Coraline Ismael Karim

I asked my father tonight what our ethnicity exactly was, and what seemed like an impossible discovery is now a concrete reality: we are Indian and Persian. The Indian threads stem from my grandmother who we, meaning my cousins and I, would gently call "Ma" because of her tender approach to us with her sweet voice and candy-like laugh, an adjacent exclamation to the West's Santa Claus yet better and infinitely realer. Ma passed away months after my grandfather Bapi (short for Bapaji because my cousin Alina trademarked the name when she was a toddler and was unable to fully pronounce the word, if my memory permits me so) ---on my father's side---passed only a few short months after my own brother did from, what I can remember, a strenuous blood swelling in his legs that caused such painful burning throughout his body because of the inflammation. He lived a long life, and I wish he could've lived indefinitely, as I believe the same for Ma. They died in their eighties. Ma, one may believe, died from the undiagnosable fate of heartbreak mixed with the alchemy of dementia. I didn't get the chance to say goodbye to Bapi, but I've always believed in reincarnation and its subtype of the afterlife. In a way, I have said goodbye to him as I have said hello to the winds and the sun and the pulling waves. I did, however, say goodbye to Ma, in a way, as a memory, as a reflection of someone she knew: my father. You see, I last saw her when in my previous effigy, as a man, and she was there sorting through leaflets of magazines that she misinterpreted as pictographs and video footage, pointing at a slim white model with perfect skin and telling me it was her and Bapi at temple, when she was young and beautiful (though she was always a beauty to us). This was only months before consuming my first pill of estrogen and testosterone's bane, Spironolactone, so I, weirdly, held a facade and likeness to my father, masculinized. She kept calling me by his name, Zauher, and told me she was so proud of all I, my father, had done in my, his, life. I saw the tears build in her glassy brown eyes, magnified behind her thick eyeglasses. She was so perfect. So beautiful within her imagination. Bits of the present seeping through, yes, calling for Bapi, yet it was a bittersweet grace, one may believe, for her mind's collapse to spare her from the tether of Bapi's passing. You see, I was not there to necessarily say goodbye to Ma, but for her to say goodbye to who she deemed fit for it. There was a keen lesson there I learned at the age of twenty, of the boundless gift that is empathy, something that should be so natural and subconscious like breathing or sleeping. You learn that you are not on this Earth for yourself but for others. For those within imagination and those outside of it.

It makes me laugh amidst tears to think of her. My Aunty Tima once told me how similar Ma and my father were, his portrayed stoicism a lie over the gentle caress of what he really is. Many misinterpreted him to be like Bapi, a man with a more sturdy, stubborn approach to people, yet he was lovable nonetheless to his grandchildren. Admittedly, he was tough on me, but it was deserved. I was a little spoiled shite. The reason my aunty said such a thing though is because it is true. My father, quiet in comfort and reserved in space, is ultimately a kind man. I fell in love with classical music because of him. He had a disc, I believe, he'd slot into his 2001 (I think that's the year) BMW SUV, and a lovely ensemble of strings played in the vehicle as we drove on the weekends for his work either delivering vitamins to his patients or going to his home. We were silent during the orchestra, yet we spoke along the tune, the soft chords and vibrating strings surrounding our ears. Most of my mannerisms derive from my father, my preference in silence and small crowds and the joy of quiet or reading and writing. My mother always saw me as an odd kid because I wasn't stereotypically "teenager", as in I didn't party or socialize much or drink alcohol like "the other kids". I was objectively the perfect kid, yet my absence of wanting to sleep with women drove her over the edge in labelling me a sinner and malefactor of Satan, though we won't get into that again.

As Ismaili Muslims we believe in reincarnation, though such a confounding ideology is like that of linguistics, I believe. It is translatable. It is communicative. It is secular and non-secular. It is a version of one's reality like Ma's magazines of models. Souls exist in all living things, no matter how small or obsolete one may perceive them to be, and such souls have infinite purpose, a purpose to transport love from one being to another. We exist purely on the exactification of love. My father's love was the silence within classical music. Ma's love was her laugh. Bapi's laugh was his lessons in my own self-sufficiency. My mother's, a reflection of the sins of her father. Love is never definitive, it can't be, it's impossible for it to be. It's relative to the living attachment in one's life. Love is as infinite as the life of one's soul. We can love ourselves or love the many, and such a love is still definable as love. I do not know you, dear reader, or, maybe, I do, and I will love you nonetheless. You may share such a love with me or its antithesis, and I will still love you. You may have once told me to never speak to you again, us both in tears, over the phone, with a promise to decide and reconsider ever speaking to me again, and no matter how much time passes, I will still love you all the same, infinitely more. I love you as I love my partner. I love you like I love the souls of my brother, my grandmother, my grandfather. We exist on this temporary plane of flesh not to waste time in disconnection but to value such limitations in love. In the rare permanence in sharing a hug or a kiss. In hearing the other's voice. A laugh. The warmth of a hand. While I know my soul will transcend to another body after my passing, whenever that may be, its current life, in my own, wishes to love. And if I never get that pleasure of hearing your laugh, your words flow out of those lips of yours, then I believe we will meet again in the next life. Maybe we'll be birds next time, singing to each other. Maybe we'll be those microscopic bears named "tardigrades" eating dead skin and floating in our own version of space, likely cannibalizing each other, as tardigrades do. Maybe you'll never see this. It's likely you've flushed me from your memory. This is all for you, I admit. In case we never speak again.

There is an ominous history on the deaths of writers. They never seem to ever find a perturbial happiness after finding their opus. There is a rumor that Edgar Allen Poe died after his last night of drinking at "The Horse You Came On" in Fells Point, his body found in a ditch covered in rainwater and, likely, passing sewage. This, though, the drinking part, at least, seems to be, in fact, an acclaimed rumor by the owner of said pub, sourced by Jeff from "History and Coffee", also in Fells Point. Tennessee Williams died from asphyxiation, though he had the privilege of living until the young age of seventy-one with the critical and legendary acclaim of A Streetcar Named Desire. I had studied the play in my undergrad under a Dr. Diecedue, and what I remember the most was Blanche's insecurity of her age and using shadows to mask her supposed wrinkles.

Who I find most curious is Sylvia Plath. She killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning via head in the oven. She battled with depression most of her life, even having spawn before her suicide. When I write, I fear to admit I do not write during spouts of happiness or joy. My writing is birthed from deep bouts of sadness and psychosis. It comes to fruition by manic episodes, longing of memories of another life, and thoughts. Thoughts, well, likely similar to Plath's. I do not have much to say this time. Humanity is parallel to monstrosity nowadays. Others feign morality out of convenience. The people of Palestine have been enduring an ongoing genocide for nineteen months. You once told me our lives were so similar, outside that Starbucks near home. I don't know how long I can do this for. Pretending. Always pretending. Such theatre that I have forgotten how to remove the mask.

