I wake up most days wanting to be carried away to another place. I dream of other worlds and possibilities. Places that seem impractical and illogical and unattainable. To shed this body and float like dandelion babies in a summer breeze toward I don’t know what. Maybe it’s escapism, maybe it’s a fascination with death. The thing about both is that they involve journeys and the prospect of becoming. To become is an action that never has a clear ending. When have I become? Am I because I say I am?
To exist in this middle ground of constantly becoming but having became already, for eternity. I dream and I nightmare. I hope and I fear of other worlds, in the same way that I hope and I fear of this world. The multitude of existences contained within our atmosphere. How the smaller and smaller you go, the more vast things seem to become.
I dream of making the impossible possible, because that is what being trans is. It is the filling of a vessel that has been empty for centuries. It is the exploring of a cave long forgotten with the architecture of humanity painted on its walls. It is the grace of a soul feeling it has no home but always offering someone a place to rest their spirit. What I’ve been searching for in this experience of not being home in my body is hope because I think hope provides relief, a brief moment of warmth on the skin, the first taste of spring, the breaking of the first tendrils of a vine through the soil.
But how does one build hope? Hope requires an orientation toward the future. An accounting of the past or perhaps a radical reimagining coupled with the integration of mechanisms we associate with the future. For many of us, the only hopeful option in considering the future is liberation. In considering futurism movements such as Afrofuturism, it becomes apparent that there is this power to the act of radical dreaming, particularly for people who have been told dreams are futile. To imagine a future if the past hadn’t been the past or if the present took a dramatic turn towards the decolonial. The way that Afrofuturism has continued traditions of storytelling, mythologizing, hope-building.
I wonder about the diametrical opposition between past and present. If we are constantly becoming, then doesn’t that mean we live in a constant state of past and future whirling around us? Maybe these two are not so opposite as we perceive.
And it makes me think…
what if trans people could imagine a future and a past simultaneously?
So many of us don’t even conceive of a future, we live in the present because our bodies are constantly the site of violence and existential conflict. And our past has been erased from us. But if we gave ourselves permission to dream radically, to reimagine our world as an alien one, where a binary was never a consideration, where the march toward proverbial progress isn’t used as an excuse to justify the destruction of entire groups of people. that freedom gives us the power to breathe. To sit within that lush imagery and bloom.
For art becomes artifact. And these are the building blocks of a cultural narrative and a mythology. A proclamation that we are here and have always been here.
