I remember standing outside the dog track on a country road wearing my mom’s dress, the flash of the light bouncing off my pearly ghost skin. I don’t think someone like me was in the Kerry newspaper’s before… I was scared.
The first time I was on the radio in Ireland, they said ‘Think of all the people you are confusing…don’t you think it’s selfish?’ – I remember pacing around my small room in Cork on the phone. I was fighting to explain why I existed…I was scared.
I worked in a video game shop in Cork when I started to wear makeup. I was writing a book about being non-binary and the day I got my first copy I was told about a complaint about me, a man came in and said that I was dressed in ‘circus makeup’ and that I was a man. He sent the complaint all the way to head office and I had to be investigated…I was scared.
I went home for Chirstmas a few years ago and a drunk man and his friends started to shout at me saying I was gay. All my childhood friends were with me, and they watched as I fought back. The man laughed, and I was angry. They all stood there and afterwards, one of my childhood friends said ‘That was an overreaction, you should calm down’ . It was like I was always fighting…and I was tired of fighting.
I remember one of my oldest friends ignoring me in Tesco. I was with my mom and sister. He said ‘I don’t want to be associated with someone like you’ and that was the last time we ever spoke.
I remember reading the comments on the internet when my newspaper articles went online. Hundreds of comments that made me break down in tears. I deactived my instagram and stopped putting myself out there. It was too much, and I couldn’t handle the hate. I was so sick of fighting.
My universal credit coach recently told me that they keep changing my pronouns from they/them to he/him on the internal system, and that he’s trying his best and has left a note for them to stop doing that.
I remember sitting with my old best friend at a pub and how he told me that ‘what I’m doing is hurtful and wrong’. The amount of friends who I have lost along the way has been crazy. It goes to show ya- you never know someone until they spit at you. Or something like that!
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this and that I was just a boy. How easy life wouldv’e been for me.
And now, trans people are having to fight yet again. People will kill themselves…and if you’re not scared and angry…you’re part of the problem.
I remember the journalist for the Kerry neswpaper asking me ‘Do you think it’s getting easier for you to be who you are?’, that was 5 years ago now. I’m not sure what I said at the time…but now I think about it and I’m not happy with the truthful answer..
I wanted to share little real life expereinces of what it’s like, and how hard the every day moments can be. I want to send all my love to people everywhere who have to fight!
We rushed through the overgrowth of thorns, our torches burning in the spill of night. This wasn’t our first time trying to escape the orphanage, so we knew how to stay quiet and had to hurry.
“They won’t be far behind,” Sebastian whispered.
The orphanage was by no means a wicked place; it was, of course, where we all met. The three of us spent every waking moment together. And truth be told every good memory I own belongs to the times in the orphanage with them by my side.
They told us of the beauty of the outside world, the flowers in their many colours, and the green grass that stretched far and wide. How one day we’d see it for ourselves, but not until they were ready to accept us. For you see, this was no ordinary orphanage; this was an orphanage for monsters.
We made it to the surrounding walls, the furthest we had ever come. Sebastian reached his fingers into the mud, and the stems started to pull up from the ground. They chased up the wall in a cross-hatched pattern, forming a ladder for which we could climb. He heaved over, baring his teeth.
“After you,” he huffed.
I handed my torch to Nori, and I scaled the wall. When I reached the top, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The fields were dry, and the trees were without leaves. It was as if a forever winter had come to haunt the land.
“Guys,” I yelled.
But before I could get their attention, the howl of dogs filled the quiet. They had found us. Nori caught hold of the ladder and quickly made her way beside me. She grabbed my shoulder and let out a giddy laugh.
“Close one,” she smirked.
We jumped from the wall and down onto the dry fields. We fell heavy on the ground, and it left our knees bruised and bloody.
“You okay?,” she asked, dusting herself off.
“I’m fine,” I said, wiping the blood with my shirt.
Atop the wall, Sebastian stood looking at us with a cheeky grin. He gripped the side with his fingers, and he kicked himself to the ground.
Suddenly, the orphanage gates swung open, and the hounds were on us! They were terrible creatures, vicious, crawling skeletons with searing red eyes. Their yellowing bones sparkling in the halfmoon.
