Sophie.

“The asshole is stalling out sending the alimony checks, can you believe that shit?”

“Sounds ridiculous.”

“I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do, I'm going to be late for rent again.”

“...you could get a job.” There was awkward silence between Sophie and her friend.

“I might have to, but raising this child is hard.” It wasn't. Sophie did not raise her child so there was nothing hard about it. It was also more poignant that Sophie's friend had five and still worked.

“...I guess.” her friend said over the phone.

“That fucking asshole is just making my life harder because he can.” she took a drink out of a can Keystone sitting on the kitchen table, one of several dozen. From today. “He's not content being out of my life yet so he still wants to ruin it for me and the kid.”

“Well you knew he was an asshole for years, we all did.”

“Just a violent son-of-a-bitch never content with anything in his life.” Sophie wasn't wrong. Her ex-husband was a violent son of a bitch who was never content with his life. She just omitted the fact that several of the violent confrontations between her and her ex-husband were often instigated or started by her.

Like when one night while drinking she was watching 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' and her child watched her awkwardly stumble up and into the kitchen, grabbed a wooden spoon and went into the bedroom to beat the hell out of her ex-husband in his sleep. She could not remember why she was upset at him, but the devil avoided the details and she was running on feelings and liquor and she was certain that she must've been brooding on the couch and upset at him for a pretty good reason. And that was a common thread in most of the confrontations with her emotionally demeaning husband who rightfully observed she was a loser despite very much being a loser himself. They were both loser parents who sought to blame each other for their own shortcomings which led to them in fact aggravating each other's shortcomings further. Nobody else existed in the world except each other to pin all the evils and hate in the world on. Except her child. The child sort of existed probably. The child was at least useful for leverage against the opposing parent. The likelihood of them growing up to be a loser just like Sophie and her ex-husband was high, because that's what institutionalized poverty and an abusive household did to a child. The odds of getting out and making something of one's self was low, because even if given the opportunity to get out, their upbringing would not give them the ability to recognize it and their upbringing would not grace them with the work ethic and tenacity to work through it. The child was to be embittered by the world at this point, and lapse back to the present and a slew of batterings later, Sophie was at home drunk at 11am, wondering where it all went wrong.

“I just don't know where it all went wrong.” she said on the phone. Sophie did but was in denial. Her pride and inability to blame herself for anything gave her a myopic view on her circumstances. Her ex-husband was clearly to blame for her lack of money, not her inability to hold down a job. Her and her child going hungry was because of the lack of money, not her unwillingness to leave the house and go shopping unless it was to the liquor store down the street for more cheap beer. The animosity between her and her child was because her ex-husband was clearly manipulating them against her, not because of the horrible circumstances her child was put into watching their mother become increasingly more apathetic and self-destructive. Sophie was not the ideal role model for her child and she was certainly not a good mother, but she convinced herself that everything she pretended she was doing was for her child probably sort of.

“I have to go to work, so I'll talk to you later, Sophie.” her friend said.

“Okay.” And with that, Sophie hung up. She slowly slouched into her chair at the kitchen table, consciousness coming and going as it pleased. She didn't know whether or not she wanted it to stay, so she drank more to find out. Her grip was surprisingly steady, as it needed to be because there were so many cans on the table that knocking one over would lead to them spilling onto the floor again. Of course it didn't matter if they were on the floor anyway, unless there was still beer in any of them that she hadn't finished yet.

She had hoped that drinking her problems away would work. It didn't. She had also hoped that lying and manipulating the situation around her and skewing the information she relayed to her family would make her problems go away. It also didn't. Sophie wanted to leave all her problems behind or drive them off, but problems were frequently as stubborn as the people they followed, and Sophie was stubborn. She was stubborn enough not to die despite ingesting enough cheap alcohol day in and day out that it would have a man twice her size setting the air ablaze if he tried to light a cigarette. Her alcoholism could not kill her, she was driven by a sobering hatred and an unyielding liver that she was more abusive to than her child.

