Trans women are dying everywhere. Out of the corner of my eye, I see another one. I swing my unestrogenated frame around, screaming for the off-road ranger to stop the safari jeep, binoculars weak in my hand. She is thin as tweezers and wearing a dress that moves like a large tissue stained blue by the tears of Dr. TJ Eckleburg. A species of this strain, fiercely unabashed, is particularly wonderful, like a cake you can finish all alone. I have never been to a fashion show, but I’ve seen enough clips of them online to let my yearning for flashy shows of confidence paint a picture, and she was better than a fashion show, because as she scaled the grimy, 14th Street station steps, all you could think was that she made the entire world a home. Obviously, if you support the right things, you know the endangerment of trans women, for their fashion-show-making abilities if nothing else, is catastrophic; and if you post enough Go-Fund-Me’s for the rehabilitation of dwindling populations of trans women across the world, then maybe they can be saved before 2030 rolls around and they’re all gone. Things as beautiful as trans women can easily go extinct, because the other beautiful things–food, air and freedom–are also going extinct. Beauty is dying everywhere. Resonate with my fondness for these beauties and turn out your hearts, and your pockets, for God’s sharpest creatures.

            P.S.

I tried something. The lights were out. For once, I made it to the bathroom without a sound. There’s something I’ve been hiding, red and glimmering, murky and stinking of dying spring. I turned a black shell to reveal it, the final blade, and I brought it forth, as I’ve seen my mother do hundreds of times, her eyes almost black and sprigged with the mirror’s haunted hopes, and I drove it into my closed lips, like a spoon working into my mouth, and dragged it across. I stared and saw, by a few refractions of the moon, a sliver of myself, and it was red. I thought, if I leave here, I will cry, and when the crying’s done, I will harden, leaving nothing warm on me but the lips. So I didn’t leave. I stared into myself staring. I leaned so close I kissed myself, and I tasted like metal and bitter buds, and with that, it was sealed: It’s a foggy truth, but I am a woman.

Another trans woman. I just won’t admit it, or hint at it, or even notice it for a while. I don’t know if I’m a trans woman. I don’t know if I’m a trans woman. All I know is I’m a trans woman. All I know is I’m one of them. Their hands are like magnets, and not man-magnets or mother-magnets. Home-magnets, like all my life I’ve been running across a field slanting into a crowd waving their loving arms, and feeling the static friction of the dirt on my bare feet, and wondering why I keep hearing my name.

Being a trans woman today means I was lying about being a non-binary person yesterday. And a gay man last year. And an unscathed infant last decade. And what makes these lies so mischievous and sad is that they’ve been making me pretend to be an untouched, white dress shirt, when really I’ve been a stolen Pollock the entire time. Not splattered and strewn across with slutty pleather jumpsuits or too much blush, but with ideas of those things. I was defamed by ideas before I ever left my house or faced a camera or took a step, before anyone could even theorize that I was a trans woman. What a horrible lie, like the official US Constitution with a portrait of Beyonce on the back.

I realized the extent of my lie last week, when I saw a picture of me at three years old with my sister’s black-purple lipstick torn in my white cheeks. This is a Damning Trans Woman Moment, I thought, wanting to huddle the image close to my bosom like a swoll-eyed runt. But crawling through my sister’s door into her makeup cabinet was a Damning Trans Woman Moment, too. Waking-up at 4:00 AM with the mere idea of crawling into my sister’s room and doing something in there was another aforementioned Moment. So was my first crawl. My first breath. Everything has been brewing, a buffering before the final website finally unfolds onto the page, raining pink digital confetti over those two words, TRANS WOMAN.

The buffering had been quiet, imperceptible at first, like an always-dripping tap in an inconspicuous, All-American kitchen. One night a wall is blown out to reveal an entire ocean that’s been building up behind it, lapping and salty. Before it became miles of undiscovered organisms, being a trans woman was adorable and curious, like a baby chick inquisitively tilting its 1-gram head. Which is funny, and odd, and not what anyone would think, but if I wish to take my life seriously again, I must stop laughing and marveling at myself, both past and present. I must commit to this role, this lifetime role of Trans Woman, in the current play of Trans Women Are Dying Everywhere. Commit! Commit! I say to my smooshed, hairy arms, pressing on the dark bathroom floor, shuddering against the winter of my new ideas, which gradually overpopulate my mind and my skin and my older, warmer, unworded ideas.

