I re-homed one of my kittens today and the devastation is immortal. For three months I watched him grow and change and live. Then I handed him away like I had torn into my own chest and offered a warm piece of it to someone else.

I remember them being born. Six months on testosterone and waking up to babies like the universe wanted more than one thing becoming in the same room. I felt so incredibly alive. All that beautiful birth. All that proof.

He used to sit on the counter and watch me cook. When I sat down to eat, he came close to the plate, and I would gently push him away, and he would come back every time like he didn’t understand the leaving.

This was his entire life. Two brothers and a sister. A mother. A house full of bowls and blankets and bad little habits. A human father who named him, loved him, and cried when he left his hands for the last time.

I think the worst part is that he had no idea what was coming. He walked right into the carrier like he never knew fear in his life, and I gave him that. Three months old and all he knows is undying love. All he knows is hands that fed him, a mother’s belly, the sound of my feet, his siblings breathing against him in a pile.

The other cats don’t even know he’s gone yet. It almost feels absurd. I am standing in the wreckage of something, and they’re sleeping through it. What if Minnow notices the brother she always slept beside is missing? What if Fish starts looking for the son she gave life to in my house? What if I have to watch a mother learn the shape of absence and there is nothing I can say in her language except food, except water, except I’m sorry?

He slept beside me all night. He was the first to meow when it was time to eat. He was always the one curled on the closed toilet seat when I opened the bathroom door. Jesus Christ, I remember the first time he purred. How small the sound was. How enormous.

I did my job well enough that he can leave me now. I was his first world. I loved him into being ready, and readiness had the nerve to look like loss.

He has a beautiful life ahead of him. More moons than three. More windows. More bowls. More names said softly across rooms. He will grow long and old and gray around the mouth, and maybe he’ll remember me. Maybe memory is not even the point. Maybe he will dream of me and feel only warmth.

I’ll miss him more than anything. Four sets of paws running across the floor down to three. My lamp is destroyed from his claws. The needles on my fake Christmas tree are flat and sad because even it will miss the way he climbed it. Even my body will miss the scrape of him. We were both real enough to leave marks.

I love you, Mr. Anchovy. How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. Keep swimming and know I’ll always love you across oceans. 🐟❤️

Date: May 24th. Three days from the eighth month of my becoming. I’ve made a religion out of patience, but devoting myself to the body’s hypocrisy is wearing me thinner than the atrophy.

Time: 0242. Google says the significance of that number is “a powerful spiritual message encouraging you to maintain inner peace, trust your intuition, and build your life on a solid foundation of faith.” The universe can be funny like that; asking you to hold onto faith like it’s not a forest fire in the palm of your fucking hand. Joke’s on me, apparently. I feel so out of alignment, I could be used as a warning label for transformation.

Location: The place I tried to will self-love into evidence of my worthiness. Then, the horrendous yellow lighting on fake linoleum like even the bulbs were sick with my knowing.

Participants: A wavering man. A bright-red unbecoming, guilty of perfidy.

Conditions: Rain worrying a window screen, incapable of washing away the smallest, yet cruelest, of bodily sins. An uneven breaking in my chest felt through a lifetime of past and future trials. A tremor in the hands and the fault lines and the part of the mind that chooses dying as veracity and logistics as perjury.

What Happened?: The body is making evidence of itself again. The body is still capable of betrayal. Not blood enough to be a wound. Not gone enough to be mercy. A holy unbecoming in the midst of transition.

Who did what?: The body quietly presented evidence of hair along the jaw like scripture, then ripped the euphoria straight from my tenacity in the form of bloodletting. My actions were far less violent, but were just as harrowing. I’m tired of writing about crying in metaphors when nothing feels worse than the tribulations of existing in an old body; a slow death begging for forgiveness; a prayer to be made whole by more than just ribs.

Direct Quotes: “I am so fucking tired of the ups and downs.” (Said in an exhausted, teary-eyed voice; deeper than it has any right to be when the body keeps denying its transformation in bleaker ways.)

Interpretations: An existential trial against my strength and audacity. Autopsies performed on a body still breathing. Nonconsensual bodily functions.

Questions: When does the aching feel less like suffering, and more like deliverance? Do I get to be loved anyway, even when my growth is more grisly than verdant?

Emergent Themes: It feels like dying more often than living right now. I am more coroner than keeper. I am tired of being this way, but there is no other way to be when refusing myself would be damnation.

lone pine poetry, Field Note For The Trans Man’s Body

A poltergeist hidden somewhere I will never be able to visit, who knocks over my things just to say, “I exist in spite of your healing. Let me remind you how precious a thing can be by ripping it right from your grasp.”

I heard its voice the other night; smoke at the foot of my bed where all the bad dreams play like a film of my life, and the good dreams feel like fictitious hauntings of their own.

Both things can be true at once: the healing and the haunting. In fact, I have almost always been contradictory.

I am a poet, but can never seem to carry the words correctly. I am a man, but can never seem to notice him in the mirror. I want freedom from this place, but can never seem to reach for opportunities aside from rotting in a bed in a place I can’t quite make feel like home.

And the worst one yet: I want love in a vicious, feral, disgusting way, but can never seem to find it. And even if it found me, I would cower and bite until I scared it away.

I don’t reach for astrology the way I do for words, but the stars tell me I was a hermit once.

Apparently, the stars themselves know more than I do about my past lives, but won’t offer instructions for how to stop or how to let people in when my twenty-three years in this lifetime taught me how much safer it is to be alone.