It was a lot of hatred too. It was more intoxicating than the alcohol, and arguably was doing a better job of killing her than the alcohol as well. At this point in the divorce she seldom knew love or how it looked anymore, the hate drowned it. Hate was all she needed to drive her will to live. She was malnourished and frail, and yet the hate kept her alive and gave her strength. She had the strength to throw a potted plant across the room as if it was made of foam and almost beaned her child with it for asking why she didn't make dinner again. She hated her ex-husband for doing all of this to her. She hated being poor again after maxing out her ex-husband's credit cards. She hated whenever the child came home and couldn't look at her before quickly rushing upstairs out of shame. She hated waking up to an empty bed every afternoon despite having an asshole of an ex-husband, because being dependent on an asshole was the only way she knew how to live her life. But most importantly of all, she hated herself. She pretended she didn't, but she hated herself more than anything else. She hated herself because beyond the impenetrable wall of pride, the elaborate facade she's constructed for herself in front of her friends and family that were manipulated into knowing nothing was her fault, she knew everything was all her fault. But she still lied and manipulated people anyway because she had an idiot's pride. And it took all her concentration to keep her horrible self-esteem about being a loser in check by repressing and denying any fault she committed. It was a lot of energy, but hate gives a lot back. Everything she saw in her apartment reminded her of her ex-husband, which would make sense considering he bought mostly everything in it. The futon in the living room reminded her of whenever she kicked him out of the bedroom and he had to wake up at 12:30 in the morning to leave for work at 3am six days a week and hated him for always being tired. The table she was drinking at reminded her of all the times she didn't cook dinner and hated him for chewing her out for being so fucking lazy that she couldn't even do something as simple as preparing a meal for several hours for four very picky eaters. The lights that were on in the kitchen reminded her of the electricity bill he was still paying and she hated him for it because he knew as well as she did that she wasn't reliable enough to pay for it herself, and she wore sunglasses indoors in the afternoon out of spite but also to have something to hide herself behind. And even her child reminded her of her ex-husband as the lynchpin, the only reason she stayed married to the angry son-of-a-bitch. And occasionally she hated the child for what she felt was forced to endure.

Sophie's hateful reverie must've lasted hours before it ended when the garage door started opening. She hated that too because it was generally a sign that her ex-husband was home and ready to start a fight and it put her on edge, but she knew at this point that after she snapped back to reality several hours later, all these signs of hate in the real world more or less meant ultimately nothing but the weight she tied to them. The child came in through the door from the garage. They must've gotten off school. Remilia was behind the child pressing them into talking.

“Oh come on, Lucas. Tell me what happened. Please.” The child was ultimately unresponsive. Sophie had her sunglasses she wore indoors at 3 in the afternoon to hide behind, but she saw the child, arms bruised and face reddened. They were thin, malnourished almost as much as her.

“Tell me you're seeing this.” Remilia looked over at Sophie. She said nothing as the child avoided eye contact with both of them and stormed upstairs. “What no, don't be like this. We're worried.” Sophie said nothing and watched the child leave. The hiss of a beer can pierced the silence as she started to drink again.

“You ARE worried, right?” she asked Sophie, who continued to drink and said nothing. “You saw that child, they had the daylights beaten out of them again. Would it kill you to ask? To at least act like you're worried?” It sure felt like it would. Any expression of emotion would probably snap Sophie in half at this point. Remilia stood in the living room angled towards the stairs, but looking back at Sophie while her expression was a combination of being disheartened and frustrated.

“You can talk to everybody else but Lucas, huh? Is that because your own child knows too much already, that you can't lie your way through that conversation anymore and that they see right through that facade of being a good mom?” Sophie sighed and continued to drink. “Or is it because Lucas knows you can't be relied on for anything and won't even bother asking for help, even though that child desperately needs it? God knows you can't feed your child, let alone emotionally support them.” The alcohol was going dry as Remilia talked. “That child is going to be broken and it's going to be your fault from this point on. Does any of that matter to you at all?” It did, but not enough to do anything about it. “Do you really think you can keep this going? That you can wait it out and things will eventually fix themselves and go back to normal.” Sophie genuinely did. Is was an over-earnest, terrifyingly genuine belief that if she looked away long enough, everything would just sort itself out eventually. That she could get to a point where she could be happy. That despite her ex-husband being gone for good, he would come back and remain a convenient sticking point for all her problems.