Before my brother died he was dating a woman, who we shall call AK, and was madly in love with her. Or that is how I perceived their relationship to be. I first met AK when I walked into our living room at the dusty age of fifteen, two days without a shower, facial hair coarse, patchy, and smelling of dead skin and morbid teenage-adjacent detritus in a fecal-stained blue boxer brief, and she was there, watching TV while working on a project for her class as an elementary school teacher with colored markers and glitter glue on our second-hand sectional, and I, still not having mastered social queues as a neurodivergent kid, thought this was perfectly normal and not at all disrespectful to a guest in my mother's house. I had recently watched season two, episode five of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, and the convoluted, yet weirdly sensical, connection between neurodivergence and airline maintenance fascinated me. I have never gone into therapy for the direct diagnosis of autism, though I wonder if, possibly, I were to have spoken with a doctor and their specialty that I may have indeed been told I am on the spectrum. I think it's safe to say I am, more as a personal diagnosis given my mannerisms and hyperfixation on the actions of people and reacting precisely in tandem with their own mannerisms rather than naturally. Fielder talked with a specialist, if my memory allows me, about neurodivergent people "masking" their true characters to provide comfort and relative normalcy for non-neurodivergent people as a means to avoid confrontation from their own neurodivergence, something that is usually done by neurodivergent people who do not meet the stereotypical standards of an autistic person. I understand the hesitancy when one declares themselves as neurodivergent or autistic, a self-diagnosis, so have you. Still, it does give me my own sense of relative normalcy when looking back at my kid self, the attitudes, the reactions, the inability to understand how to act amongst family members, new friends, adults who weren't my parents, and even half-siblings who I had just met as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old who called me weird or a loser because I mumbled and paced around a wedding venue for an hour straight out of need to dissociate. Granted, I could have just been simply odd. I could also just not be good with crowds and people. Or, maybe, I was never a people person. I do not have to be inherently autistic or neurodivergent to act similarly to people on the spectrum. To me, I feel it more appropriate to receive a proper diagnosis from a professional before stating I myself am one on the spectrum. For all I know, I am simply insane. And that is okay!

For some time I called AK my sister, my family, both during her time with my brother and after his passing. Growing up in a city and town where most of the people you communicated and interacted with were either people who told you to act white---talk "proper" or dress with boat shoes, khaki shorts that stopped just above the knee, and golf shirts---or with people whose skin color matched my own but also fell under the same curse of acting subservient and washing away any of their ancestral culture. Like myself, my closest and best friend did not learn Spanish from our mothers. I cannot remember the exact reason as to why he didn't learn it, though given the fact his Mexican mother still had a thick Latin accent, barely spoke any English, and married a white man who left shortly after impregnating her with said best friend, I think it's safe to say it was for similar reasons like my own: our mothers did not want us speaking cohesive Spanish around white people. It would, simply said, make us look bad, in their eyes at least. I would tell my brother and AK many times growing up that I "hate white people". I believe I meant it every time. As a brown-skinned youth with an Arabic name and violently closeted I was not exactly treated well by the pale majority in my town. I, naturally, began to hate my monsters. AK thought I was joking every time I said this. That says something, given AK was white-skinned herself with what I presumed to be a common European and white name. A brown-skinned person hating their monsters was something more realistically laughable than altruistic to her. After my brother died, we became reluctantly closer. I was still closeted, though she secretly knew of my queer identity from my brother before he passed. She invited me over to her mother's house for their Jewish passover one year, and I was happy to go there. I'm chuckling while typing this, but I had just came from an Anytime Fitness with, I believe, an old friend helping me get swole, as the kids say, and I arrived at her mother's house in a pair of black gym shorts, an oversized black graphic tee, and a trucker's hat with a comically animated sad donkey on it. It was indeed a full house: her mother with her chemically straightened black hair, AK slouching, eyes red and swollen as only a few months have passed at this point from my brother's passing, and several members of their family.

This is where memory becomes dodgy. The wondrous mystique of memory is that it acts on its own accord in infinitum. We destroy what hurts us the most, especially in memory. I remember a bowl of matza ball soup, the homemade vegetable stock floating doughy balls of unlevened flour seasoned with the perfect blend of thyme, pepper, salt, maybe some MSG, who knows. I told AK's childhood friend LU, let's call her LU, it was delicious, especially for a vegan dish. It was. It was amazing. I had thirds. I am thankful for the loss of memory in this moment and many more. As one becomes more aware of their surroundings, they are forced to reckon with a past without information and supplement the absence with said newfound additions. You recall pictures of your brother in Israel, before that great sand-colored wall of prayer, flexing his back with the tattooed word "Familia" and his beloveds' names written beneath in Hebrew because AK told him how to spell your name in Hebrew. You remember the photo of him surrounded by AK's family in "Israel", in their settler-colonial household that was likely stolen by a Palestinian family. You remember all their smiles. How happy they looked. How happy he looked. You remember, and you wish to absolve such memories. And it happens. You forget so much with pain. I sometimes forget the faces of friends I used to have since childhood who I have not spoken to in years. Their faces appear in blur; their noses, mouths, eyes all a pale splodge. Sometimes, I force myself to see pictures of them hidden in the cavity of social profiles or albums to remind myself they ever even existed. I haven't seen AK's face in years, I believe. I struggle to visualize her now. I remember her long black straight hair. She told me she got her nose pierced with a black hoop ring because the school would have likely fired her if she shaved her head in commemoration of my brother and his buzzcut. After transitioning, I told AK one last time how much I hate white people. I couldn't tell you the context, though it was likely valid. She called me a racist. Maybe she called me a Jew hater, too, by saying such a thing. This was years ago, mind you, before my education of Palestine, though their plight remained all the same in that year, and the years before when my brother was in "Israel" with her and decades before that. She told me, "Not all white people are the same". She held such an adoration for my monsters and a distaste towards my own comment. How dare you?, she must have thought. I wonder if she is holding such logic for the Palestinian people. I wonder, today, if she holds reason for the mass genocide occurring to tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Arabic and Muslim and trans and queer and black people alike who have, for centuries, been propagandized to the masses to be vile animals and criminals and pedophiles and murderers. They're not all the same, I hope she is saying. Yet, I do not believe in such a projection of humanity from her. No matter what I told her, my struggles were not her own.