I don’t want to be alone forever, but I know I have the tendency to be nonexistent. To disappear when I am expected to be human. To fall helpless to myself when people are waiting for me to keep giving.

It is a daily struggle back and forth with this ghost. When will I be loved? When will something other than my own hands hold me steady? When will life feel worth living?

But the calendar doesn’t change. It just repeats me. And by me, I mean you could map me by the places I stopped asking for such things and instead started believing in accumulation more than arrival.

It is a petrifying realization to bear when you conclude that the biggest fear you’ve been cowering from this whole time is really just your current life.

I am exactly as alone as I’ve been afraid of. I have survived every version of this without noticing. It does not make it less heavy.

There is no event surrounding it. It is just the room I wake up in. I was building it this whole time with my own bare hands.

I am alone. I am living my biggest fear. I am tired of redecorating the walls. My heart beats on continuity instead of life, and I am chronically sick with it.

But they stopped making pennies back in November of ‘25, and now what remains is a fixed amount passed around between slippery hands.

I watch copper catch sunlight in abundance and wonder what it’s like to be warmed by hands that love you.

I think I’ve always been that last penny in a back pocket you forget is there. The one your hand finds and sets aside for later because it’s just one cent. You don’t realize how important it is until you’re one short, and only then do you wonder where you left me

Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. I’ve picked myself up 8,576 times since I’ve been manufactured, and the only good luck I can single-handedly find is that I’m still in circulation.

But I don’t feel very lucky. Because in this life, I’ve had 35 cents that meant everything to me. It doesn’t sound like much, but I felt rich when I had them.

I lost fourteen to circumstances out of my control. Eighteen dropped me and couldn’t find it in them to be bothered with one cent. And now I am left with three.

One is too shiny to know the harshness of life, and I keep it tucked away in a safe place in fear it might realize how dirty I’ve become.

With the other, I feel like I’m being rolled over again and again between fingers that are wearing me thin.

The last is me. I have picked myself up 8,576 times. There have been countless times I have flipped the coin in hopes I would lose.

I’ve never been much of an accountant. It’s too painful to bear witness to how many days I have been left unloved. And if we’re counting…

18 x 8,576 =154,368.

That is how many times the people who have dropped me could’ve chosen to pick me up.

I threw myself into a wishing fountain once in hopes it would baptize the past right off of me and make me shiny again.

And although the water glimmers prettily enough, I do not remember what it is like to be worth something.

So, I keep smoking cigarettes because my hands have been trembling since I heard love was real and not an unjust violence. I haven’t had the privilege of touching something so holy.

And I don’t know what else to do with my hands except try to curate a similar conviction. But it always ends with tobacco-heavy lungs and fingers that smell like the evidence of my desperation.

I’m tired of pretending smoke can replace the love I never received as a child. How smooth the aerodynamics must be for a luckier child to grow up never questioning if being unloved equals do I even exist?

All I know is how to be wildly inefficient; I don’t know how to cut through this fog, so I breathe it in instead like it could teach me the aptitude for accepting warmth without flinching. I think I was built for losing.

Annotations:

So, I keep smoking cigarettes because my hands have been trembling (I am scared and I am needy all at once)

since I heard love was real (growing up and realizing some people have received a fuller love than you were handed)

and not an unjust violence. (all I know is what I’ve been handed, and what I have been handed hurts like hell; the very idea of love repulses me now)

I haven’t had the privilege of touching something so holy. (All my shitty relationships have failed; rightfully so. But the evidence of lack and inexperience is exponential. Real love in my very own hands might as well be indistinguishable from scientific evidence that God is real, just like there is no scientific evidence that I am guaranteed love in this life. What am I supposed to believe in, save for my own stubborn heartbeat?)

And I don’t know what else to do with my hands except try to curate a similar conviction. (Curate: carefully selecting = I am purposely doing this with precision. Conviction: a formal declaration that someone is guilty OR a firmly held belief = both work here. I am trying to choose something similar to the holiness of real love and warmth [as a firmly held belief; except it’s others’ belief, which is why I am trying and not succeeding]. But I am doing so with substance abuse [declaration that someone is guilty.])

But it always ends with tobacco-heavy lungs and fingers that smell like the evidence of my desperation. (My hands smell like cigarette smoke, and I cannot hide this desperation for warmth, even if it’s fleeting and temporary.)

I’m tired of pretending smoke can replace the love I never received as a child. (Curated warmth cannot replace absence that is already marrow-deep. Cigarette smoke doesn’t reach past the lungs. I will never succeed.)
How smooth the aerodynamics (having the effect of reducing the drag on an object as it moves through the air or as air flows around it)

must be for a luckier child to grow up never questioning if being unloved equals “do I even exist?” (If you grow up unloved enough in the shadow of successful reciprocated love, then you wonder if you are even meant to exist. I am human just like any other. I have soul-deep beauty that is unique to only me. Why is that not worthy, and why do I have to suffer through the lack and the evidence right in front of my very own forsaken eyes?)

All I know is how to be wildly inefficient; (All I know is lack, absence, abandonment, etc., not real love or warmth. I wouldn’t even know what to do with it if it were handed to me plainly.)

I don’t know how to cut through this fog, so I breathe it in instead (I don’t know how to be effectively aerodynamic. I don’t know how to stop smoking as a temporary illusion of love. I don’t know how to quit the scraps handed to me. So, I smoke. I breathe it in instead. I trick my body with the false suffusion of love.)

like it could teach me the aptitude (a natural ability to do something) for accepting warmth without flinching. (As if illusion could ever equal truth. I simply do not know how to do this. We circle back to the idea of love as unjust violence and conviction as a declaration of guilt; the cigarette may warm my lungs and give me fleeting comfort, but if I were to try to hold its hand, I would merely be burned. I would flinch, and so I am guilty.)

