Queer Little Nightmares

by David Ly

MONSTERS THAT CONJURE FEAR AND FASCINATION in me will always be my heroes. Vengeful spirits have every right to be pissed off. Vampires know how to have fun. And Godzilla is the monster we deserve. I’ve always rooted for monsters,

Throughout history, monsters have tended to represent the big, scary “other.” The thing we do not understand, so we deem it monstrous. Scholars and people a million times smarter than me have analyzed this through the years,

a slow start is better than no start.”

A busier to-do list means a busier brain. The thing is, my brain isn’t busy. There’s this tender emptiness inside me. Like a bruise that doesn’t turn purple, still I feel its ache under my skin.

Maybe I should feel like a fraud. Or worse, an abomination. A wicked thing on the wrong end of a shotgun. But each time my thoughts whir with this hostility, they swivel back to the night sky, to Brenda and me running toward each other, making our tracks across the stars, and I feel unafraid and infinite and new.

with every return I love her a little less still I am nothing without a haunting

I’m already monster enough in my community, the embittered trans woman who hefts around her Indigeneity in order to devastate the white queers from their high pedestals. A monster carved from necessity, or at least conditioned to fulfil other people’s unholy crusades in community. I am familiar with being a weapon. I know the wildfire that has spilled from my throat and my fingertips.

There is no such thing as loss: only the way we let go of things the way they let us go.

And, what with her odd ways, her preference for her own company and a good book at home, romantic relationships had dried up by the time she hit the latter part of her thirties. Her regrets were few. And she thanked her lucky stars she had never been trapped into unwanted motherhood.

Why does intimacy come more easily when it’s anonymous? Are we so far removed from our outward identities that it’s painful to reconcile the two?