter words his father would say. His mother would just purse her lips, when she was still alive, and continue to spray down the macrobiotic hydroponics garden, or pretend to be focused on one of Lladno’s moons. That is to say, she would ignore it.
Ignore him.
But Johnny was a tough little boy to ignore- at least when he didn’t want to be. When he did, it was as if he disappeared, just blended into the background. He’d gotten out of and into a lot of punishments that way. And this was how he explained it to himself, when he was alone at night in his hammock, floating around his padded room, rocking gently. He didn’t understand why everyone couldn’t do it. It was just stuff. Everything was just stuff, Johnny thought. Even Johnny.  And he could control that stuff.
Johnny was nearing his eleventh birthday on LLadno in the month of June, Terran calendar. Everyone went by the Terran calendar for birthdays and events because it was standard. Johnny liked it because it meant two birthdays for him each LLadno year. Johnny didn’t like birthdays for the presents; whenever Johnny received a present, he was grateful and made a show of using it, but later he would let it return to The Stuff. What he really liked was the people, The Stuff that talks, and he loved every opportunity to experience them.
He was about ten when The Stuff became capitalized in his mind.
As Johnny’s eleventh birthday approached, LLadno’s sun crept closer to the horizon. It just so happened his birthday would fall on the first day of the Darkness, and he was excited. Johnny loved the Darkness almost as much as the speaking Stuff, because it meant things got thinner. He didn’t fully understand what he meant by that, but he knew it was true. In the Darkness, everyone could plainly-or rather couldn’t, which was the point-see that Stuff was just stuff. It was all the same. He always hoped someone, someday would understand, but even at almost-eleven he was losing hope.
And so his birthday got closer. Invitations were sent out and came back, some accepting and some regretfully declining.  As always and on every world, there was social order, and Standards that Must Be Kept. And so each birthday, fewer ‘yeses’ came to the house. But for this one, for a birthday on the start of the Darkness! More yeses than in years, and Johnny would sometimes look at the pile and smile, inwardly. His father worried when he saw Johnny smile, so he had to hide it. He could wait. He would have to.
Finally the day of Johnny’s birth arrived, the sky a fiery purple as the sun’s corona lit the sky and bounced off LLadno’s moons. Everyone had shown up early, and the presents were piled high in one corner of the habitat he shared with his father. The rest was awash with people, Johnny’s speaking Stuff, and they were all trying admirably to live up to their (to them) unknown reputation. Johnny could see everything, all the interconnections, and could see that there was no beginning and no end to anyone or any group. Everything flowed together as it should. And so Johnny let himself vanish while he watched the Stuff, and the Stuff talked and looked at the real star of the night, the Star Stuff.
The countdown to the Darkness began.
“Five…Four… Three…” the speaking stuff shouted in unison. “Two… One…”
And the Darkness was complete. For a moment, all Stuff was just stuff to everyone, or so Johnny believed. Than the speaking stuff that was his father spoke.
“Alright! Let there be light!”
So Johnny did.