Why is being a Trans Woman so intolerable? Why are Trans Women Dying Everywhere? Why is it that beautiful things seem to always go extinct, and do so too easily? These are questions that, if answered, might become of great use to me, might even halt a bill. My stepfather had a friend who transitioned into womanhood years ago. He never called her by her chosen name, nor used her correct pronouns, because he “knew [her] when [she] was a man,” he justifies. But if I had a close friendship with the universe when it was a pitch blackness consisting of invisible gasses, would I refuse to acknowledge the planets and stars and other things that popped from that supposed nothingness? Could you sympathize with my refusal? It must be hard, but yes, it’s possible to hold onto someone even when it’s not who they are.

I think what confuses me most is, why would you want to hide yourself from Trans Women? Is a little visibility too much to ask, or a little color? Is that color like an unthawed block of ice with an ancient, god-like threat sealed inside us all? Perhaps it is, and perhaps that’s the answer to my question of why beautiful things must go extinct so easily. Except for one thing.

Extincting beautiful things cannot be easy. The professional extincteurs just make it look easy, but deep down, they’re working up a sweat, growing violently red around each of their clamped, pursed orifices—because the professionals extinguish beautiful things by pretending they are not there, and it is hard to prohibit a light that burns inside you, inside all of us. I’m sure that for every secret trans woman stopped dead in their tracks at the passing of the Blue-Tissue-Queen of 14th Street, there were clusters of murmuring boys shielding their eyes. But even when numbing all their receptors to the world, it must be hard for them to pretend that a Big Bang is just a breeze that barely ripples or pinches the Earth. I remember staring up at the curved planetarium ceiling and physically snapping when a burst like ten fireworks erupted. It was a blinding whiteness that seemed inches from my ears and eyes, the replication shooting through my face like a river to a dead body thrust overboard, leaving a violent crick in my neck for the weeks following the planetarium. But in the end I loved it, from the aerial assault of history to the pain in my neck, and I went back for more, like an adrenaline junkie relying on jarring uncomfortable truths for their next fix. I watched, heard and tasted with an expectantly open face, a zen masochist. I certainly understand that creation is loud. But so is screaming, and we were given the ability to scream for a very important reason—to inform the others of something new, and of ourselves.

If we try to be mature about this and place ourselves in the minds of the extincteurs, we may see something. A motive. It is not that they desire to extinct things simply for the purpose of relishing the dwindling, dead remnants of Big Bangs pathetically withering away (trans women thrashing like saplings in a flood). Extincteurs want to see the world as they once knew it, before colorful, cackling women walked out of cataclysmic explosions purse first. Back when everything was lightless, and quiet, and in tandem with the very cores of their souls. Perhaps they must exterminate everything different from what they were bathed in as infants because they don’t know how to swim in anything but sink water. The first cores of their souls are the only cores of their souls they will ever know. There will be no subsequent selves, homes, hideaways and childhoods for them. They will preserve the landscape that called them perfect, that told them a bit of itself was inside of them, that coddled and was kind to them, because kindness, in their minds, is a vulnerable tradition, not an attitude. Living, to cis men, is just preserving everything in a time capsule—dipping a rose bud in super glue. Living, to straight men, is killing me.

But this doesn’t fix my rage, so I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think that trans things die because they’re too beautiful to be allowed alive by the men, or too developmental. I think they are killed simply because some straight, cis people have gotten ahead of themselves nowadays. They’ve confused home with stripper tied to all corners of the bed. They’ve forgotten that God is always watching. It’s been too long since they were too short to ride the roller coaster. They see things they don’t like and destroy them: ex wives, revolutionary dance moves, standard body types, Trans Women. The list goes on forever.

Indeed, people have gotten so caught up in their own creation and control, they’ve forgotten the only way to live; letting our bodies or God or Trans Women voyage forth, and sitting in awe as a brutally hot air blows them in the face, an air of horrible, beautiful Trans-gressions. Somehow the normies have forgotten this, or perhaps they never knew.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s any way to avoid the pushback, just wear a dress with no questions asked, but that’s a dangerous, ancient type of dreaming. I wasn’t meant to be a man, but this knowledge doesn’t change a thing; I want so badly not to be a Trans Woman. Not because I’ll die everywhere, but because it’s so official, our job of being Hated Gods. We bring you your life, like mothers in labor forever, and receive death. Death everywhere. I’d rather be a trough of mystery-meat, labelless, undetected. But labelless, undetected Trans Women are just Audacious Men With Crossdressing Hobbies. Be a woman, a woman! I holler to my mind. Come clean with your lies and admit it for once! But how can I admit something I’m not sure is true if I don’t want it to be? I’ve never held onto an unfinished idea this long. It’s like knowing exactly how it feels to touch water just before it becomes ice. It’s like stretching any fleeting moment into a full-blown forever, or dragging a hangnail up your arm until you’re nearly out of skin.

