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2 short stories i wrote in high school. CW: Funeral, Suicide, Drowning

I wrote these when I was 17 as part of a creative writing class, and I decided to post them so people could laugh at how bad I am at writing. I’m putting them together because they’re both about women and death, and I think writing them was an important step in coming to terms with my gender identity.

1. Lake

It was late afternoon by the time she woke up. She threw the covers off her body, and looked out the window. Storm clouds were rolling in, blanketing the lake in their turbulent shadow. she made her way downstairs, stepping over the discarded wrappers on her bedroom floor, careful not to disturb the territory the ants had already claimed as their own. As she entered the kitchen, she noticed the remnants of a breakfast long passed, one she had slept through. She grabbed a pancake off the leftover stack, and tore a piece off with her teeth. It was cold, and she didn’t bother putting any syrup on. There was a letter on the table, too. She opened it. Her parents would be away for the weekend. Perfect. she made her way back upstairs, throwing on a pair of old jeans and a puffy winter jacket that she outgrew a few years ago. She reached under her bed, peeling away the scotch tape that secured the carton of cigarettes and pack of matches to the bed frame. She pocketed the cigarettes, along with a shiny penny she noticed on the floor. she wasn’t superstitious, but it couldn’t hurt. She went downstairs again.

She made her exit, grabbing her old red scarf off the coat rack on the way out. As she stepped out the door, she heard the discordant screech of a crow. Not a good omen, but again, she wasn’t superstitious. A few more feet and her foot found itself completely submerged in a puddle along the driveway. It didn’t bother her too much, given where she was going. she meandered her way down to the lakeshore, plopping down on the sandy beach. She opened the carton of cigarettes, put one to her mouth, and after a few failed attempts, managed to light one of the matches. She watched the smoke drift lazily away from the tip, and contemplated how it would eventually find its way amongst the storm clouds overhead. She stood up. Cigarette still in her mouth, she began to walk into the lake. The water offered little resistance at first, but once she found herself submerged to her torso, she noticed that the movement of her body had changed. Her legs drew in wide arcs, and her arms pushed against the lake water, intent on making her way further in. It seemed almost like a dance, she thought. She continued to push against the dirty liquid, pausing momentarily when she heard a thunderclap overhead. The water was up to her mouth now, the cigarette extinguished. Just a few more feet. She looked back at the house, raising one hand above the water and giving a small wave goodbye.

She never walked back out of the lake.

2. Stairway

Acrophobia, or fear of heights, is the most common phobia, affecting around 7.5% of the United States. Feeling that stomach churning sensation when you look out a high window is very common, something that a quarter of a million people experience regularly. I was different. I used to be afraid of looking up. Down I had no problem with. In fact, I loved those annual visits to New York with my parents, taking the elevator to the top floor of the Empire State Building and seeing the island of Manhattan spread out in front of me, a tapestry woven with threads of steel and concrete. I would take regular journeys to the park near my friend Andy’s house, which had these beautiful bluffs overlooking the ocean. I would lie on my stomach, dangling over the edge, looking at the near hundred foot drop. It was game of chicken between me and gravity; would I finally suffer from vertigo and right myself back onto solid ground, or would the universe finally decide that it had taken enough of my shit and pull me down into the rocks below?

But I never looked up. I remembered one time I tried to look up; I was in 6th grade, standing in the center of my school’s baseball field. I slowly craned my neck, pulling my head towards my shoulder blades, staring into the sky. I started to feel weak in the knees, and before I knew it, my legs had given out. Andy found me a few minutes later; I was flat on the ground, looking straight up, unmoving. The doctor said I was close to landing on my spine in a way that would have permanently paralyzed me. I was lucky. After that, I never looked up again. Andy stayed with me in the hospital until late in the night, when his parents decided that he was bothering me and it was time to take him home. I didn’t mind though, he was sweet. Andy died 20 years later, in a Walmart shelving accident. I was back home for his funeral.

I got out of the taxi at the entrance to the park, rain beating against my black silk dress. I unfurled my black umbrella, the wind struggling to pull it from my grasp. I walked slowly across the manicured lawn, feeling a sense of nostalgia that persisted until the mahogany casket finally entered my vision. The raindrops continued to hit my umbrella. I wordlessly entered the crowd, all of us shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by friends yet experiencing the same loneliness. I stood in silence, listening to the service, until I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. There appeared to be some sort of object, ascending from the bluffs. I waited until the pastor ended his speech, and quicky excused myself, making my way over to it. The familiar cliff was still there, but some sort of staircase appeared to be ascending from it. I looked up at it. This spectral pathway extended as far up as I could see. I tentatively put my foot on the first step. It held solid. Then the next. Before I knew it, I had made it 10, 20, 30 feet up. Something was wrong though. I paused. It hit me; I don’t look up.

That was my last thought before I hit the rocks.

an absurd defense of arguing on twitter. CW: Transphobia

Albert Camus wrote an essay in 1942, one that has become more or less the seminal text in his theory of absurdism. In this essay, he asks — and answers — the one question that he sees as the defining argument against absurdism: If nothing matters, why not kill yourself? In retort, Camus compared living with knowledge of the absurdity of reality to the greek myth of Sisyphus: a man tasked with pushing a boulder to the top of a hill only for it to roll back down and the cycle to repeat. Camus argued that we can decide to end this cycle through suicide, or we can take pleasure and joy in something that may be meaningless and pointless. If a lack of meaning can be a vessel for ennui and depression, so too can it let us experience something positive. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I spend lots of time arguing with people. On the internet and in person, with my closest family and friends as well as complete strangers. I like to think that I’m fairly good at arguing, I speak confidently and with authority, I know persuasive rhetorical techniques, and most of all my opinions are consistently 100% correct. However, out of all the people I’ve argued with, I’m not sure how many of them I’ve actually convinced of anything. My parents are still capitalists, my friend Paige still refuses to acknowledge that ye is the objectively best Kanye West album, and I haven’t convinced anyone that you can create an effective example without listing 3 things (we do jokes here, friends). And of course the other end of the stick is that very few people have been able to convince me of anything either. Arguing is a fundamentally solipsistic endeavor, like hitting your head against a brick wall until it gives way — chances are if it does, it wasn’t on very sturdy foundation to begin with.

A few weeks ago, I had a particularly long and involving argument. A group of TERFs on twitter were getting all mad about trans women disrupting the “divine feminine” or whatever bullshit they’re on now, and I responded.

That kicked off a shitstorm in my mentions of proportions I had never experienced before. 3 or 4 of them ganged up on me, bombarding me with all angles with a variety of retorts, ranging from the deceptively cordial to the straight up stupid.

Of course I knew that nothing I said would have any effect on these people, but more than that, I knew it wouldn’t have much of an effect on anyone. No one who agreed with me was tagged in the thread, and I’m not that big an account, so nothing I tweet gets much engagement besides the people I’m directly responding to. My theory was all but confirmed when the rest of the TERFs found the thread: responses to me ended up with dozens of likes while mine accrued between 0 and 1 most of the time. For all intents and purposes, the only person who was actually listening to what I was saying was me.

I’m recounting this twitter drama not to show how I owned a transphobe epic style, to show how woke I am, or to lament my low follower count. I do it because I think it underscores why I do these things in the first place: not for external validation, not to convince anyone, not even in the hopes of effecting any real or tangible change in the world. Just as Sisyphus can be content with pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity, I can also enjoy getting heated at dumb shits on my (least) favorite internet platform. One must imagine El-GBT happy.