If I Die: A Black Trans Request

If I die,

i do not want to be memorialized.

i do not want to be undesirable and despised in my living only to be lessened and capitalized off of in my death.

i do not want your tears. i do not want your nice words. i do not want your summation of my living.

i do not want any performance of care,

rest in peace

rest in power

we loss a giant today

he asked the tough questions

he lived honestly

he was a good friend

he was a good sibling

he was always there when i needed him

he made the world better

we need to protect Black trans women and femmes

i want to be celebrated by only the people who attempted to save my life.

the ones who invested in my futures and trajectories in earnest.

the ones who allowed me to be flawed and make mistakes.

the ones who fought to experience me in my allness every day and in every encounter.

and the ones who stayed.

i want you to be in awe and perhaps make sense of my audacity in living ’cause I lost so much to live in the way that I did.

i do not want to be referenced by a person or an organization who continues, at this very moment, to contribute immensely to my death and to the death of people like me.

i want my Black poor Louisiana family to be taken care of

my Black momma, my Black siblings

and my Black nieces

and nephews

and those who don’t fit easily in the binary,

all living on the margins of the margins.

they’ve never known levity or rest. they only know dreaming as a means to escape. they only know survival in the now.

when I die,

i want to come back as a ghost and terrorize my oppressors.

i want to haunt you. i want to be your night terror — the bearded boogie lady who shows up every night to force you to reckon. the lady who shows up during your sleep paralysis episodes to scare the shit out of you. the lady who forces you to remember.

i want to fling back windows on windy nights, knock down keepsakes in your basement and attic and peer over you as you sleep blowing sour somethings on your face. i want to move your lucky ball cap around your house during your favorite team’s playoff run, never sitting in the one place you set it down. knowing that this will actually cause disruption.

i want to hold your hand and take you back in time, and flashback some of your most violent moments. i want you to experience the pain you caused and the deaths you contributed to, and then explain to you how it’s coming back to you tenfold. taking my time, ’cause now I have access to unlimited time and energy.

i want to hold your hand and take you to visit one of your many futures. One that has you in a room, all alone, with all of the things you’ve accumulated in your living. i want you to ponder on what it means to be financially well and morally bankrupt.

i want to invite dead Black trans kids to your room in the middle of the night to whip yo’ ass. Don’t worry. they won’t kill you. they will of course show you more kindness and grace in their death than you ever showed them in their living.

i want to cast a wicked spell on you. one that does not allow you to experience joy and pleasure in the current way you choose to live. and each day you continue to live your life without empathy for deviant peoples you will stub your big toe (on your favorite foot) twenty times a day and get paper cuts in between your thumb and index finger in the most inopportune moments. the spell can only be broken with a string of radical and truthful decisions made around your living, and will return once you allow empathy to dry up.

i’m dead,

keep your tears.

i want the people who loved me in real ways to play Le’Andria Johnson’s catalog as they mourn my death. Le’Andria is the sound of the Black fat trans rage in my head and heart even though I’m agnostic at best.

my rage was always dark, and for a long time mascaraded and paraded as something else. something less and something easy.

i want you to pay attention to her conviction to tell the truth as she experiences it. allow that conviction to move you to a more honest and just place in living. however, and a true however, continue to overmind the christian dogma and instruction.

i want you to find the worship moment with Le’Andria and Tiffany Andrews singing No Weapon. there is a moment when Le’Andria reminds us to not lose our mind, to hold onto it. i want you to make sense of that line as you hold that Black trans existence is parallel to gaslighting and telling bold lies.

i want you to play Better Days, and try your hardest to believe the words and the sentiment. and be open to what better days look like, and how they come about. and what your role is in creating them.

i want you to watch the Nina Simone documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone, and track the ways we make Black brilliant women and femmes, the most humane of us all, crazy. instead of valuing the wisdom and the divinity of Black trans people, you continue to choose fear over the lives of the very people who can free you.

i want Nina Simone’s, Here Comes the Sun playing in elevators, hospitals, waiting rooms, coffee shops and airports all in my honor. becoming the soundtrack for trans living.

if you can find my body,

i want to be cremated. do make sure my Black mother sees my body first to bear witness to my living and death. i was indeed here.

i want my ashes to be sprinkled around New Mexico canyons. i want to be able to see the stars at night, listen to the soundtrack of canyon living and canyon death and all that’s in between.

i want to smell the desert flowers as I lay, as i rest. as i reflect on my living.

In death,

i hope to be assigned someone to hold me. someone to massage my shoulders, rub my feet, lather my hands in shea butter and then cuddle me in my fullness without hesitation and doubt. only certainty exist.

i hope to be assigned someone to be my tether while i dream and dream and dream. I need someone who will hold onto me and never let go. and i hope that there is always a reason to dream, even in death.

i hope to be assigned someone who knows me as desirable. and that desirable is synonymous with living in honesty, in audacity and in tenacity of doom.

i hope to be assigned someone who i can share my secrets with and they can share theirs with me. i want us to routinely discuss the most subtle and intimate ways we bucked the system and how shame and cowardice pressured us to bury those attempts.

i hope to be assigned someone who can wish me a job well done in earnest. Someone who took the time to understand and observe my living. someone who was in on the joke of life.

i hope to make home a place where accountability and joy exist in all the ways i can’t imagine nor define.