I was just eight when I first started playing Runescape, a massively multiplayer online role playing game based in a medieval, fantasy universe full of dragons, demons, magic, gods, and rusted tractors from a bygone era---our past. I've always loved fantasy growing up as a kid, especially when it involved creating stories from the infinite imagination of the child's mind. I first discovered Runescape at the local public library when my mother was going to community college in the same area; she'd drop me off at the library, tell me to go to the kids section (which had six box monitors and relative beige computers) and tell me to play. I think I'd work on browser games, specifically Stick Wars, this versus game of stick figures from gold miners to stick giants against AI.

I remember us growing up in poverty, my mother, brother and I. My father was, is, technically, a doctor, though he was reluctant in supporting us and rarely did. The only times he'd really part funds to us was when my mother threatened to reveal to his mistresses he was cheating on each of them with the other. My mother officially left my father when I was eight. I had spent a night with him and his girlfriend, of who he was dating for years and cheating on my mother with, at their condo in a wealthy part of Florida. I was using my dad's old Dell laptop to play Runescape, and I named my character "Lewewe1". My password? Well, my password was "Lewewe2". I was not the brightest child when it came to internet safety. I was doing a random event, of which at the time was not optional, where I had to save Molly by putting her evil twin sister in a schute. I got a DM (direct message for my older readers) in the game from a person saying his brother was looking for a "newb" account. According to him, his brother had a maxed character, level 123 to be exact, with high stats and an incredible bank. He said he'd happily give it to me if I gave him my account. I was ecstatic! I told him my password, and he actually didn't believe me. "Okay, be for real," he told me. I am! I responded in text. It was clearly a scam, and I lost my first ever Runescape account at the ripe age of eight. That was my first lesson of deception.

Telling a story is telling a lie. At least if it's fiction. My mom would bring me thrifted stuffed animals as a kid, and I'd create battlefields with them. I had a stuffed teddy bear and a stitched child with wool brown hair and white fabric skin who'd act as their own generals. They each had their own respective battalion: my brother's beanie babies, action figures I ripped out of my brother's pristine plastic boxes thinking they were meant to be open to play, and I'd use musical drumsticks as swords or staves, shaved-down pencils as wands or daggers or crossbows, and my mother's hoop earrings as tethers for the prisoners. I knew how to keep myself occupied during my mother's fights with my father. I'd became imbued in the dream of storytelling when she screamed slurs about his dark brown skin and Muslim name, or when he retaliated with "bitch", "cunt", "Spanish whore", or use sophisticatedwords like "sycophant" against her knowing her inability to fully understand the English language would frustrate her. Stories, in this sense, were a source of happiness.

I discovered Runescape from these two Asian brothers at the public library in the kids section. I couldn't tell you their names, I can just remember their faces. They spoke in Americanized accents and acted like the white kids who'd call me a "jihadist" when I began growing facial hair as a youth. The youngest of the two was ten, though he was in my grade because, according to him, "School ain't as fun as Runescape". The older one, I believe thirteen, was astute in Runescape technicalities, and he taught me the basics until his younger brother took the reign. The youngest always asked me for my account details, telling me he'd help level up my character whenever I wasn't at the library. There was a third player in their group, though, who wasn't present, the oldest of their escapades, probably sixteen, who loved to see me cry. He was a fat boy riddled with acne over his rough white skin and greasy black hair that flopped over his right eye like a botched My Chemical Romance cosplayer. The youngest brother would give the oldest my account details for the purpose of the destruction of my account. He would then change my password, and the youngest, who happily conspired with him, would tell me he had no idea how the man was able to get my account details. "Must've saw me type it in!" he said with a crooked smile. I believed him, of course. I was just eight and had still not learned from giving away Lewewe1 so easily. This was my second lesson in deception.

I was quite impressed with myself with the time I gave to Runescape, a game I still play frequently through its older variant named Old School Runescape. Just look at that pixelated, 2000s decorum of the website. It reminds you of a simpler time. A time when your biggest hardships were of mom and dad screaming at each other, of a time when the worst thing someone could do to you was hack your Runescape account and call you an idiot. A simpler time, yes. There are many moments in my current adult life when the simpler times come back to me. I think that's why I play this game, still. It allows me to get lost in a different world outside of our own. It let's me be free from the horrors of what is happening. The absence of my father. The tears of my mother. The death of my brother. The disconnection from childhood friends. Runescape in 2008 was a time of little fear and absolute fun. I miss such a time. I think this is why I write fantasy and science fiction. While such worlds and universes I create are inspired by the real and my own, they are still a falsified extension of what is. They allow me to escape the world we live in. It's not an original thing to say, I know, but it's true nonetheless. Sometimes, we need to pretend what is in our life isn't real at all, and the worlds we embrace ourselves to enter are infinitely truer.

I spoke with my oldest, closest friend yesterday. Him and I have been friends since we were twelve, and our friendship has grown into our own creed, a siblinghood, an understanding of each other in the sense of familial bonds. I had the privilege and pleasure of being one of Stoop Storytelling's Spoke and Word: Tales from the Bike Lane" storytellers this past Thursday. I told my friend I spoke of our childhood together, albeit briefly given the time constraint, but with a warming relishing that brought me to tears over the video call with him. We don't see each other very often in person given the fact he is currently in Belgium for work and I in America. We actually don't speak much either, though I do not wish for you, the reader, to perceive this as a monumental negative. My friend and I talk, usually over video, once every one to three months. Sometimes the reasons are of life and the inconvenience of distance. Other times it is the vagrant stupor of mental anguish that fills our minds from time to time. Yet he and I never fail to speak when either of us need it the most. We rely on each other in our darkest or happiest times. We speak of what victories we achieved and the need to share such moments with one another. The antithesis exists, too, naturally, as all forms of balance do. After telling him about my storytelling achievement---a personal achievement, really---I cried. These tears were a mixture, an alchemy of the sadness of our loss of childhood and the profound happiness that we as peculiar children have grown into brilliant people from our own hardships as brown people in a white, Conversative city in Florida.