I think I was built for losing. (The premise of the poem.)

And I don’t know what else to do with my hands except try to curate a similar conviction. But it always ends with tobacco-heavy lungs and fingers that smell like the evidence of my desperation.

I’m tired of pretending smoke can replace the love I never received as a child. How smooth the aerodynamics must be for a luckier child to grow up never questioning if being unloved equals do I even exist?

All I know is how to be wildly inefficient; I don’t know how to cut through this fog, so I breathe it in instead like it could teach me the aptitude for accepting warmth without flinching. I think I was built for losing.

This isn’t about some beautiful healing journey where I pick my bones up off the floor and reassemble them sturdier to brace for more petty endurance.

This isn’t about some holy becoming where I finally discovered that I could cradle my own heart with love rather than hostility. (It took two entire decades, and then some.)

This is about waiting for the train to come, and only memorizing the sound of thunder; studying the exact frequency of metal-on-metal when it arrives for someone else, and retaining only secondhand afterglow.

This is about stories passed down through centuries and the cumulation of stardust and DNA. I am made from love (or at least the illusion of it); that must mean I am deserving of reciprocated intimacy.

It is the prophecy I have been built upon. How unfair it is that you have not pursued it, or that I am not deserving of it until later in life (when I know it is quite possible to be twenty-three and adored on the account of witness testimony). I am the witness and the omission.

This is about the substantial weight of a lifetime without love. Of victim blaming the mirror for the ways love has never arrived clean. And hugging my own bloodstained hands to my chest as some poor display of decorum.

I swear it’s my own blood (I didn’t hurt anyone; not on purpose). But I would have been careful with your carpets and your heart if only you had been willing to risk the contamination.

This is about the simple fact that you are. just. not. here. I can’t fathom the discrepancies between us. You are telling me that I have been inexplicably devoted to the threadbare hope that you even exist and that you know how to love me with a specificity that feels authored, and I am not deserving as I am right now?

That I have waited lifetimes and fought wars for the hairline faith that your train is not derailed, but perhaps delayed? (I’m not sure if I have the undying conviction I’m supposed to have.)

And this is not all said in self-interest so much as self-awareness. If reciprocity is what I yearn for, then why haven’t I arrived at your station? If I have the capacity to love, then why haven’t I cradled you dear enough? (I swear I would’ve found you by now if only I had been given the manual to do so.)

But I am derived from the incapacities of those before me; of tremors and torchlight and tired hands. And maybe you are just as skeptical as I am about the possibility of being held in bloodstained hands. (What if we just keep facing away from one another?)

But even if this is true, that you are just as forsaken as I have been and have no instructions for the opposite, it doesn’t change the ways I have bled out over a longing that may never be met.

It doesn’t change anything. I have been welded to a station bench, on the backbone of evidence before me, of happy endings and unconditional love, yet the tracks have been barren and remain so. I am getting tired. I am getting cold. (I know emptiness better than I know my own hands.)

I might go missing before I ever get the chance to be known. This isn’t about you, but it will be because of you.

But love is a knife I never learned how to let go of. And if my hands are not bloodstained, then the blade is not sharp enough. If I am not cut open in your presence, then you are not looking closely. If I am not your victim, then you do not love me in a way I understand.

I confuse intensity with proof. I confuse harm with devotion. I have never trusted anything that didn’t leave a mark.

Maybe the love of my life could be myself if only I passed as a man, my dream body, something clean, something unquestioned, and became a published poet, my dream in life, proof that I was here, that I mattered long enough to be archived, and moved to Oregon, my dream home, the trees are allowed to be quiet and melancholic without apology, with the comfort of knowing I won. (I lost.)

Maybe winning was never the point. Maybe I just want witnesses. Someone to say, this counts as life and you can be loved anyway.

Maybe I’d be intriguing to someone who wants a trans poet who calls himself a pine tree. Because being weathered in a place like that could be blamed on storm clouds rather than the bones I had to drag here.

Maybe the love of my life is waiting for me amid rain-soaked pines. Where damage looks romantic, and pain has scenery.

I’d meet him in a bar or some shit, and he’d smell the heart rot in me, and I’d tell him, I know I look like I’ve been touched by the hands of a taxidermist, but it was me all along. I just needed to stay upright somehow. Preservation is ugly work.

And then he might try to show me the hands of something warm and alive. Real hands, the kind that don’t demand proof, or ask me to bleed just to be believed. And I’d gag on the audacity. He’d tell me, I love you, but it’s useless. You don’t believe in endings that don’t look like wounds. And I would have to agree.

Sometimes I miss the dirt. It didn’t need me to believe in it first. It was the only thing that ever knew how to hold me. It never asked me to be anything but heavy.

Bare (verb) — uncover and expose to view.

Do I bear it, or do I bare my soul, like a wound that keeps reopening in hopes it will catch the right fragment of light this time and look like stained glass instead of taxidermy?

Could I bare it, if I were as fragile as cathedral panes? Or do I bear it, and twitch in the dirt like roadkill that has already met the hands of God more than once?

There is no soft answer. Only what I carry and what I peel back with shaking hands.

Janie is married. There’s a house somewhere with her new last name on a mailbox. Mary is dating a man with two million followers, loved loudly and publicly.