“You won't ever be happy.” Remilia coldly interjected into her thoughts. “Your life may be Hell, but it's all you know. You won't do anything to try and make yourself happy because you don't know if you'll succeed. And you'd rather be miserable if it means blaming somebody else for it other than yourself.” Sophie stifled a whimper as she continued to drink. “I'm going to go talk to your child since they have nobody else. It won't work, but I'm at least gonna try.”

Sophie ran out of beer. As she attempted to sit up her knee clipped the table and the cans spilled onto the ground. She stumbled to the garage door and pulled her car keys off the key rack. When she went into the garage, she attempted to get the car key into the lock. She failed a few times before she got it in and twisted. She got into her car before realizing she forgot she left the key in the door lock, huffed and got back out of the car to retrieve it. As the automatic garage door opened, she turned on her headlights. The sun had set, it was past 7pm. She was still wearing her sunglasses. She began pulling her car out, strangely steady despite her clear intoxication. She was a better driver drunk than most people were sober. The liquor store was only three blocks away across the train tracks, but she was able to buy a 24-pack without a word and leave as quickly as she showed up. When she got home she almost slipped and fell in the kitchen. The lights were turned off when she left. She sneered and her anger surged for a bit before the apathy quelled it. She was too tired to drink at this point, it was 1am after all. She went upstairs and looked at her child's door. The light was off underneath the crack of the door and silence settled in the apartment. When she opened her door and crawled into her King-sized bed alone, it was 2am. Sophie wanted to call her friend or her mom to talk, but she figured she would do it when she woke up.

Trans in 2018.

Man it's a strange thing to try to come out as transgender in 2018 with this political climate. It's difficult articulating what kind of happens when one tries to come out of this particular closet because I think a lot of people imagine what trans people are like while never actually meeting one or being aware that they've met one in their entire lives. To a lot of people who hear about transgender people, it's just a bunch of made-up bullshit. At its worst, they think trans people are perverts and predators masquerading as the other gender to rape somebody in a bathroom, which despite a rousing marketing campaign a lot of idiot republicans decided to run with, has yet to be met with any documented case of that happening in the US, let alone 10 or however many need to occur to make an argument that otherwise doesn't actually exist. Although there are plenty of cases where trans people have been assaulted for what they are, a Republican doesn't really actually care about predatory behavior considering they voted a bloated molesting husk into office while endorsing candidates that participated in sexual abuse, the more notorious recently being Roy Moore, a child predator and religious zealot so cartoonishly evil and anti-LGBT that he's convinced that me wanting to be a woman or get fucked in the ass angered God and caused 9/11, which I'm not even paraphrasing. Which could you imagine the kind of power I'd wield if that was true? If my ass was the Death Note and dicks were writing utensils, I'd be running the ink out of every pen possible just to see if I could give God carpal tunnel. Roy Moore I'd rationalize is on a personal level one of the most vile and outright evil men voted into office if the Zodiac Killer wasn't already a senator.

The strawman/woman/trans/thing that people invented always kind of scared me because of how flippant they are in really understanding or respecting what trans people. As somebody who knows a lot of trans people, I have never met a single one that insinuated that somebody “assumed their gender”. Like y'all know no rational trans person actually says that shit, right? In fact most trans people are terrified to even speak up and ask to be referred to by proper pronouns because we're terrified of the repercussions of people getting aggravated and mocking us or treating us like shit more. Because God-forbid out of the hundreds or thousands of words people can speak over the course of a day, that they'd have to change just one or two. The notion of a militant hyperdefensive trans person using made-up genders to identify as is either deep in the bowels of Tumblr where not even other LGBT people like them, or are concoctions fabricated by merciless incels and misanthropes somewhere in /r9k/, among the same people who thought it'd be funny to call in bomb threats to Twitch streamers while talking about how entitled they are to women fucking them. Like why would you want to make jokes about a group of people that most people at best are utterly indifferent towards their struggles and at worst vehemently hate them for a plethora of arbitrary reasons? When Ricky Gervais got defensive over making jokes about trans people equating them to monkeys, he wasn't being edgy. A middle-aged entitled white man with a lot of money and an enormous influential voice heard by millions making transphobic jokes doesn't make him fringe or confrontational or edgy, it makes him our president. And boring. The tired boring that's more expected than it is surprising.