It's a depressing humor thinking back on how we met. We were on the 8:20 AM school bus to our middle school, and my friend's route was before mine. The bus picked him and every other black and brown schoolkid at the apartment complex they lived in on a stroad called Walsingham Rd. The complex had the definition of a facade: a well-manicured painted exterior solely completed only in the most visible parts of the complex---the very front. Once one was to drive into the complex and past this facade, the complex became what was its original composure when my friend and his family had moved there: uncared for. The road's potholes became torn apart, the flora ripped up and cast aside, and in the very back of the complex where my friend lived, the grass was dry, brittle, and within patches of the most coarse and textured dirt one may ever feel in their palms. My friend will disagree when I say that he was not too fond of me upon our first meet in the bus. If I'll be entirely honest, he was in the right: I was a complete asshole and an entitled annoyance. Still, we initially bonded out of our physicalities, our brown skin a difference from the majority of white kids at our school, and eventually became brethren with each other, finding joy in anime, video games, and riding our teenage modes of transportation around the peninsula ten minutes west of us. The memories, naturally, are blurred, though I can see us riding down the nude bike lane, me in my cheap bike where the spokes rattled every turn and the handlebars would creak and he on his longboard that somehow rode over every crack and rock and sidewalk split without any fault or fear. We were simply kids. We had no fear of what was to come. We were given the rightful privilege of not knowing the future and the horrors to come. Whether those horrors were interpreted as work, car-dependency, climate apocalypse, American terrorism, genocide on indigenous peoples both now, in our childhood present, and the past before our first breaths, we did not know of such things. We were given the blessing and curse of blissful ignorance. And now, as my brain no longer grows and is halted for the rest of my life until it begins its ruthless decay, I see children on my miniature phone screen be genocided and killed and exploded by experimental American and Israeli genocidal bombs and weaponry all under the vile illusion of freedom and liberation of white supremacy. We witness the enactment of the horrifying "Gideon's Chariots" (of which I can't even find an appropriate citation because EVERY MEDIA OUTLET IS CONSTRUING THIS GENOCIDAL, ETHNIC CLEANSING OF GAZA AND PALESTINE AS A "MILITARY OFFENSIVE") and the appropriation of murder and destruction onto Palestinian men, women, the elderly, and children, which therefore grants admission to destroy ANY ethnic minority and ALL minorities that trickle down the white supremacy ladder. I do not even know where to start about the ongoing genocide of other parts of Palestine, of Rafah, of the West Bank, because the attention, naturally, is on Gaza. We are witnessing people of color, of Central America, of South America, of non-European descent be bagged over the head and taken from the families by the Ku Klux Klan AKA the FBI, HSA, ICE. We are watching a brain-dead black woman be experimented on as a bloody incubator! All the while we witness white liberal democrats most poised efforts be reposting their support for disliking Donald J. Trump, or, most commonly, their entire silence on the atrocities occuring. I am so frustrated. I am beyond anger because it is now undefined horror and sadness. If there is a god, he is no woman of melanin, for such an abstract would not allow such a world to be manufactured by its creations. Our god that overseers and whips us into being is a white, soulless entity overjoyed by the very machinations that mirror him. This new reich of America, the fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh, have all been in the making since the inception of empires and this one in particular. I asked my friend, "When did you think you became radicalized?" and I struggle to remember his response. I struggle to remember my own. Were we radicalized before our own thoughts could even be conceived because since our very births this country and world, from our very first breaths, began to discriminate us even as babbling, crying babies? Shame. Shame on these corporate and billionaire entities for what they are doing to our world and the very indigenous peoples who have maintained its survival for ages. Shame on the very people, the black and brown and asian and non-white folk who participate in the willful silence and appropriation of this country's ineptitude and infidelity of the most vulnerable and most broken. I hope to not see the day when the doom wreaks its slow and flaying madness onto our world. The parasites be damned.

In American schooling we have grades and public school curriculum that is purposefully inferior to private schooling due to our classist and racist system. My second grade experience was one of mostly prejudice. My teacher at the time, Mrs. Gulf, was not too fond of me not because of who I was but by who she associated me with: my brother. He was also her student when he was eight years old and in second grade. The first thing she told me was, "I hope you know what not to be". It's a bizarre thing to tell a child of that age given the presumptions of such an age group in certain circumstances where we are told we do not know what we know, such as sexuality apart from heterosexuality or gender apart from the given binary at birth, yet we automatically must know how to decipher our attitudes and interactions and verbalizations in public settings from our own family and cultures to grant comfort to the lady teacher named Mrs. Gulf. Mrs. Gulf was a big beautiful woman, a BBW as some may say, and she had a son in my brother's grade, which was eighth, and she told me she didn't like the examples my brother set for her son. Odd. As far as I knew at that age, my brother's examples were of rap, hanging with his black friends, and spouting about Fidel Castro. Remember, now, I was eight. These details mattered very little to me. I just wanted to go home and eat my Ritz Cheddar Cheese Crackers and snack on my several Pizza Rolls and, maybe, one or two Hot Pockets if I were still hungry. When teachers and adults such as Mrs. Gulf force such a weight of responsibility onto an eight-year-old, our worlds seem infinitely heavier thus forcing our psyche to equalize their priorities with our own. In other words, food make me feel better.

Two days ago was the forty-year remembrance of the 1985 MOVE bombing by the FBI and police department of Philadelphia. I am remiss to say the first time I heard about this was just one or two years ago. America and its government finds so much joy in teaching their youth to hate themselves and hate the world because this very government hates those who project happiness and unity and community. The MOVE family were black people of solidarity and liberation. And the terrorist American government and violent police system who murdered and destroyed hundreds of lives and homes would rather you focus on fabricated "terrorism" and "criminals" from outside of the country and within this one, too, as long as they are not white-skinned and wealthy. Once in second grade, a boy named Trey, with slicked-back gel-blonde hair, a tanned face with a single mole beneath his nose, and southern Conservative parents---his mother the P.E. teacher and his father a businessman or lawyer, if I remember correctly---had cursed in the classroom one day. He said, "Fuck" or "Shit", something perceived as derivitive by white folks. Mrs. Gulf, with her own fascination between my brother and I, asked who said the word after raising her head from her desk of papers and Blackberry phone. Well, Trey pointed at me, "[She] said it, Mrs. Gulf!" We're only eight, after all, the lesson of defending our neighbor and our peer has yet to be taught. And, well, I was a quiet, a well-mannered child who didn't say much out of fear of getting in trouble. That didn't matter to Mrs. Gulf, you see. To her, the blood of my brother ran through my veins, and I was no different from him. She walked over to me, this tower of a BBW, and in an unfamiliar, dark voice, she said, "I know your brother teaches you these words, but it doesn't give you any excuse to say them in my class." It didn't matter that I said it wasn't me. She had enough evidence from her prejudice to solidify I did such an act. And so, I had to sit in the corner for the rest of the day, staring at the two collapsing walls and the black shadowed line that ran down between them.