Do not remind me of my loneliness. I do not want to know how in love you are. It is only a reminder of something that is unattainable for me.

And I know that number because Instagram made sure I did, because I always look, I never learn. Like a knife in the gut;

warm, instructive, lack lack lack. sharp, taunting, you’ll never measure up. twisting, gutting, the people who hurt you are doing so much better than you!! And I am just alone.

This is why I should have deleted the app years ago. Nothing holy ever lived there, unless the slow ritual of comparison, a shrine built from others’ milestones and my own absence, could be just as consecrating.

To be known the way you should is to put yourself through hell. Exposure masquerading as intimacy. Visibility that costs bone.

I cannot stand watching people I used to know receive everything I’ve been missing. Jesus Christ, it makes me want to go missing.

Like they were measured once and never doubted again.

So, I stand outside and shiver. Let the cold teach my fingers how to go numb. I burn my lungs with cigarette smoke.

Okay, maybe I lied when I said I quit nicotine. Self-destruction, to me, is as sentient as a pulse. Proof that I am still here. And still choosing harm because it feels familiar. Choosing to bear it.

GOD, I AM BEARING IT SO FUCKING WELL.

I stay awake until the wrong side of morning, pulse racing, convincing myself I’m dying, knowing damn well I engineered this panic with precision.

Is this my life? Is bearing it all it will ever be?

My sternum feels like it’s splitting, a seam ripper tearing right through the center of me with savage cacophonous intention. My chest staging a coup against this sickening, animal desire to be loved.

I bare everything anyway like an insensible organ donor. Take it, take whatever still works.

The heart rot never gave me a fighting chance. I’m already hollowed, and still, I bear it alone.

Or at least for the foreseeable future, which is how I talk to myself when I don’t want to lie.

The groundhog said six more weeks of winter and I wondered if I should give myself the same grace.

Six more weeks of ash and permission. Six more weeks of something to do with my hands. Six more weeks of not being brave.

Winter has always meant I am allowed to be worse.

I stood outside like a ritual I didn’t believe in anymore, cold biting through my sleeves, thinking about how relapse is never loud, just indelible.

That first drag after absence, nicotine spreading like a memory that never forgot me, my body lighting up as if it had been waiting in the dark with the porch light on.

I don’t want to talk about it.

Which is another way of saying I don’t know how to translate my indolence into something useful.

Standing still with a target on my back that feels familiar. The gun is always pointed. It’s not a matter of if, but when I choose to shoot.

I don’t belong here and everyone can tell. By the way I hover at the edges of rooms, by how winter keeps choosing me, by how quitting feels less like triumph and more like abandoning the only thing I never let go of in fear it would bite back.

So, now mildew-ridden lungs feel safer to endure than the potential love of a man? Don’t answer that.

Six more weeks of winter, the groundhog said. Six more weeks of wanting to disappear slowly. Six more weeks of deciding whether survival has to hurt this much. Of contemplating if death is really as scary as it’s made out to be. Of wondering how much longer until I am loved.

I was going to say “loved correctly,” but I think I’d take scraps at this point. Or not. I might gag on the emptiness in my lungs and decide the nicotine keeps me warmer than any arms around me ever did.

I dragged a cleaning cart behind me like penance, like a vow I don’t remember taking, like I’d been ordained into service without my consent. I don’t remember applying. I don’t remember agreeing. I only remember knowing that I had to clean something up, and believing, incorrectly, that I would be forgiven for it.

I remember searching for a dumpster and not knowing where it was, like I’d been hired by the universe to dispose of something and no one bothered to tell me where to put it. I believed in it the way people believe in confession, that if I found the right place to put everything I was carrying, I could finally stop. That there was a container big enough for the years I spent making myself palatable.

I pushed the cart through crowds of families and strangers, pausing in the open like a lost dog, looking around for a place big enough to swallow what I knew I had to leave behind. I wasn’t supposed to be here, but I kept pretending I was, a role I decided to perform that day because performance has always been safer than truth. People stared at me like I was speaking the wrong prayer out loud. Not cruelly, worse, like I was out of order. And they questioned me like a suspect, like I was invading their livelihood, and I must repent for the ways I’ve chosen to show up in the world.

Who are you?

Do you even work here?

What are you searching for?

Why are you dragging a cart full of trash behind you?

I didn’t know how to answer them. I didn’t even know why myself. I didn’t know how to say: I am trying to rid myself of something the world insists belongs to me. I am dragging the remains of a girl I was told to keep alive. I am tired of worshipping at an altar that only accepts my silence.

I didn’t understand their staring until I did, until I felt my body the way it must have looked to them: chest full like an accusation, hair long like something meant to soften a verdict, my voice tuned to someone else’s comfort. I was dressed like a compromise I never agreed to. I was still wearing a before the world refused to bury.

I kept walking because stopping would have required an explanation, and explanations have always been a kind of trial. I ignored their hungry impatience, offered half-answers, and watched them turn away unsatisfied with my unsaid truth in their mouths like a splinter.

I found my way into a building that looked like a rest stop along the interstate; fluorescent, hollow, transitional, bathrooms and echo, a mercy I hadn’t earned. The kind of place you’re only meant to pass through on the way to somewhere else. I pushed the cart inside like I could roll my life into a different shape under those lights.

There was a voice in my head telling me to replace the trash bags, to finish the work, to be useful, to keep things orderly so no one would ask what was wrong with me; the same voice that taught me obedience before language, the same voice that called endurance a virtue.

