Moon Memo: Hauntings
Good morning from Halloween. The veil is thin, and the dead are walking through.
Octobers have been hard since 2000, when my Grandpa died. When he died I quit church, because when I walked into chapel later that week a bunch of people swarmed me, layed hands on me, and told me he was in a better place. My grandfather was at best a loose hearted agnostic, and at worst a forest loving heathen. I knew he was in the smoking section of heaven if he was anywhere, and he would not be down with these God botherers bothering me.
So October, my favorite month since I was a tiny kid, has always had a bit of twinged sadness for me since I became an adult. As it should. It's the time of dying. Of leaves going from verdant green to orange to blood, then sickly brown. The rains come, and turn them into soil. And the cycle begins.
It's also the month of trans suicides it seems. Since coming out I've had about 7 girls that I kind of knew die on me. At least 4 of them were in October.
I thought Stevie was going to be ok. She had a small community around her. She had her music and her desire to make a scene. She had a mission, and a mission often leads us to stay alive.
It didn't lead to her staying alive.
I forgot that she had died. Someone told me about it months ago, and I just dissociated away. We were never friends. She was the girl I saw skulking on the edges of house shows during my early years. She was extremely talented and extremely sad, and disappeared for periods to go to the hospital. But I thought she was going to be okay.
She wasn't going to be ok.
I have a rule: I won't live a life for anyone. I won't mother someone if they need someone to make every decision for them. I have my reasons: childhood trauma of living with my sick grandparents. The loom of Shane getting older and needing me to take over. Other things.
It has cause me to cut myself off from relationships. Break up with people. My recent breakup was because there was even a small wiff of that coming, and me cutting it off before it could happen.
I will not live a life for someone.
And the ghosts don't know that rule. So they gather around me, and whisper to me, and haunt me, and make me feel guilty for staying alive.
I will not feel guilty for staying alive.
I'm so voraciously trying to stay alive that I fall into patterns of sex and work and activism and poetry and all the things too hard, until I flounder, and I fall off.
The past is past to everyone but ghosts. -Torrey Peters
(She) needs to know she is not a psychopath. Because whenever she hears the news that another trans girl has died, she is exasperated. Oh goddammit, not again. -Torrey Peters again, talking about me, the bitch.
Anyway, I found out Stevie died again last week. And things were ok until we hit Trans Day of Remembrance planning at work.
And I just kind of shattered, OK? Not everything is going to be ok, OK? I thought I got through a calendar year without some girl dying, ok?
And I tried to go about my business. Kissed a girl on a date that I shouldn't have (not because we didn't want to, or because it would have lead to anything less than a fun time, but because I don't have capacity to show that kind of attention right now. Sex can be a drug, and a way to dissociate. Not always. I had a very non-dissociated time with a dear friend last week, and it was wonderful and put me INTO my body. The gasping and splashing and lips against me made me happy to be alive. But that's not what sex with this new girl would have been like, after the news of Stevie. It would have been crashing my body against her cliff of transness, trying to bring my friends back. And I don't want to do that with someone else. It's not fair to them.). Trying to work. Trying to be the good girl.
But today, a cold Halloween that's going to be raining, that's going to be lonely, that's going to be one beautiful trans woman lighter, I'm not doing ok. And that's fine. I don't always have to be ok.
I'd just like a year without a dead trans woman to haunt me. To demand every breath and orgasm. To demand that I die old. To demand that I keep showing up for all the other girls so they won't be a dead trans woman who haunts me.
Sorry to be so heavy here. I hope you can have a good spooky night. Dress sexy. Get scared. Merry gay christmas. Fuck the election.
Misha Lynn Moon