Lucas Yao

What comes after I’m proud of you

You’ve always been so scared. The first thing you told me
was that you were scared. You told me about a transgender
woman who lived in your apartment when you were young
and said she found a way to live her life without hormones
or surgeries or legal name changes. As though you can know
or understand the bravery of being a transgender woman
in 1980s Ivory Coast. I will not live in the shadow of your
fear. What gives you the right to be so scared of my death
that you’d bury me alive? You ask me to undo my reality
and invite back a darkness I’ve banished. But you can’t
know what you’re asking, or you wouldn’t ask at all.