When we were in our 20s and did not know each other yet, neither of us even living in the city where we would eventually meet, neither of us were yet aware of how we were already growing toward each other.
We began together in the same place where we always began individually: rooted in our trauma, constantly trying to overcome the past.
Where others might have traced freckles, we draped our love over each others’ scars.
Where others went to dinner and a movie we went to AA and then the lake.
We saw ourselves as a matching set: two separate root structures but two mighty attempts to grow out of the same soil of past harm. You brought me so much beauty.
To have lost you is to have lost the story of who I am.
Who can I be if not the one who walks with you?
And while that answer is infinite, the infinity still looks like a black hole, and after all that I have walked through, I am exhausted of the darkness.
Losing you was a loss of family. A loss of community. I cannot bear to participate in either structure any more.
I can’t watch tv, eat sushi, make silly jokes, visit the lake, or look at my dog without my memory supplying me with my other half.
You are always with me, still, closer even than the restraining order I still hold.
Living in memory is the story of who I am.
For a long time, the distance I have traveled since I lost you meant nothing. No changes in my body or my brain or my nervous system. No changes in my insomnia or desperation.
But these days the memories I live in of you are more often the happy, earlier ones than the tragedies that came to us in the end. Maybe that is a healing.
I am not angry about living in the past. I could work my whole life on my current trajectory of trauma-born single-focus intensity of tearing systems apart with my bare hands, and be satisfied. I will take my revenge on what hurt both of us most, and many others will live easier for it.
But I remember when the future felt open. I remember when the present felt present.
Losing you was a loss of us both.
When you are raised as a conservative Christian girl in a high control religious community, no one has to explain to you that your emotions should not be visible in public, should not impact other people. The equation you constantly balance is whether or not you should be visible in any way, ever.
While the depth of tragedy that I walked through was the worst possible way to learn the lesson, I have been shorn clean of all that held me inside myself. There are no guardrails I cannot crash through. There are no expectations I cannot fail, loudly, and with glee.
Our lawyer was old enough to remember the density of AIDS deaths, and young enough to not be scared of fighting for a trans person’s rights. She only met you once, when I brought you in to sign the medical power of attorney. At that point we had already been through so many pink slips, so many police encounters. She pulled me aside after the appointment and warned me about what she saw in your behavior. I said Theresa, when we are shot by the Cleveland cops, put our bodies on the steps of the Cuyahoga County ADAMHS Board. She was silent for a long moment.
In fact I do hope that my death, when it arrives, is public. When the end of my body, and my voice, and my immediacy on this earth, when the end of my story arrives, it will be because I finally picked a battle I couldn’t win. Young as I am, I still cannot envision losing that battle, but tired as I am, I accept its inevitability.
As an adult I have lived my grief loudly, with volume and ferocity and shamelessness. I have screamed at cops in motel parking lots and I have screamed at Cleveland City Council. I have sobbed in the lobby of the First Precinct Police Department and I have sobbed while testifying in the Ohio Statehouse. In my grief and my rawness and my intensity, I have walked systems toward changes that would have been otherwise impossible to access.
I refuse to lie. And nothing tells the truth better than my grief.
I remember being silent. My first several rounds of trauma, early in my life, are marked by the absolute silence that surrounds them, both other people’s and my own. I did not cry. I did not yell. I swallowed. Breathed. Waited. Digested the pain and metabolized it into chronic health conditions. Breathed. Waited.
I will never be silent again. If I die quietly alone at home, it will feel like a recapitulation of all the ways I brought my identity and experiences out of the silence of the home I grew up in and gave them voice, gave them volume, gave them gravity.
It would have made sense to me to have died in 2020. Life the past three years has made no sense at all.
But the volume itself has become a kind of north star. In my loudness there is momentum. In my demand to be heard, there is a solidity of self. Crying in my car, in the grocery store, at the movie theater, at work makes sense to me. I will not allow anyone to deny me my voice, including myself.
I am not sure what death will change about who I am. I do not think it will make me softer or sweeter or quieter.
When I consider what it means to be among the number of those who are still living, I know I am obligated to hold the sharp edges of those who did die. I hold the stories that cut like knives, i hold the rage that burns like fire, i hold the sadness that tsunamis over entire generations. I hold these in my hands like weapons, and i wield them.
The privilege that exists in my body or how others perceive me is the costuming that gets me entrance to the spaces where queer rage is not supposed to be allowed to exist. Sounding like I have a college degree walks me in to spaces that have never heard the grief of generational poverty.
I have been accused of being two-faced, and i have never minded this accusation. It is true. I use one face to enter the halls of power. I use a second face to tear them down.
I have had my moments of apology toward those who left this life before me. Even when I did not know them i hold them close. When i drove myself across the country alone, from the midwest to the west coast, i stood in so many communities i had no connection to other than knowing the legacy of those who had left it. In Cleveland I think always of Tanisha Anderson, whose murder by cops took the breath out of an entire community, and a few years later, took the breath out of her mother, who drowned in grief. Driving out of Ohio I thought of the so-called westward expansion and all the First Nations people who are bulldozed beneath the strip malls. Driving past post fences in Wyoming brought Matthew Shephard’s face into my mind for several hours.
Alice Walker said activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet. Activism is the payment of a debt rendered by all those whose deaths were the precursor for my ability to live.
We who did not die hold a debt, whether we realize it or not. Whether we see the police officer who did not shoot us, the legislator who stopped short of putting our names on a state registration list, the Nazi who postponed our death until the next demonstration, the abusive spouse who picked up another beer instead of the gun, whether we can see the harbingers of death walking toward us or tell them thank you for skipping me this time is not the point. We who did not die may not be skipped over next time, and we have work to do until that time.