I've seen some try to compare it to coming out as gay. Coming out as gay can't be really compared outside of “HELP CONSERVATIVES ARE OPPRESSING ME”. It's not like your actual appearance changes. You can hide being gay from your family (note: you shouldn't and it sucks that you'd have to, but you can). In my family it wasn't even okay to be gay. My dad told me if I had any gay thoughts at all, the fag scarabs would come out at night while I'm in bed and start feasting on my flesh and consuming my penis to rob me of my masculinity and I'll start craving the dick of tougher men out of envy. God forbid if any thoughts of being a woman crept in, it would've meant after the fag scarabs ate my penis they'd start tunneling up into my body creating some unsanctified vagina from carved-out flesh that actually functioned as a portal to Hell so Satan could send his unholy children into the world. None of this is actually true and to clarify my dad never actually said any of this explicitly, although if I could function as a catalyst between reality and the underworld that would be metal as fuck. Instead it's just hormones run rampant and make me dissociative at random intervals and I get emotionally volatile while despising the filthpit vessel that my soul is forsaken to be entombed in, which is far less metal and just kind of fuck.

My dad would sort of pretend to be supportive and say “if people want to be gay it's none of my business” but would go into flippant denial if I even hinted that I was anything that wasn't his manly son who should be giving him grandchildren and not looking at penises. And I liked looking at penises a lot, penises are pretty fucking sweet. My dad wouldn't want to believe that I might be gay or pan or just not wanting to fuck women instead, so what hope would I have that normal people would be accepting of it if my own flesh and blood wasn't? But my dad didn't even grant me the courtesy of thinking I might have PTSD after being raped in High School, so maybe he's just a shitty person. But trans people put up with a lot of shitty people, so most people would be surprised and kind of horrified at how common my circumstances are to a lot of them.

Probably the most unsettling thing I've dealt with in all irony has been the LGBT community itself, or in many cases just the LG community with the “bt” in lower case letters, frequently and crassly lobbed off much like they'd probably think I would want to do to my penis. Regardless of how “progressive” or “pro-social justice” people frame themselves as, it's vaguely amusing that these so-called inclusive groups are still human. They'll still look for a reason to look down on people, who they view as lesser or impure. I have met gay people who feel threatened by trans people, threatened by our desire to transition muddying up what it means to be gay to them. Where if I transitioned, I would not be a trans woman, I would still be a closeted gay man in denial. Because instead of just wanting to fuck who they want, they decide to make their label the central focus of their identity, and we can't be having any of that shit. Them cis-white motherfuckers are trying their best to be understanding and progressive, we can't go changing the game on them after they finally just started getting used to dudes wanting to fuck dudes being gay. If we start talking about pansexuals or asexuals or transgender people, they'll get in a huff and need to lie down before we get a chance to tell them that gender identity has existed as a construct to tell people what society expects of them based on the all-important factor of what's between their legs and hanging off their chests. And I haven't even talked about TERFs yet either.

TERFs are a strange bunch, who are typically withering relics of 70s militant feminism that are the same aging white moms who also probably think women of color have it easier than them because they can play the race card. While varying in age, the older, more unyielding and decrepit feminists generally are the ones to carry the bigotted flag, which I find ironic because they say I can't be a woman because I can't bear children, which my response is generally “give it a decade and I guess you'll stop being one too when menopause hits.” You would think a lot of feminists would be inclusive as Hell when it comes to trans women considering they're people who despise toxic masculinity and society's expectations associated with gender, two things that have just really fucked up that whole “feminism” thing that's been going on for about... ever.