“Stay behind me,” she squeezed my hand, as she said it.
Nori was a girl who appeared like a lark. As she swanned her wings and furled her back, there was little space for anything to exist. But in the middle of the blur, the scarlet flare of torchlight flickered. My eyelashes blinked as she burst the sky open with fireworks of magic. She grabbed my arm, and before I knew it, we were hand in hand, soaring through the fields and away from the orphanage.
“Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about,” Sebastian shouted.
The hounds scratched against the barrier of fire magic but couldn’t penetrate it. THE BIRD MOTHER looked on as we fled into the distance.
Even though I had seen this all before, every moment and every detail, holding her hand and running beside her was like a dream that never ended. I wished to live here in this place, in this memory, with her, forever.
“We did it,” she squealed.
“This isn’t how they told us,” Sebastian said.
A darkness was growing like a plague, turning tree barks into blistering shards, blades of grass into pools of mud, and causing the flowers to wither and die.
“Did you know?,” she frowned at me.
“No. This is new”
I had the power to see into the future. When I was born, I saw how I died. When the nurses wrapped me in a muslin tarp, I saw how the rats would eat their bones and how their children would mourn at their death beds. I was cursed with a wickedness that I couldn’t understand.
Up to this point I had known how everything would happen, but I never saw this in my visions. A great well of sadness took over me as I wept at what I saw, for the feeling of not knowing was too much. The tears in my eyes made my sight blurry. When I came to, it was her face that I saw.
“It’s okay,” she said with a warm smile.
“We should keep going,” Sebastian called out.
We all turned to face the orphanage, the home in which we found each other and where we grew up. It was small from this far away. And even though none of us said it, we were sad to be leaving it behind.
For hours, we walked through the dry fields, with no idea where we were going. We kept our heads down so as to not stir up attention, but no matter how long we walked, we didn’t come in contact with anyone.
“They really wanted us hidden away,” I joked.
“Knew we’d be too much trouble,” Sebastian laughed.
Eventually, we came to a broken-down farmhouse. The porch was covered in larvae spooling out of a dead horse carcass. They circled around the dry blood like a marching band. I watched as their shiny bodies glimmered in the last of the sunlight.
“We should take rest in here,” Nori kicked down the door.
The floor creaked as she stepped on it, and the wood snapped in front of her feet.
“Careful, watch your step,” she warned.
Underneath the rotten exteriors, there lay a beauty unlike anything I had seen. Picture frames with family portraits, patterned wallpaper, and a golden brown spinet piano in the corner.
“What is this place?”
“Looks like it’s empty,” Sebastian drew open the piano hood.
The keys left out an untuned cry as he hit them hard with his fingers. He quickly jumped to his feet and rushed towards the kitchen, and pulled open the drawers.
“Ha! Enough tins here to feed us for weeks,” he yelled out.
I bowled over onto the bed of the upstairs room as the night fell. I couldn’t help but feel scared, for I had no idea what was out here and what kind of future awaited us.
Nori knocked slowly on the open door before she came in and lay beside me. We stayed in silence for a long time until she spoke.
“I wish I had some place like this growing up,” she said.
“You had…me,” I let out a short laugh.
“You know what I mean,” she was serious.
I leant in and faced her; we were so close that our foreheads were touching. I pushed my thumb into her chin, and she shook her head and smiled.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“If there’s a house, there has to be people” I tried to be hopeful.
“But, what if…,” she stopped.
I swept my hand through her hair, and I looked down at the top of her nose. I was so scared that she might be right and that we could be the only ones left. Our whole lives, we had been lied to, and my powers had betrayed me. This was the only thing I knew that was real, being here beside her.
“Never let me go,” I said softly.
She placed her hands on my hips, and she held me. And I knew that everything would be okay.
THE BIRD MOTHER would come looking for us; there was a reason she kept us hidden so far away from everyone! I had seen it the day I was born, the reason why she’d stop at nothing until we were found and taken back to the orphanage. For monsters were not welcomed in this world.
Nori looked into my eyes, and it was true, love is the most ultimate monster of them all. For when I was born, I saw how I died.
THE QUEER PRAYER BOOK 