When I write, I've taught myself to write at least three drafts before deciding on a final product. Just recently, I began working on the second draft of Bian Lian and decided, after feedback from a professor, to both take her advice and change the trajectory of the story. Instead of the protagonist Alejandro being perceived as inherently evil or abusive, he is flawed and stuck. Previously he raped a trans woman and gaslit his wife into thinking nothing is going on in the house when she is gone. Now, this edified trans woman, who still remains unnamed, has more humanity to her, and it to him. They are familiar with each other, dare I say in love, though she is, ultimately, a play thing for him, a temporance, and his wife will always be his at home, in their bed, waiting for him. To Alejandro, his wife is a safety, a luxury, that he knows will be able to have a future with. To many with this life, trans women are not meant to be true lovers but experiments of sexuality. Trans women, to this archetype, are not people. They are things. Toys. Pleasure pals. Dolls to play with, rip apart, and walk away from when you're bored.

I visited Florida these past several days for personal matters. The reasons of my doing so were positive and joyful to begin with, though such an activity ended in exhaustion. Relativity made way to the realities that be, and my own personal reflection onto this escapade was ultimately a negative one. Place has quite an impact on a person. It can turn them turbulent, wishing for a sporadic multitude onto all surrounding them, or create serenity, allowing them to find a new or familiar inner peace unbeknownst to them long ago. For reasons of this being plastered onto a public, digital lexicon for strangers and friends to read, I will withhold the specifics. Although, I feel it necessary to speak on the experience of returning to the place I once called home, to interacting with persons I once saw as equals and who now perceive me as a lesser being either by the shade of my skin or the facade I hold truth to.

There was, at one point on my trip, where the breaking dam of thoughts and feelings made way onto the world of my own mania, but, alas, such things have gone mute. I find myself on the topic of place, now, because I was made and unmade and made again within Florida. Florida, to me, is a violent, wicked hellscape. It is a land of variety outside a singular majority. It is a world caged by mirrors and the silent screams of those most in suffering. I did not want to re-visit Florida, no, if it were up to me I'd sooner be chain by a ceiling, a tether or noose clinging to my neck until the black bruising left me in a violent gasp of undersea air. No, Florida and I were never companions. We were reluctant fellows in a parasitic relationship, Florida being the parasite and myself being the mad cow soon to writhe with disease.

I had initially written more past the previous paragraph, but the laptop I wrote on had crashed and is now no longer serviceable. I will take such a thing as a sign. I will, however, finish this note on this: my hatred for Florida is entirely subjective and connected to ill content. My mother, you see, has schizophrenia and violent episodes of psychosis. She relies on Christian faith not necessarily as a tool for growth and inflection but deflection. She hides her past with shades of religion and finds resolve in the arrogance of such blissful ignorance. To this day, my mother refuses to accept my Muslim identity. She gets angry and begins to shout and scream if I dare say such a thing. She tells me I was raised Christian and am Christian no matter the circumstance. It is an ironic thing given the fact when I began my transition she said something similar about my being a man no matter what I attempted to change. The words may differ yet their meanings remain. I have come to realize I do not hate Florida, not objectively. It is a beautiful place with magnificent flora, fauna, and cultures. Although, unfortunately, my mother loves it. And my subconscious acts as the antithesis of my mother's love. What she has come to love, I come to despise. She adores Florida. She loves white people. She loves cars and the vain wealth they procure. She loves the beach and the burnt elderly tanning over their foldable chairs. She loves the children she substitutes for. She loves her lawyer who won millions in a wrongful death settlement for my brother. This latter fact she continues to pretend never happened, and she maintains this idea. How I know, well, she made the mistake of giving me the same lawyer's number after my partner was hit by a car and needed counsel for his own legal settlement. After I began asking questions, well, she was quick to tell the lawyer to let us know she can no longer help us and stopped answering my inquiries.

My mother is a flawed person. She grew up in poverty and raised my brother and I in it, too. We knew nothing but financial troubles and still made a life out of it. Her current wealth is of blood and grief, of the loss of her favorite child and the remains of the bastard that brings her to tears because of her transition and feminine presentation. My mother does not wish for me to be a woman. She continues to urge me to dress in a suit, wear my hair up and hidden, and to hide any and all forms of self-identity that I am entitled to. This is how she raised us. She raised us without identity. My mother does not identify as an Ecuadorian woman. Rather, she claims herself as a Christian woman, as if the moniker itself is an ethnicity and culture. She raised my brother and I as Christian boys, and if anyone dared ask us of our backgrounds, she would say we came from Europeans. She wanted so badly for us to be seen as a respectable white family when I was dark-skinned and Arabic named, and my brother was light-skinned with thick curls and spoke perfect Spanish. Yet, I hoped she had changed, somehow, to this very day. But I fear that is not the case. She asked me, after I tried so hard to tell her this world is one of racism and Islamophobia, why she hasn't suffered as I have? I don't know how she managed to come to the conclusion that her and I are the same people. In some way, it explains a lot given her severe attachment to wanting me to spend every waking moment with her. So, I told her we aren't the same people. And it drove her mad hearing those words. I wish I could say why this verbalization of difference in identity created anguish in her, but I am not her therapist. It also saddens me to know she will never partake in such mental medicine. Christ will always be her doctor, lover, facilitator, and mediator. I pray for the day she comes to her senses, though she has been given decades to come to. Inshallah.

Yesterday, I received my nth job rejection out of around 300 or so applications in Baltimore. Today, I also had another rejection to a litmag due to the story not matching the theme or tone of said magazine. The latter is understandable---my writing is not for the majority. It's usually violent and with many portents of body horror. I focus so much on the dark aspects of life, whether it be of a city one lives in or their own physicality. Although, what some label as body horror I perceive as the real. Word choice defines a tone, yes, but why something must be considered body horror when it's simply an existence of matter seen in a less lax version is confounding to me. One of my professors told me in his response to my final portfolio that I revel in the grossness of detail, yet I should pay mind to the beauty of such things, too. Such feedback had me thinking of the truth in the comment. I admit, I sometimes forget the beauty of human vanity, albeit I fail to find much of it. What makes a human beautiful is not inherently human rather the beauty surrounding them, or so I like to believe. Beauty is inspired by outward sources, from real beautiful subjects such as the pseudo-cerulean sea or the gradient petals of a flowerbush. Strip a human nude, and the idea of beauty becomes falsified. That is why we adorn ourselves in jewelry, clothes, makeup. We are as beautiful as a newborn, though I write this adjective as a derivitive rather than complementary.

