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?

Seventeen is just one of those in-between years, easily forgotten, like a Tuesday—stuck in between sweet sixteen and legal eighteen.

At least in Brooklyn, you don’t have to worry if you’re literally invisible because of your brown skin. Sometimes I try to find a white person to walk behind, just so that when everyone jumps out of that person’s way, they won’t knock into me.

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?

“Morality, at its essence, defines what is human,” I say. “Keeping questions of morality out of art suggests keeping humanity out of art itself.”

I always see it on the news. The ways the government is trying to erase me, the ways politicians try to pretend transgender people don’t exist, even though we do exist, and always have, and always will.

“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.”

“Yourself,” he suggests. “Loving and accepting and celebrating yourself, and loving and celebrating and supporting the young women like you who will come next. Changing this world, yes—we need people who will fight for our rights, fight for justice in the courts so that it will be better for the next generation. But creating our own world, not just for ourselves in our bubble, but one that can spread to those who need it most—one filled with our stories, our history, our love and pride—that’s just as beautiful. That’s just as necessary. Without that, we forget ourselves. Crumple under the pain of feeling isolated, unaccepted by others, without realizing that, above all else, we need to love and accept ourselves first.”

Once I start screaming, I can’t stop. I scream so hard my throat feels raw and my heart pounds. I’m screaming with joy. I’m screaming with pain. I’m screaming with the awe that I’m here, that we’re all here, and that we’re here because of the people before us, the people who couldn’t be here, and I’m screaming for myself, too.