Something shifted there, quietly, no announcement. No one looked at me strangely. The air stopped asking questions. Men nodded at me like benediction, like they recognized me without needing a reason, like I was worth the passing greeting; a simple tilt of the chin, an unspoken we. And suddenly, I wasn’t visiting this body anymore. Suddenly, I wasn’t borrowing myself. The relief startled me with its simplicity.

As I stopped outside the bathroom doors, this critical juncture between who I was and who I could be, I knew I had to make a choice. But it wasn’t about which door to choose yet, not in this exact moment. It was about if I had the audacity to even make a choice at all.

I left the cart at the bathroom doors.

It felt like sacrilege, like abandoning an offering half-made, like leaving proof that I had been trying so hard to be good.

The world responded by rearranging itself.

The open space collapsed into a house preserved like doctrine: beige nostalgia, childhood under glass, rooms that remembered rules better than people. I was with boys I never grew up with but always believed in anyway; the ghost of a communion I missed by accident of birth. They felt familiar in the way hunger does, familiar in the way absence leaves a shape that snags the skin if you witness it too hard. We toured the space like it was history, like we were allowed to touch what used to hurt.

Upstairs, the hallway was long and dark, dressed as fear; fake, plastic bodies hanging like lessons, monsters made cheap enough to laugh at. I remember thinking I did not want to walk down that hallway alone. I have never trusted myself in the dark without witnesses. So, I waited for the others, like waiting has ever saved anyone.

We pushed through together like it was a haunted house, laughing and shoving each other, letting fear drain out through jokes. For a moment, I thought: maybe this is what it looks like when you belong. Maybe this is how it could have been if the math, and the stars, and fate had been kinder.

The doors were there again, commercial bathrooms abnormally placed at the end of the narrow hallway with a heavier gravity than before, one light burning like a final question. This wasn’t passing through anymore. This was choosing.

I stepped into the men’s room and felt terror rise anyway. Not because I was rejected, but because I wasn’t, because being allowed in doesn’t always feel like being worthy. I felt like I was trespassing inside my own future, like the world might suddenly remember its disgust and drag me right back out.

So, I left again.

Outside the doors, the house collapsed into storage; now it was a warehouse-like back room full of Halloween decorations, like a Spirit Halloween with all the lights shut off; fear stacked in aisles, bodies hanging, faces frozen into masks, the dark so thick it felt like something you could tear open with your hands if you got desperate enough. I couldn’t see. I could only feel the shapes of things meant to scare me; every shadow a possible threat, every corner an accusation.

I paced, wringing my hands, listening to the boys laughing in the bathroom like nothing was wrong, like the world was still bright for them, like they weren’t living the very life I would beg for on my knees. I couldn’t stay in the darkness. I couldn’t go back inside. I finally understood something older than language: No one is coming to save me.

So, I ran, arms raised like prayer, like defense. I ran through what was meant to stop me, shoved past figures, shoved through the dark like I could break it open with momentum. I learned something unforgivable there: the dark only works if you believe it deserves you.

And then I was out, back at the beach in the middle of the night; the ocean breathing, the boardwalk turning into a bridge curving over the water like a spine, LED lights stitched into the metal framework, humming like a promise no one could revoke, pretty in a way that felt undeserved. And the world was empty; no witness, no questions, no need to answer for what I was becoming.

The warm summer air lifted off the ocean and curled around me like a hug I didn’t know I needed. I ran over that bridge like I’d been released from something, like confession finally spoken without apology. I laughed. I watched the lights turn into streaks of color as I sprinted past. I spread my arms wide and let the wind hit my face like a blessing. For a moment, I was only motion, just breath and the quiet permission of my body carrying me forward. No one telling me what I was, no one asking for proof.

At the end of the bridge, daylight returned the way it always does: too bright, too crowded. The cart returned. The ritual resumed. I picked up trash like revelation does not require follow-through. And then, I found the clothes.

Memory does not ask permission. It just takes you by the throat.

My father died here. Not here-here, not buried in the dirt, but close enough to stain the place. Just the anticipatory grief of standing here, burning deep inside, choking back the smoke that demands to touch the air in fear it might make others cough, or worse, get a taste of real oxygen and ignite fully and uncontrollably burn every bridge in sight.

These were the clothes I was wearing when I learned that loss does not wait for you to be ready. I tried to keep moving because grief trained me to be efficient, because stopping felt indulgent. Then, the truth arrived fully formed: I am going home without him. This is the last place I will ever see him alive.

I fell to my knees in public and learned what the world will tolerate. Pain makes you legible. Collapse makes you credible. Only then did they look. Only then did I belong again, once I was nearly willing to let go of self-sovereignty.

After that, the dream turned punitive. Timelines blurred, places folded in on themselves, my head fuzzy like someone had been erasing me in real time. I searched because I knew something was missing, and I refused to let the world call it imaginary.

I knew I was searching for you, but I didn’t know who you were yet; only that you were someone I loved deeply in my past, and I lost you, and I’d been searching ever since in the way people search for a missing limb, in the way people search for a name that finally fits their mouth.

The longer I searched, the more worried everyone got. They didn’t know who you were. They didn’t know why you mattered. They started to talk to me like I was sick. They started trying to contain me like an oil spill. They didn’t believe you existed.

They put me in a high school with a fake body and a fake name like a sedative; familiar misery, acceptable despair. I stood on the steps while people passed and felt the lie shift sideways inside me like a sinkhole about to collapse.

This isn’t right.