Toxic masculinity is a poison, and just because it doesn't affect me in the same way it affects a woman doesn't mean it doesn't affect me at all. Just because I was born a man doesn't mean people get to handwave whatever problems I had with that good ol' chestnut “Well it could've been worse! At least I had male privilege!” Which is bollocks because I didn't want male privilege. I just wanted to be myself, I just wanted to feel like I could act a certain way or look a certain way that I'd be happy with without people wanting to kill me. And while saying they wanted to kill me is an over-exaggeration, let's talk about what being a man has done for me. I've never been bulky, I've always been skinny and even called dainty by a few people when I was younger, and girls and women certainly let me know that. I cried a lot and wanted to talk about how I felt when people treated me like shit, something I apparently could not do because I'm expected to save face AND MAN UP. For being quiet and delicate and timid but a boy I was bullied growing up to the point that I did not want to be alive anymore, and have attempted to not be alive on a handful of occasions, which much like everything else in life I've failed at doing. Just simple things like liking pinks or wanting to write romances or baking got me branded a faggot in High School. Being judicious and non-aggressive got me branded effeminate. My dad flying into denial every time I bring up the possibility of being gay despite him never seeing me date or talk about women in his presence would make me question how open I was allowed to be about what I really wanted to be in face of a bunch of stupid expectations a dick's placed on me.

I feel like it's a trend when people talk about what it takes to be a real man or a real woman it's generally the really shitty, terrible things about being those genders. Who the fuck would want to be a real man, where you're expected to be some cold unfeeling sociopath who shouldn't show weakness or emotional vulnerability and women are seen as objectives or people who need to be taken care of because you don't respect them enough to be equals or self-sufficient? Why would I want to be a real woman, where I'm just expected to have to deal with being objectified and disadvantaged in society my entire life, and having a bleeding hole that tries to kill me every month while worrying about an 18-year long mistake ruining my life? On a physical or societal level of expectations, if I don't experience these things why does it make me less of a man or woman? Why are these arbitrary barriers of entry I have to go through to define my identity? “You must be this oppressed/fucked by society to join.” Like fuck y'all, I'll take installing a pussy that comes without the menstrual cramps and capabilities to birth a child, it sounds buying a brand new computer without all the garbage firmware and junk installed that nobody likes or wants.

Talking to a lot of folks about transgender people has left me equal parts amused, scared, and baffled. As if they haven't been talking to one the whole time and they think they can get away with some of the naive or ignorant shit they say. It's like them assuming you aren't gay and after looking around to make sure all the SJWs are gone decide to go into a tangent saying “MAN SO HOW ABOUT THOSE FAGS AND MARRIAGE, AM I RIGHT?” I just... find it strange that so many have opinions about people whose lives do not affect you in the slightest, or at best mildly inconvenience you because courtesy is hard. Because you see me and go “Fuck, that person has enormous man-hands. Are they one of them trannies? I can't say 'tranny' anymore, shit. Fuck I gotta call that dude a she? A they? An it? FUCK, WHY ARE WORDS SO HAAAAAAAAAAARD?” And after nearly having a stroke attempting to unlearn your entire vernacular, you express begrudging acceptance of this weird amalgamation of shapes that doesn't fall under the easy readability of human gender you've been accustomed to your entire life and settle on accidentally misgendering them and then in an incredibly sarcastic and passive-aggressive tone say “Oh I'm sorry, I meant she,” which is like rolling your eyes at a trans person in audible form, like you had to imagine them saying “EXCUSE ME, DID YOU JUST ASSUME MY GENDER?” to feel slightly validated in your tone.

What I'm saying is, these observations coming out of the closet as some weird non-binary genderfuck is the most I'm willing to make a fuss about this. I don't actually vent this to normal or cis people in person. All this grandstanding has to be done in the privacy of online or people I could very easily cut out of my life because stakes are lower here. I can't be bothered in person. I—much like a lot of trans people—don't have that fight left in me. I don't want to deal with the repercussions of standing up for myself and I shouldn't be expected to when people could just not really be assholes about it. We live in a society where we still jump or even outright kill people for what they are, I can't risk that shit when I see the blood on the walls. I'm too tired of passive-aggressive surrender passed off as tolerance and acceptance, because we all know the moment it feels like we're encroaching on you to accommodate us so your behavior doesn't make us feel like garbage, y'all ain't having any of that shit. Unless you're getting paid to, because in most cases you sure as Hell aren't going to use words like 'faggot' around your boss.

