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Fortunately my high school English teacher was a little obsessed with Joyce. ‘Stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, epiphany, yes I will yes I said Yes, and falling softly, softly falling on the living and the dead.’

Being in the present—which is to say, presence—implies a future, too; caring in that moment shapes that future. Presence makes a path to find future presence, too. It shows us a life, struggles linked in love and fear alike.

want people to be more than the sum of what’s done to us, but sometimes I’m scared that the trauma just shovels into our skin anyway, hollowing us out from the inside.

For me, horror is a love language, but maybe that’s because for me everything is a love language. Horror at its most intimate is a way to share the secret parts of yourself with others: what frightens you, what comforts you, what you’re nonplussed by.

I, too, have realized that loving yourself isn’t a panacea for a world that doesn’t love you. At various times, I’ve felt an urgency to live and a simultaneous urge to die. In Greer’s work are those same tensions. I finally realized: I’ve been drawn to Greer’s work for all these years because in it, I see a world I’ve walked in as well.

Killing yourself in a world that wants you dead is a capitulation but one hard to resist.

If I love Greer Lankton’s art, which I do, it’s a love forged with every body I’ve seen laid down. It’s a love fierce with how hard it is for us to stay living, how hard-won our beauty is. It’s a love alive with the necessity of living, because not living would carve a hole in the other people you love. It’s a love I have to believe she felt, too, until at the end, she didn’t.

But trans women’s art is reduced to autobiography every day; our work, to outsiders, always reflects our own lives in 1:1 corollary. Invariably, everything we make is viewed through the lens of memoir, as opposed to something wholly original. Look at this book, for instance.

People should be allowed to change for whatever reasons possible. It’s in the changing that we get a chance to live.

Fundamentally, werewolves are violent monsters, and that violence causes pain in themselves and their victims. But unlike brute animals, they remain human, with all the human feelings of guilt and grief that come with the killing.

What is a wound if not the measure of life?

But love and hurt do not exist especially far away from each other; and to admit one is not to deny the existence of the other.

Writing isn’t healing, but I understand why I thought it could be; the book felt like the only foothold I had for my grief and guilt. Who, in our country, could see that synchronicity in death and not think the only way out was through work?

director Tobe Hooper stayed up all night shooting the last twenty minutes of the movie, and no one washed their clothes through the whole shoot because they couldn’t afford second outfits and were scared of the clothes being stolen from the local laundromat.

But of all the movies I’ve seen, I’ve found the most splendor in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, discovered myself the most in it—a revving engine of a film, sick and quick and all deep reds. In fact, this is how it worked: First I loved it, and then I loved myself.

With the boy in high school, I almost forgot how satisfied I felt after punching him; in Danny’s bed, I just felt the fear at first, not the joy. Once I finally touched another body, I thought I could find myself in it, but even now I’m not being honest with what I remember.

Memory works two ways; while we remember what hurts us it’s easy to block out how we have hurt others. “It’s not Vietnamese bodies I see in my nightmares,” one veteran disclosed in a 2015 C-SPAN interview, “it’s me.”

The horror makeup artist Tom Savini, who jump-started the increase in gore and torture in American scary movies with his special-effects work in the eighties, served as a combat photographer with the military in Vietnam. That, he says, is why his work was so realistic: He pulled the images directly from his memory.

Here’s the broken core of the thing, the disjuncture between what I’m writing toward and my difficulty in saying it. There are two violences here, that of the empire and that of its denizens, and they are asymmetric violences, and different ones. But they are linked. One reflects another: The lessons of a militarized society become internal for everyone in that society.

“Maiming,” Puar writes, “evades the optic of collateral damage,” and through that maiming goes undiscussed. The right for an occupying military to maim, she argues, replaces the right to kill.

The Right to Maim — It’s not death that’s the most significant violence, she argues, but this refusal to allow death. This is in part so insidious because wars are described first in terms of bodies lost, not larger damages done. An injured civilian—or even an injured soldier—is less visible to the liberal gaze than a dead one.

Torture exists, conveniently, in a space of deniable death: a mercy, ostensibly, in its reluctance to kill. Because of this, torture is sometimes de-emphasized in discussions of war’s aftermath; in my own hometown, the murders that Blackwater guards carried out were far more heavily discussed than the maimings.

Everyone in the movie is confident in California, because they were born there. It’s a world where race doesn’t exist, where class doesn’t exist: a fiction far from the South. Scream is set in a world, somewhere, where the only thing you have to deal with is trauma.

“Scream,” Williamson said in an interview, “is about gay survival.” The things I warmed to in the first film—the quips, the complex women, the homoeroticism of the ending—are all shared across a lot of queer media. But if you look beyond the universal queerness the film promises, it’s not about gay survival after all: It’s about gay escape.

White culture at the time was California culture.
But it wasn’t the radio, or television, or even clothes that caused me to fantasize about California; it was Scream. Everything else in popular culture I saw carried a masculine prankish sheen overpowering the parts that seemed otherwise compelling, all rowdy shirtless men in bands and softboy bravado.

Horror movies present worlds where horrible things happen on top of one another; people die, are psychically and physically mutilated, are abandoned. In presenting the worst possible outcomes for a life, they make our futures feel safer—but by ignoring the potential for growth, the fear beneath still festers.

Through horror, you can see everything in a life: Atmosphere and pain and death and above all the desire to keep living.

Another word for Kristeva’s “sickness,” after all, is vulnerability, and vulnerability always lurks beneath the surface of horror, the wound beneath the stitch. Horror movies are about staying alive, and that focus has taught me more about care than anything else.

Horror shows lives unlike our own and this is where it gets its strength.

Since Trump’s election and the Twitterization of everything, she’d started to wonder if there was even a point to writing books anymore. And who for? The directionless cruelty of the Trump era tore the veil off social behavior and destroyed the illusion that any one human life mattered.