My vagina is so beautiful; I quake in fear I might wake to find her gone

#ThingsYouCantUnsay #TransFemmeFocus

My vagina is so beautiful.

My body is full of opiates.

I drift in and out.

I quake in fear that I might wake and she’ll be gone.

That I will no longer be whole. That my truth will be as though a voiceless scream, a dream I cannot share with anyone.

That my consent to my body will be shredded before me, as it was so many times before.

For more than fourteen thousand days, I woke up the wrong shape for me. My vulva existed only in my impossible hopes. I woke burdened with something I was supposed to be proud of. Every day.

There were so many days.

It’s not fair. There were too many days.

Like being caught in a psychological horror story, I woke each day. After so many days I often agreed with my tormentors, there were five lights. But they never stopped asking.

Each day was the same. Even after I learned that others had escaped, that others were shaped just the right way for them, my lived experience continued to be repetition of the loop.

Sleep. Wake. Weary shock. Grieve. Bury it, where no one could know about it.

To ask “but how did you feel about it in the moment” is to misunderstand with astounding violence. The question launders violation.

Every day.

I have fewer than ten days waking with a vagina. It is an utterly alien experience - not having a vagina, which is wonderful and welcome, but not being continually tortured every day by being the wrong shape.

Every day I wake, I fear my new form will be cruelly torn away, remanding me to an ever-dark incarceration within my own body, my brief experience of relief revealed to be a new embellishment on my lifelong pain.

When I wake, I cry in fear, because I finally have something worth fearing the loss of. I cry because I shouldn’t have had to endure fourteen thousand days of torture to finally know what it’s like to have a body I fear to lose.

When I wake, I cry fourteen thousand days of tears.