On trans day of remembrance, I’m thinking about how we remember the dead through the violence imposed by the cis-het gaze instead of the self-determination and worlds of survivability our siblings created while they were living.

How do we keep their lives without forgetting them in the stubborn aftertaste of violence that claims control of how their stories are told and how their living was erased. How do we remember them the way they would want us to?

How do we unlearn the practice of stripping a person’s life-ness through our tendency to first remember the violence used to suffocate them instead of the capacity of life that was held in their lungs.

As I find the bricks to build a home within myself, there’s a constant dissonance in the consistency of erasure of losing people who I could have crossed paths with: How do we share the live locations of our joys with queer and trans siblings who are already dead?

I’m grieving 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, whose death also came from a cis-het policing of transness, and Annanyah Kumari Alex. I’m thinking about what it would be like to become friends over coffee rather than siblings over death. I’m thinking I wish I didn’t know them at all if it meant that we are co-existing without crossing paths. I’m thinking about everyone else whose 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?