Maybe I should TW this

(I always breathe in deeply a couple times before I start reading. maybe you wanna imagine that, maybe you don't.) 

"Nobody cares!" 

Bolded, italicized, underlined. 

"Nobody cares!" 

I visualize your lips and your tongue painting what you just said to me. 

"This is the real world, this is how things work," you spit.

I visualize jumping.

'Get used to it' fills the silence in my head that my breathing couldn't. 

As I restrain my lungs from expelling air, I restrain myself from letting you hear my cry because it's not longer safe to. 

What you're saying to me is that I am other, my kind is abnormal, that I don't exist in the real world. 

When you kissed me again for the second 1st time on Sunday, I was elated. 

I was finally kissing someone who saw me. I was kissing someone who I didn't have to justify or defend myself to. 

It's Wednesday now, and I don't want to kiss you anymore. Your face makes me angry. 

I wake up every day to face the real world. 

The real world where I apparently don't exist.

Where every new person I meet is a potential threat to my identity, a potential threat to my physical safety. A threat to my existence. 

The real world where I'm afraid to get out of bed. I'm afraid of intolerance. I'm afraid of hostility.

The real world where people like me face violence on a regular basis. 

Where I watch a man beat my non-binary friend after the words "faggot" spill out of his mouth and are caught by his fist that meets my friends mouth. The real world where people like me were once bundled up and set on fire is referenced every single day nonchalantly and this word has become ingrained in our diction. 

The real world where I battle my body and ask myself if I want to deal with the physical pain of tightly binding my mass of chest tissue or the emotional trauma of not. 

I barely exist in the real world, gasping that somebody will see me. 

This is not your real world though. 

The only reason why I get up in the morning is so that one day I can maybe be that person who sees someone like me for who they are and includes them in the real world. Every day I'm alive is a rebellion and success; as my mind battles my body and my body battles suicide, I will continue to exist in the real world. I have to ask you, if nobody cares and if this is the real world, what are you doing to make that different? 

You're cis, I'm not; what you've said has silenced me, but I won't allow it. 

You don't get to call yourself 'radical' - you're not an ally. 

--NB