This isn’t how life is supposed to feel.

I turned and ran. They chased, held me down like salvation could be forced, like compliance was care, but nothing could keep me from you this time. I knew you were out there. I knew I needed you now. I broke free and sprinted.

I ran through neighborhoods and past storefronts. I ran until the road tried to kill me. By the time I reached the railroad sign on the edge of the shoulder, the sky had quieted to a deep blue, and the crickets were waking up to sing like they were calling me home.

She was there, the girl I used to be, watching with the patience of someone who knew she was temporary, like she had been standing at a gravestone for years and was waiting for me to catch up to the funeral.

“Oh my god,” I gasped, hands on my knees, breathless with hope. “This is one of our places. I hope he’s here.”

The shoulder dropped off into a strange cliff, rocks stacked like scripture. I climbed onto a huge boulder overlooking the hill like I’d been told in another life to come here, like my bones remembered the way even when my mind kept going blank.

And there you were.

Crouched and curled in on yourself below the overhang, cowering like you were afraid of even the air touching your skin, small in a way that wasn’t weakness, but in the way something becomes when it’s forced to hide for too long.

I cried and fell to my knees on the rough rock. I called your name. You turned, confused, blinking at me like you weren’t sure who I was, like you weren’t sure you were allowed to be found, like you were shocked that someone could even see you at all.

“It’s Grace,” I said, a name we shared in the middle, a name I kept like bone. You looked at me like you knew you should know me, but you couldn’t place it. I kept that name for a reason despite the femininity dripping off it like old blood, because that’s what I always gave you: the grace to exist in any form and still be deserving of my worship, even in the middle of violent becoming.

“It’s Jonah,” I tried again, and your confusion deepened, like the future was too new to recognize, like you’d never heard that name because you’d never been allowed to choose it. Do you realize why I chose this name? Jonah means ‘dove,’ and doves symbolize peace, and when the world sees us as Jonah, we will finally be at peace for the very first time in this life. Because when I had finally baptized you as such and met you out loud in the mirror, every threat of possible extinction hooked into my body suddenly went quiet and slack.

I got desperate. I needed you to see me. You were already turning away; the old reflex reappearing, like you remembered the very few times the light hit your skin while choking on dirt, and you screamed into the soil, begging me to free you, but God, even I didn’t hear you sometimes. Turning away, like you couldn’t bear to watch the light fade again.

“It’s Jennie,” I cried, and it felt like tearing into my own chest and ripping my ribcage wide open, and begging the world to devour my vulnerability, but it finally stopped you. I watched your face change as recognition sank in, and then you were in my arms like a prayer answered too late. Our deadname means ‘fair,’ and I want to laugh at the irony in that, but instead I just hold you close because I have been gone for far too long, and I swear on names both dead and alive that I will never let you go again.

“I finally found you,” I sobbed into your shoulder. “I have been searching for you forever.”

You didn’t pull away when I said it. You didn’t ask me why it took so long. You just held on like someone who had already forgiven me before I learned how to ask, like you understood that survival is not a clean theology, and resurrection always arrives with dirt under its nails.

I felt the eyes on us then. The witnesses. The ones who had been following me through this dream with concern sharp enough to cut. They stood there looking at me like grief had finally loosened something in my brain, like I was kneeling in worship to nothing, like I was embarrassing myself for a phantom I invented to excuse my becoming.

That’s when it came back to me, the oldest rule of my body: They can’t see you.

They never did. Not when the boys’ bathroom felt like an illicit sacrament at nine years old, not when you first knocked on the inside of my ribs and spilled your truth messily all over the front porch at eleven, not when you went quiet to keep me alive, not even when you stood in the living room at twenty-two and said the words it took a decade to accept, feeling just as miniscule as you did the first time. They mistook your silence for absence. They called it imagination. Phase. Confusion. They taught me the vocabulary of doubt and handed it to me like scripture, and god, was I devout.

I turned back to them, the witnesses, the begrudging congregants, and laughed like a heretic who has finally stopped trying to convert anyone. “You made me think I was hallucinating him,” I told them. “You made me think the most faithful thing I have ever carried was a lie.”

They didn’t laugh. They didn’t soften. They just stared harder, waiting for collapse, waiting for the moment this would become tragic enough to justify their fear. But I was already past that part. I had knelt. I had named. I had gone back into the dark and returned with what was owed to me.

“Go on,” I said to you then, not to prove anything, not really, but because there is a kind of mercy in letting the world feel what it refuses to witness. “Show them you’re real.”

You stood without hesitation. No trembling, no shame, measured in voice cracks and needles, in hair abandoned on bathroom floors, and the slow recalibration of your body.

They feel you in my voice before they believe it. They feel you in the way my body rearranges gravity. They feel you in the way my name no longer fights me. They feel you long before they are willing to call you real.

And I no longer need them to.

I am both the body and the witness. I am the altar and the offering. I am the boy who learned to disappear as an act of love, and the man who returned to break that vow.

I did not imagine you. I protected you. And if there is a God who understands devotion, let Him choke on this truth: I would tear myself open if it meant you never had to beg from the dark again.

You are not a ghost. You are not a mistake. You are not a future hallucination I grew into for attention.

You are the reason I lived long enough to write this. You are the prayer that survived being misnamed. You are the peace I baptized myself into and refused to drown.

The dirt may still be bloodstained, but I have finally left it. I have finally found you.

I don’t feel like me, but I know I’m here. Almost like that feeling when you’ve been dreaming all night long, one long storyline after another, until the walls start pressing in, things look strange, and you realize, shit, this was all a dream.