So, what does rejection have to do with this exhaustion of my feelings, my thoughts of the day. I tell myself such a concept is natural, as is the human body, that it is expected like the sun rising and falling every day and night. Even though we expect such an occurrence, a predictable and common sort, it still has the capacity to draw negative emotion, distress upon the mind, because ultimately such a transition of the sun's position or the rejection of another vocation may cause turmoil to even the most capable of a schedule. Still, I sometimes wonder how such rejections can be so commonplace for me. Out of three hundred applications, only two have responded for interview. Admittedly, one was willing to hire me, though the commute was an hour and a half, the pay almost seventeen an hour, and the expected work hours would be sporadic with no compensation for travel or benefits. Desperation should not be cause for financial safety, though for some it is. It is not them who should be at fault for such a mindset. This economy and its capitalist approach force it unto those willing to work to their bone for a sense of normalcy. The second went as far as an interview. This was months ago, mind you, and the conversation went very well might I say. Alas, I was rejected. It was likely for the best. Two out of three-hundred, gods. At some point, you wonder. You are qualified, sometimes overqualified, for the position you are interested in, yet there are countless rejections. There is so much to blame. This excuse for a government. The dependency on artificial "intelligence" to filter through resumes---are they a man, a woman, is their name easy to pronounce to the American settler or is it far too syllabic for the European tongue. And once they do feel compelled to look past such variables, there comes the background check and seeing the peculiar legal name and gender change that came before your current, real moniker. Such a thing makes an employer ask themselves if hiring such a variable candidate is worth the time and management. They believe we as transgender people are too difficult to employ, that we are debilitated because of our identity. Such thoughts are inherently ableist. And if by some chance we do get hired, the employer expects us to be entirely grateful and willing to kneel before every bequest because they "did you a favor". My last vocation, my first week in working there I was told, by the manager who hired me, that she chose me because I spoke Spanish and no other reason. She asked me, after being hired, if I knew the English alphabet and was ecstatic when I wrote an affluent sentence within an email. It was a bizarre thing to be told by a white, blue-eyed lady with blonde-dyed hair and being a self-proclaimed liberal democrat. Good for you, I say! Bravo! I will send an edible arrangement to congratulate your accomplishment. It's safe to say I was their diversity hire. It's Florida. A minority with my name does not get hired for their skill in a white workplace rather for the presentation of their personhood. What they are when they're nude. The perceived beauty of what they wear; their name, their skin color, their accent or the languages they speak.

I wonder what theme and tone the editor took from my submission of this litmag. Was it dark? Was it abhorrent? I was beautifying the common rat in Baltimore after it died beneath a cherry blossom tree. I wonder, too, if my name causes friction amongst employers seeking a candidate for their team. Does my name strike discomfort amongst them? Activate a prejudice, mayhaps? The Arabic peoples are being willfully genocided after all. It is no longer a blind, avoided occurrence. And such people hold beauty, even in death, do they not? They become martyrs in their blood. Their silence screams songs. What the hell is beauty, then? What is beautiful and what is disgusting? I never understood such concepts. It's an entirely subjective thing to tell another to understand. My beauty is your disgust, and vice versa. The aged, weighing body, to me, is a magnificent thing, like the knotted, gnarled fur of a gray aged rat scurrying over cobbled streets. They are beautiful and wondrous to me. Yet, to another, they are vastly disgusting. All this says about the opposing subjects is what their perspectives are onto people themselves, that the clothes that cover the beauty are what makes beauty. Such a sad mentality. I feel sorry for such beings who hold such weight for the disembodied material.

V

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Admittedly, I did not do much today. I say this and realize I did, in fact, do something, at least, for the better of my health. That action is the act of participating in therapy. I will not burden you with the details, for they are for myself and the tether of my thoughts. I began reading Richard Peaver's translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and in his foreword he writes, "Once terror is identified with the world, it becomes invisible" (xix). It comes as no surprise when Peaver contextualizes this quote as this trope not being familiar to just the twentieth-century and the Soviet-censorship from it; the brevity of said quote holds true to centuries before, this very moment in geopolitical history, and, likely, centuries beyond our own when we are merely scorched bone and dry dust from the inevitable doom of the toll our earth has taken from human infection. I'm not far into the novel. In all honesty, I'm not much of a fast reader, my eyes dart between words on the pages and the world around me in most scenarios. Though, I find it easiest to concentrate when within scattered noise, like a packed restaurant or a cafe where the espresso machine is constantly steaming milk. What a privilege it is to say this, the act of concentration within confined, safe spaces. I feel so powerless at times, my perceived inability to do what I believe I think must be done placating a temporary depression onto my soul when given myself brief moments of respite, away from my meager distractions of cycling or staring into a book. Maybe that in of itself is an act of exposing my own power. We aren't truly powerless, we have just been taught from very early ages that we are, regardless of our belief systems or identities. Such a mentality is the success of capitalism, of the very reason why many of us and our immigrant mothers and fathers and parents have toiled the very American soil to create this ridiculous country into the apparent and real fascist state it has been driven to become for many, many years. I will not say who told me this, not that it is new information or an original ideology, and I know I will not remember their words verbatim, but resistance and the freedom of the oppressed from their oppressor does not come from sitting idly and without violence. Trans rights did not come to fruition by the lack of a thrown object by a black trans woman, Marsha "Pay It No Mind" Johnson, rather by the actuation of it. We must remember this and cement such a history directly into our hearts and minds.

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Smile, Baby

Monday, May 5, 2025

Today is another monetized, empty-hearted holiday where pseudo-culture participants with fair skin wear sombreros and eat their jarred salsa and packaged tortilla chips from the chain grocery store to feel enlightened. Regardless, there is a more important, real culture being devasted and genocided that we must not lay our eyes from. Yesterday night I had the privilege and pleasure of going to the 2640 Space in Baltimore to watch the screening of The Encampments with fellow comrades and likeminded liberators. Words won't do it justice for how necessary this screening is to be viewed by all parties of the world, especially those continuously avoiding such avenues of documentation of the genocide. For that, I will not summarize the screening but simply share that it further educated my perspective on the cause and taught me more of the power of the student and the power of the oppressed and the power of the unified mind. What I'd like to take from it specifically is the common trope of the undeserved smile and happiness of the victim. This authoritarian idea where if we as liberators, as protestors, are smiling and cheering for a cause we wholeheartedly believe in, such as the true liberation of an oppressed and genocided people from an apartheid entity, then we therefore do not deserve to smile because we should be writhing in tears and pain and sorrow. The latter is true, still, within our hearts, though we do not survive for the others' sakes by drowning in sorrow for that mentality ends in the ultimate victory of the powers that control our lives. Resorting to individualism, the idea that is what can I, as a single person, do? or if it does not affect me, then I am safe from all manners will end in the defeat of the people and the victory of the powerful. We must remember Pastor Martin Niemöller's "First They Came". We must use its poetic verses and reform it for every setting, whether it be for Palestinians, for trans people, for people of color, for service workers, for Africans, for South America, for the very people who suffer under the boots of the authority.