The answer to this pain, to every question, though it's an exhausted response, is that unsayable beauty. There’s an old, kicking horse. I find myself needing space from the whole world to messy my windows and lips with colorful creme paste. I find myself looking up at the clouds in the sky and spinning around until they look like gutter puddles I’m barreling into. I find myself pulling gummy eyeliner down my cheeks in the shower and then looking left to my mirror and, to top it all off, I’m a beautiful, dark-eyed woman. Miriam sang Mi Chamocha as the shackled Jews bowed their heads beside curling walls of angry sea. Beyonce didn’t tell her husband a word, then released an album excavating his cruel soul. Catwoman brought her needle-nails into Batman’s neck as she kissed him, gently, showing him with no words the real guts of life. I reach my hand into the winds of women, of their services and soul-baring, and I let it break my heart. This is the family I’ve found in a country of death, of death everywhere. Legacy like a horse, quick and thundering, hot with blood.

There is one irreconcilable something, the worst thought of all. The thought, which is more like a knowledge, that I will die under a bed at 5:00 AM when a person I love finds my penis and rummages through me like a haunted cabinet and smashes me past the ground. The taste of pulse I get between my cheeks at this thought, the nerve-threaded shell of my arms and legs and toes, the walks and the looks of us, and all of us dead.

Nina Simone says that when you have nothing, not even a rhythm in your ribs, not even a mother or a father, you’ve got your shoes, got your shirt, got your back, got your sex, got your fingers, got your legs, and I know right now that I’ve got a woman. A woman in my vein-tight arms. A woman in my eyes, lit with dirty fire. The straight, cis men will smash her into the floor, perhaps, like AI destroying humankind. But something like me, so covered in concentrated pigments, is sure to smear. And someone is sure to see the smear, like a crater with a pile of bones stacked neatly in its center, and someone will surely write a paper or tell a story, a story where the only thing I ever was was breasts and babies and too-tight cocktail dresses. And then there’ll be no question. And then I’ll be a woman. And no, I am not dying everywhere. I’m only being packed softly into the soil for sprouting later, only being the kind of warrior I know from the stories before me. There is nothing good about dying, but maybe it's the price to pay for living more naked than everyone else, if only just for a little while. And for some reason, there isn’t anything too sad about that.

I walk the fluffy carpet of my room back and forth, back and forth, clacking faintly in my black, studded, 8-inch stripper heels. If this isn’t what home feels like, I’ve found something better. I’ll call it moodiness, or sexiness, or maybe even love: the oiled gears of my hips swaying, swaying, the cold air arresting my shaved legs like a tongue up two candy canes, a little glitter beaming from the corners of my eyes, gazing headlights, unraveling the obvious like a movie you’ve watched a hundred times; woman, woman, woman. You know I’ll call it woman.

And who knows. Maybe I won’t go extinct, but just move away; slither into the floor and be shot through a complex network of underground tunnels exiting me out of this planet-turned-baked-potato. Maybe I’ll be secreted away from you like the pinkest sun recedes off skyscrapers in evening time, or like a pool of fish that darts from view the second your hook plops in the pond. Maybe all the Trans Women haven’t been Dying Everywhere, just gradually choosing our own lives, like rain falling upwards. And maybe, in a few thousand years, you’ll find a picture one of us managed to serve out amidst the excited buzz of our departure, and we’ll become the next conspiracy theories; Yetis, or Sasquatches, or Gods. Nobody will know that we were at war under a bed in New York City once, pitchforking demons nobody else could see, and all the time fiercely murmuring, sustain yourself, survive this night. Children will see a mural of us slashed down an avenue street and think about how we are all dead, and how now there is no learning from us, only from our cautionary tale. They won’t think about the time of Trans Women Dying Everywhere. They will think of their own time, Trans Women Dead And Nowhere, and quietly, fervently sneak their index fingers to their lips, as if reaching bare-handed for a whistling kettle, and pretend-smear color onto their lips, and whisper, Trans Women Are Living Everywhere. Trans Women Live Forever.