And once you realize you’re dreaming, your brain wakes you up, like, hey, this isn’t right, this isn’t reality. I need stability, real breath and bone, real walls and autonomy.

Except in this darkness, there’s no automatic kick out of the warped dreamland. Or there is, but your consciousness keeps hitting a wall, like a battering ram that won’t breach.

So then, you’re stuck. Knowing you’re unconscious, but you can’t wake up. Walking through darkness with no gravity; no pain, no light, no nerve endings.

Every once in a while, I hear a voice echoing, like some faraway phone call, but the service keeps cutting out. Or like the forgotten scratchy intercom of a condemned building. I run through the darkness, trying to find it, but I lose it every time.

Dreams try to flicker in, like instead of the brain trying to reach for reality, it does the opposite, like it’s now safer to distract the falling apart with better memories; fake scenes orchestrated to sedate the knowledge that you’re stuck and you can’t wake up.

And you fall for them, because they look warmer than the darkness. And then it’s just a whole sickening cycle: falling into dreams for too long, realizing you’re unconscious, the brain trying to kick you out, then hitting a wall, then running through darkness knowing you’re stuck. Over and over.

And I know something is wrong. I can feel it even in my glitched-out state. Even though the body I am using to run through this darkness isn’t my physical one.

Something is off, and I don’t know what it is.

I get stuck in a cycle of dreams again. Moments back in my childhood home, classrooms, late nights in cars I shouldn’t be in, or even late nights in my own breathing in cigarette smoke like it’s oxygen.

When the battering ram hits and I get stuck in the darkness again, I hear another voice.

My grandma. I chase her, running like my life depends on it. And I find her flickering like a memory God doesn’t want me to witness.

She died sixteen months ago. I swear I can feel her arms like we’re both alive. No, you don’t understand. I can feel your touch, the ghost of you, wrapping around my broken body. But you’re not really here. Shit, it’s all a dream.

She disappears and the battering ram hits. It’s not reality, but it’s hard to not want it back; those moments of numbness and fleeting memory-warmth.

I’d give anything to be young and ignorant again.

Back when my mom was the safest person in the world and not the enemy, not the one whose favorite pastime is to test how many different ways my soul can be ripped out.

Back when my grandma was still alive, and her clock would chime in the middle of the night while I slept on the couch, like it was singing me to sleep instead of counting down every second closer to her demise. Back when watching someone get old meant they could somehow live forever, not that they were slowly learning how to abandon gravity. (Isn’t it really the opposite, though? Deadweight is gravity’s forte.) Back when death didn’t feel like something stalking the edge of every room.

Back when friends were just friends, and not the demons that keep you up at night, wondering when the evil set in and was plotted against you. Back when friendship bracelets were law and bodies were inexperienced in knife-in-the-back theology.

Back when I was still a sister and we were all just girls together. Back when I wasn’t the stranger in the middle of four other kids and they used to know my favorite color. Back when I wasn’t the black sheep, transgender, and trying to convince them I could still be a good brother. I’m still the same person you’ve always known. Please don’t look away.

Back when summer felt like a lifetime, and winters went by quickly. And the only worry was, Dad, can we go to Dairy Queen? Mom, can we play outside? Sisters, do you want to play tag or hide-and-seek?

Back when I thought love could be a fairytale and it wouldn’t be so goddamn hard for someone to stay. Back when romance novels were the epitome of love, and you really could just meet the love of your life on a random Tuesday and live happily ever after. Back when love meant ease instead of endurance.

And I need it back. I need it back. I need it back. I need it back.

But I know how this will end. All of my yesterdays will be stuck inside me, bent metal in my ribcage hitting absence and curling back in on itself. Over and over until my chest cavity becomes a labyrinth of rust and steel, and the memories reverbate like wind whistling through whale bones (because I swear my heart is just as big; god, isn’t that just more to break? Haven’t I already endured the weight of it? Haven’t others already deemed me too heavy to hold?)

I keep trying to ignore this ache to be loved, but it’s a loud train that passes by every day on this set schedule I know like the back of my hand. And I want to jump right in front of it. To die, or to gain the attention of others? Both are a kind of death I’m not particularly fond of, but the impact sounds like a nice change from this inadequate life I’ve been living. I’m becoming myself, yes, but that can only keep me warm for so long.

One of my poems went viral and I cried because I was seen. I was seen! But now the algorithm thinks I’m only worth less than a hundred views, and I feel sick. You know you’ve got abandonment issues when TikTok starts to feel like a toxic boyfriend, your worth tied to how long it takes to give back.

And you know you’ve got abandonment issues when you hesitate to bring home a stray cat because you don’t want to feel abandoned by your current cat you’ve had for years. (I know what being replaced feels like; please don’t think I’m doing that to you.)

And god, I’ve got issues. More than just abandonment (you’re going to leave. I just don’t know when). There’s this sickening longing that snakes through my body like electric eels, and I can feel the voltage in my pulse humming consistently.

I’ve never even watched Heated Rivalry (and I can’t because I might actually spiral so hard, I relapse in every sense of the word). Still, edits fill up my for you page, and the content has even snuck onto my Pinterest feed, and now it’s hard for me to touch either of them without feeling like life just isn’t worth living like I try to convince myself it is. Because all I feel is lack (lack, lack, lack, look at what you’re lacking!!!!).

