Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

My first instinct is to roll my eyes, but if I’m honest with myself, I can feel jealousy sprouting in my chest. What does it feel like, to love someone so much that you’re willing to publicly bare your heart and soul with a black Sharpie? What is it like to even love someone at all? My name is Felix Love, but I’ve never actually been in love. I don’t know. The irony actually kind of fucks with my head sometimes.

But . . . Even after coming out, even after starting my transition, sometimes I get this feeling. The feeling that something still isn’t right. Questions float to the surface. Those questions begin to pull on this thread of anxiety, and I’m afraid if I pull too hard, I’ll unweave and become completely undone. Maybe that’s why I hate my dad deadnaming me, more than anything else. It makes me wonder if I really am Felix, no matter how loud I shout that name.

“Well,” she said, “you deciding to be a guy instead of a girl feels inherently misogynistic.” She told me, “You can’t be a feminist and decide you don’t want to be a woman anymore.”

Fuck this bitch

I’ve never known a pain like this before. I’m definitely feeling it now. I feel like I’ve been physically attacked. Like someone took control of who I am. Took that control away from me.

“I want to be in love. I’ve never, you know—felt the kind of passion great artists talk about. I want that. I want to feel that level of intensity. Not everyone wants love. I get that, you know? But me—I want to fall in love and be broken up with and get pissed and grieve and fall in love all over again. I’ve never felt any of that. I’ve just been doing the same shit. Nothing new. Nothing exciting.”

Some people say we shouldn’t need labels. That we’re trying to box ourselves in too much. But I don’t know. It feels good to me, to know I’m not alone. That someone else has felt the same way I’ve felt, experienced the same things I’ve experienced. It’s validating.

It’s like I’m constantly trying to prove that I deserve love—but how can I, when even my own mom doesn’t love me?

“Astrology is real,” Tyler insists. “Listen. The moon controls the tides, right? The human body is mostly water. It’d make sense if the moon controls us, too.”

My dad won’t look at me. I don’t know if he even knows how to look at me. He can’t see me for who I really am—only who he wants me to be. Maybe this is fucked-up, I don’t know . . . but somehow, it’s his approval I need most, even more than anyone else’s. I need his validation. His understanding, not just acceptance, that he has a son.

“I just want to prove that I’m good enough, too. That I deserve it. It’s kind of like proving that—I don’t know, proves I deserve respect and love, too, even if no one else agrees with me. Even if no one else believes it.”

I’m not pretending to be a boy. Just because you haven’t evolved to realize gender identity doesn’t equal biology, doesn’t mean you get to say who I am and who I’m not. You don’t have that power. Only I have the power to say who I am.

Lucky, I hope this isn’t weird . . . but you go to my school, don’t you? You go to St. Catherine’s. Okay, sorry, that was weird. But I really think you do. I feel like I know you. I hope you tell me who you are. Because this is what’s weirdest of all. Sorry in advance. But I think I might be falling for you.

I’m not trolling you. I’m just telling you the truth. You were born a girl. You’ll always be a girl.

I think its Marisol Or Plot twist Ezra

It’s a quick ride on the train into Brooklyn. I keep rubbing my thigh, imagining the testosterone sinking into me like a magical drug. It’s kind of stupid, I guess, but sometimes I feel like trans folk are superheroes. It’s a little like I’m Peter Parker, bitten by the T-shot, magically going through all these changes—or like Captain America, getting that experimental drug. When I first started doing my research, a Tumblr post I saw said that trans people used to be considered gods in a bunch of different cultures and religions. Dionysus was the god of transgender people, and Loki could change genders at will, too. We’re still considered spiritual guides in some places around the world. That’s pretty cool to think about.

“It’s like every identity I have . . . the more different I am from everyone else . . . the less interested people are. The less . . . lovable I feel, I guess. The love interests in books, or in movies or TV shows, are always white, cis, straight, blond hair, blue eyes. Chris Evans, Jennifer Lawrence. It becomes a little hard, I guess, to convince myself I deserve the kind of love you see on movie screens.”

“The issue is that we’ve never really gotten to see our own stories,” Declan tells me. “We have to make those stories ourselves. Even if a creator made a character to be straight, they put those characters out into the world, right? So those characters are mine now. And I say that Steve and Bucky are gay as hell.”

“I’m not flaunting anything. I’m just existing. This is me. I can’t hide myself. I can’t disappear. And even if I could, I don’t fucking want to. I have the same right to be here. I have the same right to exist.”

It’s almost like I was looking for the pain and the hurt, because it was easier to live with the idea that, even though I want love, I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be loved.

“Felix,” he says again, with this small smile. “It fits you. It really does. I love you. I don’t want you to ever think that I don’t. I’ll admit, at first, I had a difficult time figuring all of this out. But you know what? I’ve never seen you happier. I know you’re struggling with Ezra and everything, but I’ve never seen you with this light inside of you. You weren’t happy, and now you are, and that’s all I could ever want for you. That’s all I could ever ask. You’re happy. And brave. You’ve been so courageous, just by being yourself, even knowing that the world won’t always accept you for who you are. You refuse to be anything but yourself, no matter what. I look up to that. I admire that.”

“I love you!” I yell.

“Sorry,” he says, breathless, grin on his face. God, I’ve missed him so fucking much. “What’d you say? I don’t think I heard you right.” I bite the corner of my lip, trying to stop myself from smiling. “I said I love you.” He squints at me. “Say that again? Just one more time.” “I love you.”

Before, when Ezra would hug me, I never thought much about it—but now, there’s a pinch of nervousness overshadowed by excitement. Pure joy. Amazement, that I could’ve been with Ezra like this the entire time, if I hadn’t been so oblivious—to both his feelings, and my own. If I hadn’t been so afraid of letting myself feel a real love like this.

He sits up, resting his forehead against mine. “You deserve to be loved,” he tells me, then kisses me. “You deserve all of my love.” He kisses me again. When I kiss him back, we lie down on the couch, kissing slowly and softly, as if time is at a standstill, and we’ll get to do this for the rest of our lives.

“I was hurt this summer, hurt more than I thought I ever could be. It could’ve been easy to say I was hurt because I’m trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there’s something weird about that—something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It’s the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power.” Ezra’s biting his lip as he grins at me. I shrug a little. “It makes me feel like I’m a god. I wouldn’t change myself for anything.”