I highly recommend reading Mohammed El-Kurd's Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal because it has the translatory ability of teaching us the true infantilization of the victim to the masses; in other words, how do those in power, the media, the rich, make us believe in the comfort of witnessing the victim in their martyrdom. El-Kurd writes, "Resistance, in [the mainstream media's] case, meant something profane, disgraceful, not suitable for readers. Their victimhood was not a perfect victimhood, so they were not offered a spot in the LA Times" (El-Kurd 63). He then follows this by showcasing the "rightful" resistance of Ukranian rebel fighters in media outlets. I leave it to you, the reader, the understand why that is the case. As a Muslim trans woman who grew up being perceived as an Arabic Muslim heterosexual man, my victimhood was nothing close to the genocide of Palestinians. Still, I experienced my own version of white American oppression in being called a jihadist, a terrorist, a woman-raper (an irony given I was a closeted transgender woman with a massive attraction to men and masculinity), and when the Pulse Nightclub Shooting occurred, these slurs and attacks on my person became even more seemingly justified in the agitators' eyes. Because of the massive lack of victimization for black and brown people, especially those of Arabic and Muslim demographics, me being a victim was not possible. El-Kurd writes similarly about the native never being entitled to such victimhoods because they were never portrayed as deserving of humanity: "This misplaced focus insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and basic rights" (91). Before my transition, I came out, initially, as a gay man. I wore feminine clothing, dresses, wigs, makeup, yet I did not feel sublime in my personhood. I was still belittled, attacked, berated, and talked down on in every avenue because of my new persona. This applies to any portent of femininity, not just the homosexual Muslim man's or man-identified. Like skin color and language and culture in Palestine, femininity is the denunciation of patriarchal power. It is the direct oppositionary force as well as the intertwined and necessary balancing force that curates the world we live in. Although, femininity is a grace, it is a beauty, it is the act of freedom for the self that scares such a world built upon the white patriarchy. El-Kurd's Perfect Victims continues this parallel between the genocide and oppression of Palestinians and the oppression and vilification of many minority groups, especially immigrants of color and transgender people: "[Israel has] the tools to transform [myths of Palestinians being monsters] into a macabre reality, much like they have done in the besieged Gaza Strip. I only care about their dreams because they have taken them to the Knesset" (198). El-Kurd cites a Kwame Ture quote about the difference between wanting to lynch a black man and having the power to do so.

So, what is the parallel I am bringing as an Arabic Muslim trans woman to the genocide of Palestine. The Palestinian cause and their liberation is the liberation for all under oppression---this is a cold and hard truth. The trans woman in America, in England, in the restroom and in the public space each fear for her lives as the authority that exists around us continues to vilify our womanhoods and force us into submissive fear. Remember the Pastor's quote. First, they came for trans people because we are an easy minority to target and subjugate. We are small, complex, free beings. We unmake the maker's mold onto our bodies and create our own version. We use our own versions of femininity, masculinity, the non-conforming to find bliss within ourselves. We destroy stereotypes with every second lived, every smile made, every laughter sprouted from the basins of our mouths. And that pisses the authority off. That angers the misogynist. It belittles their small views on the world, on women, on people of color, on queer folk, on everything that isn't white and a man. Then, they came for the immigrants, those with a skin tone darker than fair with accents like the romance of sea water clashing into sand and bachata. They couldn't have done this without the media legitimizing the deportation of pro-Palestinian voices, an act that was planted long into the Biden presidency from his administration's constant leniency of the genocide. This capitalist country acts as if the two sides of its coins are different, but they are not. They serve the same purpose: to blind and stoke the flames of fear. We must abstain from the generalizations of the victim, of who we believe deserves to exist as a minority. I speak directly to you now. Maybe you hold prejudice for the Palestinian. Maybe you hold it for the feminine transgender woman of color. In my own experience, my laughter and smile has been responded negatively by those with white skin and being transgender and lesbian. The same people who grew into being perceived as white, heterosexual cis men with privilege and rich parents. Now, with their true identities as women, they see my smiles as a direct attack onto their lives. I feel sorry for them, for you if that is who you are. Renounce those generalizations of what the perfect transgender woman victim is. We each deserve to smile and to love and to laugh however our lives see fit. And so do you. Do not strike me down because we are similar, but love me as I wish to love you. You are loved, dear one, with all the fibrous womanhood you deserve. You are loved. You are so loved. I love you.

Source(s): El-Kurd, M. (2025). Perfect victims: And the Politics of Appeal.

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The Right to Splendor

Saturday, May 3, 2025

We each deserve the right to smile, to dance beneath the blazing sun, jumping through cold water sprinklers over muddied grass. It is our right as thinking beings to be granted moments of peace and serenity when many in power grit their teeth at even the thought of those in labor and service resting longer than the time given. Today, I was enamored in happiness. I rode my bicycle to Bikemore's Bikepacking 101 Workshop early in the morn, beads of sweat falling onto my black camisole, shrunken gym shorts I wore riding up into my nethers. Still, even in my lackluster appearance, I found joy in going to the presentation. To me, riding a bicycle is like sipping the creamiest drizzle of opium. It is like inhaling a long puff of marijuana, of herbal dopamine. While the event itself was concluding the wonders of bicycling through forests and bear land, I was smiling, giddy, even, in the fact that I had just biked thirty long and heat-filled and sun-shined minutes to an event where likeminded bike-lovers were, too.

A member of my bicycling escapades, of my "bike fam"--or so I like to call them--was there, too. Out of respect for his identity, and my clearly radical politics potentially troubling his professional life, I will refer to him as WOW. WOW planned on going to both the Mt. Vernon Flower Mart and the American Visionary Art Museum's Kinetic Sculpture Race around Baltimore City. I'll be honest: the day was sublime. We rode through the mart, speaking to non-profits and pottery-artists and flower-lovers alike. I ate a $20 Indian food combo, the server recognizing me from the day before, his kind voice and bright eyes a welcome sight from any person. We then rode to Patterson Park and met up with my two Anime friends D & M, clapping and laughing along to each of the brilliantly defined and sculpted kinetic art riding through the trails. No matter how much the sun sunk into my body, exhausting every fiber of my being, I could not help but cheer with all the other smiling faces within the event. It was a dream. It was a reminder of the love people have, the love of creation and each other. A variety of persons were here, and each of them were held in the splendor riding before us. Gods. Today was a lovely day. We each deserve that moment. To be held within a lovely day, with each other, in love and in care.