I think I’m just tired of existing, and I hate that this feeling has latched itself back onto me because I promise I was doing so well. (Is being strong even worth it anymore? Stubbornness used to feel like I had the upperhand.) The sickening part about life actually getting better isn’t the anxious attachment you have to the past. It’s when the things that no longer hurt fade away and nothing is chaotic anymore, and you’re left with the crystal clear image of what’s actually wrong with you (this grotesque lingering feeling of grief and regret).

Because I always knew I’d die alone, but why is it so fucking loud now that I want a future for myself? (YOU’RE GONNA FUCKING DIE ALONE!) Hating myself used to be easy, but now all I do is hold my own heart in my hands like I’m something worth loving, and wait for someone else to notice how beautiful I can be when I bare my soul to the moths (they eat away at me slowly; they’re the only ones that are attracted to me).

And everything feels like a trigger now. I can’t go on social media and doomscroll, or I end up worse than when I started. I can only watch videos that feel “safe,” like someone cleaning out their closet, because surely I won’t see my own skeletons tucked between the sweaters of some girl in California, and maybe watching someone else get their life together might make me feel a little less unbearable (it doesn’t; I’m lying to every single one of you).

Part of me wants to rid myself of every app that feels unsafe, but how do you do that when that’s the only time you are seen? And if I get rid of that, then I’m only just digging a more isolated hole inside myself, and how will anyone find me then? (I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere at all.)

And the worst goddamn part is that love could sneak up on me and show up loud right now, and I still wouldn’t believe it, and I’d still turn it away at the door. (There’s no knocking. There’s no knocking. Leave me be.)

She said an angel came down and told her the sadness didn’t have to kill her. That she believed it would so deeply, so faithfully, that she let it. And now, in this life, she feels like part of her purpose is to remember that exact truth: the sadness doesn’t have to kill you.

I keep turning that over in my hands, wondering what else I’ve carried with me without knowing. What slipped through the cracks between lives and made a home in my bones. Because I really do wonder what I’ve been handed, and why the universe looked at the infinite versions of me and decided this was the lifetime (this body, this family, this level of awareness) where I would wake up and be conscious of myself inside myself. Why I am so aware of the ache, the wanting, the watching.

Maybe I was a king once. Maybe I was adored in a way that made the air feel warm when I entered a room, and now the echo of that love still rattles around inside me at night like a ghost I can’t reach. Maybe in this life I have to know what it’s like to be nothing. To be unseen. To be ordinary in the cruelest sense of the word. Maybe it’s a balancing of the scales, the universe correcting itself.

Maybe I was a broker, hoarding more than my share in shadowed rooms, palms always full, and now I have to know what it’s like to give and give and give until my hands are empty and shaking. Until generosity becomes muscle memory and need becomes a language I’m fluent in.

Maybe I was a god. Maybe I knew what it was like to be worshipped without question, to be prayed to, to be desired simply for existing. And now I have to kneel and beg for something as common, and as devastatingly rare, as love.

Or maybe it isn’t about balance. Maybe it’s karma.

Maybe I hurt too many people once (carelessly, quietly, the way you don’t realize you’re doing damage until you look back and see the bodies you stepped over just to survive). Maybe now I have to know what that feels like from the inside, to be the one always left behind, the one swallowing apologies that never come.

Maybe I was a terrible mother. Maybe my mother now was my child then, and time simply folded in on itself and reversed the roles without mercy. Maybe I failed her in ways I don’t remember, and now I’m learning what it’s like to reach for warmth and be met with sharp edges instead.

Maybe I was a lover who took devotion for granted. Maybe I was careless with hearts that trusted me, assuming they would always be there, assuming love was an endless resource. And now I have to learn what it’s like to love deeply and receive nothing but distance in return.

Maybe I was someone who never spoke up. Maybe I watched harm happen and stayed silent because it was easier, because it wasn’t technically my problem. And now I have to live with a throat that aches from words I never learned how to say in time.

Or maybe I am simply cursed to trek through each labyrinth of life with nothing but stubborn will strapped to my back. One cycle after another. Lifetime after lifetime. Always arriving with hope. Always leaving with empty hands. Always learning the same lesson in different rooms, under different names.

The sadness doesn’t have to kill you, but it will surely try. And if it does, I hope I’m loved in the next lifetime.

I was cursed with a mother who never learned how to love me without conditions, who scans every person I lean toward like she’s searching for a flaw she can name aloud, especially now that I’m a man who loves men. Cursed with a father who tries, in the way men like him do, but still calls me by a name that isn’t mine, daily, casually, never stopping to ask what my real name sounds like in my own mouth.

I was cursed with health anxiety while teaching my body how to become itself, needle in hand, testosterone blooming under my skin like something both holy and terrifying. Cursed with panic so violent it drags me into emergency rooms, fluorescent lights buzzing while I try to convince myself I’m not dying. Cursed with a body that will never quite catch up to the self-love I force down my throat to compensate for twenty-three years without anything resembling unconditional care.

I was cursed with sisters who will never call me their brother, a niece who will never say uncle, a best friend who says Jonah but still looks at me the way he always did, like he remembers the version of me he preferred. Like the change exhausts him. Like the slip of “she” when other people are around isn’t an accident, and I hear it every time.

And I was cursed with this sickening desire to be loved and hands that are just too short-staffed to manage it. Cursed with waking up nauseous, daily, because my mind is dragging a body forward that checked out years ago, and we still don’t know how to metabolize the idea of wanting to live. Cursed with that quiet question (when will it be over?) even when someone is touching me gently, even when they are trying to love me, even when I wish it didn’t feel like endurance.