Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

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?

It makes me wonder if I really am Felix, no matter how loud I shout that name.

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?

every time I’m around him, I feel like I have to work hard to prove that I am who I say I am. It pisses me off that he doesn’t just accept it. That there’s something he has to understand in the first place.

Watching, watching, watching. It feels like that’s all I ever do sometimes.

Why am I always the person who just sits to the side and watches? What is it about me that no one likes, that no one wants?

“Wait,” Ezra says, “is everyone here queer?” “Yeah, of course,” Marisol says. “I only hang out with gay people.” Leah twists a curl around her finger. “Straight people are so exhausting.”

“You don’t get to use my pain to make your point.”

“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 know that, as a trans person of color, my life expectancy is in my early thirties, just because of the sort of violence people like me face every day.

“It’s a joke to you,” Marisol says. “You get to make everyone else the butt of your joke. We don’t.”

He falls in and out of love. And I just continue to watch from the sidelines.

And besides, I don’t think anyone would fall in love with me.

“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.

And I say that Steve and Bucky are gay as hell.”

It’s easier, I think, to love someone you know won’t love you—to chase them, knowing they won’t feel the same way—than to love someone who might love you back. To risk loving each other and losing it all.”

“I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I’ve never been kissed before. I want that, but the fact that it hasn’t happened yet—I don’t know, it makes me feel like those are things that are meant for everyone else but me.”

Live. Live them for the people who didn’t get to enjoy being a teenager. For the people who never lived past being a teenager.”

“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.