I'd want nothing more than to be normal than to be a victim, I didn't want any of this garbage that comes with having an identity crisis about what I am. People who refuse to understand and choose to perceive trans people having victim complexes either never had a hard day in their entire life, or think that since they “got theirs” and overcame something that they're entitled to be an apathetic sociopath. Which you'd think that living a shitty life would develop empathy for struggling with finding one's self in the world, but I don't know. I'm a raving concoction of unstable hormones trapped in a sack of meat I don't like, what do I know about being mentally stable?

And the day goes on.

The living room was cluttered with boxes from storage, none of which have found their homes sorted throughout the house. It was also cluttered with boxes from the house, none of which have found their new homes to the Good Will. Most of the window was blocked out by the open cabinet and the shades were closed, a few traces of light coming through and casting an orange haze over the couch. The author sat in the only empty spot available on the couch, the rest of it covered by unfolded laundry. The brandy had run dry and sobriety was setting back in as sunlight began to crawl its way out. The last week had not happened. He remembered none of it, he had spent his time off work visiting the years before and getting lost. He had just woken up and walked into the living room to take in the emptiness. He never opened direct deposit at his work because he knew that he'd never have reason nor motivation to leave his house less than he already did, and today was the day he got paid. After five days off work his skin was rough, slicked in oil that occasionally irritated his eyes. His hair clung to itself. He didn't smell terrible given the circumstances, but mostly because he's been dehydrated enough that he couldn't sweat. When he walked into the bathroom, he weighed himself. He dropped 12 pounds since he weighed himself last week. He turned on the shower and turned it up to a boiling purge and sat down in the tub for several minutes.

He probably should've taken his clothes off first.

His body began to regenerate. His hair dried out and frayed, his skin softened while the redness left, at least on his face. His body was covered in all manner of bumps and ingrown hairs and random bleeding holes from degradation, but clothes hid that at least. His toothbrush was stiff and rigid from disuse, and when he put toothpaste on it and put it into his mouth, an intense burning occurred. Every brush sent tremors through his teeth, upset his gums. He was spitting up more blood than foam as he brushed, his gums bright, angry and irritated. As he reassembled himself, he had a few clean articles of clothing left, made easier by wearing the same clothes for several days so he didn't have to do laundry frequently. He breathed in, and then out as he made his way to the door. He begrudgingly re-entered the world of the living as he stepped outside his apartment, vaguely presentable and letting nobody in to see what happened as he was in there. His isolated headphones hid himself from any social interaction while he was out, giving him an accessible exit from talking to anybody. He walked past vaguely familiar faces he couldn't bother to remember or speak to, and made his way to the office at his work, for a brief moment removing himself from his bubble in public.

“Hi.” the author said.
“Hello, Lucas.” his manager said. “How are you doing?”

“Yes.” His obtuse response was seen as playful. He just didn't want to talk. He grabbed his check and then excused himself.

“See you next week.” his manager said.

“Alright.” he responded. Every time he said that he didn't know if he was lying or not. He usually wasn't. There were days where he wish he was. He did his best to make it back home quickly, as nothing made him feel nearly as alone as being out in public. The dark was unrelenting and began to close in again. The time absent from work didn't feel long enough to fight it off; it never usually did. When he returned back home, the world came to a standstill again. Time was still lodged in an earlier day when he entered. He navigated through the empty living room filled with garbage back into his room and the stillness began to deafen him again. He was stuck in the awkward limbo of being hungry but too weak to make food, so he crawled into bed. He didn't know what time it was but the sun was still up. The dark began to settle in and the only thing that was going to wake him up was work. Work was good because he could leave the apartment and time moved outside it, and nothing in the apartment mattered to anybody else but him. So he decided to forget the weekend, too.