[continued]

How do we share the live locations of our joys with queer and trans our siblings who are already dead? How do you perceive an identity that stubbornly defines itself as loss? How do you trace the path back to yourself when each step is erased in fear of being found?

There’s the tired and overdone trope of families grieving trans and gender nonconforming people’s inaccurate gender imposed on birth – a sugarcoated way to say that parents reduce their children to anatomy everyday. I’m grieving too – for everyone who dies, is dying, is dead before they feel comfortable in their skin.

How do we live in this graveyard, where the possibility of being is killed before we become? I’m thinking about Arvey and Annanyah. I’m thinking about what it would be like to become friends over coffee rather than siblings over death. I’m thinking about everyone else who’s death isn’t sensationalized, but is dying without being known.

What do we do with this grief of living in love – of knowing that love comes at the cost of the remnants that survived despite the ending of many selves; that love exists in a continued death that cannot be counted, only felt. What do we do with the consistency of leaving someone behind as we become ourselves? “Joy is not made to be a crumb,” Mary Oliver writes. If we don’t make a collective effort to address the distance between these scattered crumbs by educating ourselves on how we can support LGBTQI+ youth, any possibility of finding a sliver of cake collapses into itself.

“To the millions of other students who might be facing bullying and violence I would say that please reach out to your parents or elders who might be able to support you and get you out of the situation. Please don’t tolerate any ill treatment, you deserve safety and an affirmative and supportive environment to learn and grow,” Aarti wrote.