xy | silas

“I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth.

Yesterday, a friend in California, when giving me directions, told me I could take the trail toward the tall pines or turn left and find a field of poppies, growing gold and savage at the edge of the valley.

When I asked which to choose, she simply shrugged and said: either way, it’s all heaven.”
― Joy Sullivan, Instructions for Traveling West: Poems

“In the body I was born with, I had been invisible as the person I considered myself to be; I had been invisible as a queer while the form of my body made my desires look straight. Now, as a dyke I am invisible among women; as a transsexual, I am invisible among dykes. As the partner of a new mother, I am often invisible as a transsexual, a woman, and a lesbian. I’ve lost track of the friends and acquaintances these past nine months who’ve asked me if I was the father. It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body. The high price of whatever visible, intelligible, self-representation I have achieved makes the continuing experience of invisibility maddeningly difficult to bear.”
― Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage

“Maybe there is some mercy in God, after all — if He allowed me to have you, for however short.”
― Rafael Nicolás, Angels & Man

“What do I do with all this pain? Where do I place it? If I cannot give it to God, then who do I give it to? If I don’t get it out of me, then it will kill me.” ‘But I want to die, don’t I?’
Samyaza took his cheeks, held them. “You don’t want to die.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t.” Samyaza’s thumb dragged along to catch one of Azazel’s tears. “You want this pain in you to die.”
“I’m all pain now.”
― Rafael Nicolás, Angels & Man