“Your gift is quite special.”

“To be cliche, it’s not a gift, it’s a curse.”

“That’s because you do not know how to use it to help people, Graham.”

“I can see inside of them. I can see what’s killing them, killing each other, watch as they kill themselves. Every moment I am around them, I take more and more of their psychosis onto myself. Separate  they are human beings with difficulties, illnesses, psychosis that may destroy them if it gets the better of them. But together, it’s an atom bomb waiting to blow off my fucking head.”

“You can see the puzzles that need solving and help us solve them, stop the bomb by cutting the wire in time.”

“No, you don’t understand. This bomb does not have a timer. It will simply blow up or it will not. A live, but sleeping mine that is patiently waiting for a nudge.”

He watched as ey sinks below the surface, not even bothering to struggle to swim. Cold, suffocating wetness clouds eir vision and clogs eir ears. The particles of dirt erase eir observer from sight, the sounds ey hear muffled and waterlogged.

“Graham.”

Ey opens eir mouth to respond and ends up choking on gallons of water, eir throat closing up.

“Graham. Graham.”

The water consumes and surrounds Graham, letting them sink and sink until there is only blackness left. Ey can still hear him calling eir name.

“Graham. Graham. Graham.”

“You don’t see the world through rose-tinted glasses, do you?”

“I see the world not at its best or as an optimist, but much worse than I’m sure it is. The glasses I wear block out the sunlight, as they are designed to do, but they work too well. They block out the sun until there is no light left and I am stuck drowning in darkness.”

“Why am I here? You know it’s hurting me. I know you know.”

“Graham. Your ability… your gift is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We need your help to understand how they think and feel so we can help them,” she says. Ey knows they sent her in here to appear as a soothing yet firm mother. They were smart. They even got eir mother’s perfume right. Just not the mother and child relationship.

“I can understand them even without hearing. You honestly just think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“Of course not,” she said, eyes shifting. Graham didn’t like eye contact, but that was just ridiculous.

“Tell me the truth. Am I here to be evaluated and institutionalized or am I here to make your therapy and psychiatry easier since you can’t seem to try hard enough to understand them?”

Graham lifted eir head, looking at her face, her brow line specifically, watching as sweat beads. It is hot in eir room, but ey was from California. These people were not used to the heat, much like Graham was not used to the cold.

“Well, doctor?” 

She took a long moment to answer, masking it with a deep breath, Graham watching as the gears turned and the ideas spun before she decided on her answer.

“We want to help you and we want you to help them. Is that so much to ask or want?” she asked, her tone full of a motherly guilt trip Graham did not want to take.

“No,” ey finally answered. “I suppose not.”

She smiled. “Good. Try and get some rest before tomorrow.”

“The dead do not sleep,” eye responded as she closed the door behind her.

Ey drank eir coffee uncomfortably as the man watched. Ey knew he was looking, even without having to make eye contact. People watched em more than ey watched people.

“You told me before that you see ghosts.”

“Only in the metaphorical sense. I see the ghost of psyche and how she flits around me and others, haunting them.”

“Do you feel haunted?”

“I feel haunting,” ey says, not looking him in the eyes.

“Man should not watch the ghosts of others, but observe their own?” he asks, looking for confirmation. Graham nods. “Do you feel like a ghost, Graham?”

“Yes. I haunt more than I exist.”

Every time I close my eyes, I see gore; stark red on a white backdrop. Human mistakes in a sterilized environment.

The day xe passed on was the first day of spring,

the world opening up from the cold winter,

embracing the sun like hir long lost love

breathing a huge sigh of relief as a band-aid was torn.

Xe hoped to reveal a healed wound, clean after pain and festering.

A wound not reopened but created,

tears and salt filling it to make it sting

 further screaming hallelujah to try and bring hir back from the dead

clinging onto every little thing that has nothing to do with hir

personally.

Xe sent strangers to us, 

asking us how we are doing,

buying us a chai tea with four extra shots through a black car and a sleeve of tattoos

justifying our mental health days that turned into weeks,

weeks of spending cash until the anxiety cripples my ability to eat

and until my cravings turn hollow and-

Hir last request was to be a rockstar,

powering on stage, basking in their sex appeal as they fuck porn stars

even though xe can’t play a single instrument

but hir art and words that I didn’t know xe had,

passion pumping out from every pore, every muscle, ever smile

until it all stopped and there was nothing but wishful thinking and denial.

“It’ll be a day of celebration.

A day of happiness and fond memories,”

they tell me as I cry harder and harder.

But it won’t be.

Because xe will never be able to be happy again

because xe can’t

because xe is gone

and every time i glance at that photograph

I remember seeing xe post on hir blog saying they were feeling good about themselves

and it was a good day.

And we cling to good days

like children to a comfort blanket.

The soft fleece is substance abuse,

the smooth satin self-harm.

I count the things that xe will never see,

though sometimes I hope

and wonder

if they have tumblr with a good wi-fi connection up in heaven,

that xe can see

how cute BMO was in that episode,

didn’t get too pissed when we watched Avengers on the way to the service,

and I hope xe saw Jaye’s James Deen porn spam

and Stoya in that wig with Amanda next to her

as we all lie on the bathroom floor as

the thing about things plays so softly through our laptop speakers,

only loud enough to understand the parts that make us cry 

as you’ve left us with no choice but to experience for you

everything that is new

and every day it breaks my heart as Jaye snuggles

that sixteen dollar bear we bought at SaveMart the day after

and both mutually named it after you in an awkward way,

not daring to say it out loud, fingerspelling it between each other

because the tears still hurt and breaking down in a parking lot

would probably upset the smoker out back.

Our sobs wracked us like ocean waves,

a riptide,

screaming nonononono

until it stopped and stopped and stopped but it never did.

the happiness sucked out of everything until it is all black

and bottomless.

and sometimes I forget the world is bottomless

and some days it is easy.

then I remember. and I’m drowning in public as xe swims behind my eyelids,

the people with the life rafts miles away,

barely keeping above the surface and

scared we’ll never relate to each other besides our grief

and worried are grief will end and we will have nothing

and no one to remember xe with

I made a pack (2 dozen) of fake cigarettes out of orange post-it notes and tape, the pack out of carefully folded and taped paper.

I kinda want to write a story where like this character has magical powers and everyone is like ‘You’ll lose your powers if you have sex so don’t do it’ and the magical person is like ‘hahahaha i’ve already had sex you dumb fucks’ and they can still use their powers because what does sex have to do with magic anyways?

There is this loud guy in my anthropology lab. I know he is not in the lecture because I can’t hear him in the back of the class talking. He’s that loud.

He feels the need to insert his jokes/thoughts/opinions into everything everyone says. Including the teacher. And all she can do is laugh kinda awkwardly because she’s a bit thrown from the interjection.

In my last lab class, we had to come up with team names. My team name was The Superfamily because science.

Someone else’s team name was The Alpha Homos because humans and science. I think Superior Homos would have been better, but that’s just me.

But when the loud guy heard the name, he jsut felt the need to do “the gay lisp” and say “Fabulous~” and all the stereotypical gay guy things. Everyone laughed and I was just disgusted. I keep forgetting that people are actually homophobic at this school. I keep thinking that everyone’s cool and nice and at the very least knows what’s offensive.

So I just whispered “And that’s when you realize half the class is homophobic” to the girl sitting next to me. I’m not sure if she agreed, but she didn’t disagree.