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The World is on Fire

Friday, May 2, 2025

A bird died in my hands today. It was a small, helpless creature I found on the sidewalk walking my dog, a sidewalk I rarely ever walk him over. I needed to take a detour, the original sidewalk meters ahead of me sporting a dogwalker who seemed all too comfortable with her world. Its feathers were brown-spotted, its breathing frantic, and its toes---I feel remise calling them talons---were splayed outwards. It looked paralyzed. Its beak was planted on the warm cement ground, hidden beneath the shade of the giant tree's canopy above us. Its body was arched upwards, like it had been trying so badly to lift itself without success. I couldn't feel its warmth. If anything, the lingering heat surrounding us was the warmth I felt, yet this bird felt like nothing. It was helpless, and I felt useless in my inability to heal anything. I stroked its spine, expecting the worse, hoping for the best. I asked it to fly, to find something to push it forward, but my words, English and indiscernible to their minds, did nothing. I felt like a child again, in her dreams wishing for a better world. I don't know how the babe got in such a position to die, how something that flies and sings beneath the blue sky it calls home was struck down to this pitiful cement sidewalk. A granular sidewalk, hard and unnerving to my bare flesh when I knelt down to comfort its last breath. My dog, a natural idiot, mistook it as food, the smell of death and rot and garbage parallel to his kibble dinner. That says a lot of the kibble dinner he eats. He held the bird in his mouth for just a second, less than one I'd hope, before I screamed for him to drop it. It happened so quickly, his jaw snapping over the babe, his simultaneous release of it, and the bird's beak was wide and open, silently screaming, its bosom heaving even more than before. We're in a gentrified residential neighborhood and no one is around us on this Friday morning. It's alive, but I believe its heart gave out after witnessing the darkness of a giant's maw. I was furious at the attempt by my dog, its idiocy and canine senses colluding all too successfully. It died in my hands, its breathing becoming smoother, slower, mute. Birds just like it sang around us. They flew past our faces and its black-beady eyes were still. It didn't feel right to leave it on the sidewalk, a place where giants crush the worlds hidden between the cracks. So, I rested the babe in a flowerbed beside us, tried my best to close its eyes without damaging it anymore than my dog did, and left.

Yesterday was May Day, and I marched for Palestine in Baltimore. I didn't feel it necessary to cover myself, my tattoos and facade all exposed, though it was mostly because I felt it unnecessary at this point. I'm already unemployed, my personal information has long been exposed by all avenues becauses of our big brother government, and I feel like the need to "cover yourself" and your entirety, to abscond any edifice of your person, is heavily predisposed by white privilege. It is white people who ultimately have the choice to hide their beliefs and what they wear to discern their ideals. I can't do that. I'm already brown-skinned, opinionated, trans, fat. I have discernible features, unlike most white people who are quite similar in taste and physicality. My comrade, of who she prefers to be unnamed (a pattern, you'll see), is of the demographic who identifies with the marginalized. Yet, her white skin trumps over any sort of marginalization. White skin is one's prime safety. She participated in the march fully covered, her keffiyeh wrapped around her skull so only her eyes showed bits of excitement or draw. She pointed out my self-exposure. I told her she looks like every white person currently within the march. She wasn't the most in danger, Palestinians and people of color were. Yet, she felt the need to hide her visage as much as possible. She has no tattoos, no discernible features, and is blonde with rich parents. There is a pattern, you see, in the psyche of the privilege. Give them the flavor of oppression, and they see themselves as the ultimate martyrs.

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An Opine to Set the Air

Thursday, May 1, 2025

It took me the few several months I have been in Baltimore to realize I can write about my thoughts into the endless virtual void rather than ponder on them in my own cerebrum to the point of insanity. I have been unemployed, say, since January, since moving here, and it's been an interesting venture of nearly hundreds of applications to writing, communication, and legal jobs. There came this bleak realization, of which my partner rightfully tries to dismay me from, that because of my name, my gender, and my skin color, the probability of my finding work in the same relative spaces I used to work in Florida are likely quite low. In other words, being a Muslim, brown-skinned trans woman once again has its disadvantages, though such disadvantages never seemed to have disappeared ever, admittedly.

Still, writing becomes a salvation for my wellbeing once more, as it always has years before and now. I find myself deeper in the words I write, sinking into the digital ink over my laptop and questioning where such creativities have been hiding for so long. Yet within all of this neverending career searching and literary absolution, I have never been happier. Not contributing to the autocratic, oligarchic capitalist, racist, transphobic, xenophobic, genocidal oil-machine that is America and the American non-communal workforce has had its benefits to my emotional and mental psyche, but I must emphasize the exponential importance and privilege that is of my moving from Florida to Baltimore. This place is nothing like the Florida I was forced to exist in. For those who do not know, Florida, in its entirety, is inherently racist and queerphobic. Some may argue with me, but the placation of one's white or pale skin holds massive benefits in such a place, like many around the world, and such a benefit is something I never had. I was called "white-passing" at one point, but such a phrase is ultimately relative, as not once was I ever recognized as "white" by those I'd have preferred to be seen as such: bigots and racists.

Baltimore has given me a sense of home and friends, two gravitous things that hold such value to the typical person. I've found identity not only in my transness, but through my Latinx and Arab-Indian identity. I see people who look like me, talk like me, have the same mannerisms of my aunties, mamaji, bapaji, uncles who all immigrated to Canada from India and the Middle East. Although, with all of these happy happenings, there were hardships along this journey. There were friends I still love who no longer are in my life, who wish to never see any image of me whatsoever. There are family members that are now strangers. Transition---whether it may be of one's gender or identity or of one location to another---is a heavy and restless journey. It is a realization that things and people are ultimately temporary. I think that's why I hold on so much to those I love, especially to those who will never love me again. There is temporance to life, and we must each use such limited time to care for another, regardless of the cracks between their bridges.

That's why I hold so strongly to the quote "Apathy is death". While my memory holds onto it from a video game, the phrase itself is deeply inspiring. To be apathetic is to kill oneself. It is to lose the one thing that keeps us parallel to the purity of other species. We humans are not the prime species. We are violent, oppressive constructs. We aren't positively "separated" from natural things because of our sentience, rather our sentience is what maintains our savagery. Refuse apathy, I say, and love one another, even those who wish to never love you again. It is with that we break ourselves from the capitalist molds the authority has wanted us to believe for so long.

As always, FREE PALESTINE, FREE SUDAN, FREE CONGO, and long live a socialist, communist society.

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