Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

by Kai Cheng Thom

but the Christian part of me knew that the secret of grace is choosing to believe.

our world keeps breaking, over and over again. i have no choice but to believe that a new one is being born.

tell me about the pain of a body that knows its life means nothing.

Donald Winnicott says, it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.

is hard because relationship building and relationship maintenance and relationship repair take actual labor, actual logistics, actually getting off my ass to make someone dinner or take someone to the clinic or listen to someone have a crisis on the phone.

being a trans femme: is something i choose, yes, i choose this, for all its contradictions. is choosing love. is love. is love.

you were born to be a healer and a warrior and a pleasure maker, to be a brightly burning azure star. you were born to sing the end of days, the beginning of a new time. let them come for you with their flaming branches, their hatred and terror, their laws and their bullets and their Bibles full of a thousand lies.

peace be to the damaged girls, the broken boys, all of us still learning what it means to hold without hurting.

dear confabulist, do you know the difference between propaganda and poetry? one is a lie that takes you further away from the truth, and the other is a lie that takes you closer to it.

it always comes down to i can’t let you leave. to calling the cops if it comes to that. this poem remembers the cops. the handcuffs they put around its adolescent wrists that day, supposedly to save its life. this poem remembers the locked room, the psychiatrist with his metal desk and no-nonsense metal questions. this poem remembers the steely waiver the principal made it sign promising that if it attempted again, it would not be on school property, for liability reasons, of course. so many stratagems to force this poem to live, so few to make life feel worthwhile. this poem is not here to force you to live. this poem is not made of metal. this poem is made of soft grass and dried flowers, sweet-smelling herbs and petrified wood. this poem is a magic circle that is strong enough to hold the weight of your truth, that this world is unbearable and sometimes you can’t bear it. this poem is an acknowledgment of the deep wisdom of all your most shameful and exiled parts. this poem is a promise to never stop believing in the inherent worthiness of everything you were and are and could choose to be.

i mean, they say he’ll always forgive you, but they also say he has a lake of fire and if you sin and don’t repent you’ll burn in it for all of time, which is kind of a mixed message if you ask me.

Take yourself somewhere quiet and comfortable and reflect on one personality trait within yourself that bothers you. What bothers you about it? How do you feel when you notice this quality in others? How would you feel if this personality trait within you was smaller, quieter, or gone altogether?

and he says, grace is the divine love that all beings are worthy to receive, even in light of all we’ve done wrong.

dear Peter, you were a seventy-two-year-old retiree on a fixed income who still, somehow, found six hundred dollars to spend on me in one weekend, and the first thing you wanted to do was slow dance.

dear trans exclusionary radical feminist, i know the meaning of broken trust, don’t you? i know that we are more likely to survive in a world we make together, don’t you? i am willing to put my fear aside in the name of a better future for girls like you and girls like me, are you, are you? i am willing to take the first step into the space between us. are you? hand on my heart, sister, this i swear: despite all that has happened, i believe we can be sisters still.

believe it or not, i know something about being a woman. i know what it’s like to live in a body defined by what men can take from it.

where were you and your righteousness when those girls were being raped and killed? where were your demands for social change and justice before the attack, while the violence was happening? where were all my activist friends when i was being groomed and used and lied to and tortured? where were you then?

i want to dream of a world where instead of building prisons, we build healing temples. i want to sing the stories that tell not of the cleansing power of blood, but the transformative power of tears.

come, kindred, breathe through me. see through my eyes and speak through my lips. love through these hands that still know your names. trace your memory on the skin of the world. in my living body, there is life for you too, and when my last breath leaves, we will be together again.

you couldn’t tell us who you were or where you lived. it was too risky. you had to be careful, really careful. so did i. so did we, all of us queer kids growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. like you, we were children at war with an enemy that invaded our loved ones from within. like you, we kept secrets to protect ourselves, never knowing what might happen if the truth should fall into the hands of enemies who might be anyone—anywhere—anytime. a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul. we acquired new shapes to disguise our true forms, shifted flesh and molded bone to afford ourselves power and protection: some of us chose the dull camouflage of forest insects, others the fangs and claws of beasts too terrifying to get close to. some of us grew wings that could carry us up and away, riding the thermals to escape the pain of our bodies down below.

hooray for gay marriage! faggots and trannies can get jobs and have babies and pay taxes just like everybody else. but who did we leave behind? what did we lose on the way here?

Learn some facts about one animal that inspires you. Spend a few minutes pretending to be that animal.

we were a generation of sidekicks with no heroes to guide us—where did they go? so many were killed, murdered, lost to the virus. others were disillusioned, brokenhearted, burned out of the fight.

Under the laws of the Roman Empire, an outlaw lost rights as a citizen and became a “homo sacer” (sacred man). Theirs was a consecrated life, intended for special purpose, set apart and forbidden.

i’ve never worried about dying. it’s the world we live in that i fear, and all the things i might have to see before it ends.

i read in a book that when lightning strikes a person, it leaves Lichtenberg figures on their skin—scars in the shape of electric currents. the lightning still lives inside them, and sometimes it changes their personality.

the other day i watched a stand-up comedy special in which the comedian told joke after joke about how trans people are apparently harming our allies and our own by fighting for our human rights. it wasn’t very funny, but it did make me cry. as i listened to the comedian, i could feel the violence still burning in the place where it entered my soul, and i could hear where the violence had entered his. he says he doesn’t hate people like me, and i believe him, but hate has almost never been the reason that humans hurt humans. fear is.

i looked inside the ocean of my sadness and found a volcano of anger there. the lava said, i am the courageous part of love.

and all they know of hate is that it couldn’t beat the love out of me… —andrea gibson, “Ashes”

there are still those who hate us, who hunt us, who cannot bear their own incompleteness and therefore try to destroy us.

love still endures. love survives. love revives. love redeems. love forgives. space and time themselves might end and the essence of what we are would still remain in a place beyond reckoning.