It starts with a kiss.
I'm paraphrasing. It starts with you. It starts with the light of the moon and illuminated storefronts two hundred meters below a construction crane—Target at the base of a Jacob Frey Building; Speedway across the kitty-corner and your leather jacket filled with shoplifting.
Are you smoking a cigarette? Didn't you quit? Don't you want to?
Don't you love the way I talk to you?
You say my name through girl stubble and a laugh. Juno. Body slumped across the crane controls and I'm thinking about dancing. I'm thinking about drunk and trespass and lying and all the other deceitful little things we do that aren't quite like it.
Lying by omission—marginal, according to you. We do what we need to survive, Thorn. That's also you. Sweetheart by day and a corny little faggot by night.
"No we don't, Evelyn," I say. I swirl grape juice in a plastic Smirnoff flask. "We live and breathe dumb risk. We do what we need and more."
"By the teeth," you say.
"By the teeth?" I repeat, incredulous. "Bite me."
You do and it hurts.
Neck covered with hickeys, you follow me out into the rain and watch me slip on a beam a hundred and seventy-five meters up. My foot slides diagonal and crushes into an acute angle where the truss meets the next beam. It's tropical in December and the world is dead. We'd be high off the pollution if we opened our mouths, and gone if we took the fall.
"Ow," I say, calm.
You pause and think about mortality and choose to laugh instead. "You know you just flashed."
A hundred seventy meters yawn open between my legs. Eldritch monsters need to look upwards to drink the sky, and at the end of everything, my fear remains alive. I raise both arms over my head and my cropped jean jacket rides up over my bare tits.
You shake your head. We're fucked in the head, aren't we? You don't need to say it aloud. Fascism is two meters tall and all around us—we climbed up here to take a look, and it's uncomfortable when ableism prods back.
Insanity. Insanity defense. Insane at the dinner table on Thanksgiving. The band-aid on my injection site has a picture of Charmander and I'm picking it apart faster than my family.
Don't blame yourself, you'd said. It's funny. What use is a voice of reason when—
I slip again. Shoe rubber screeches on cold metal. My father slams my finger in a car door and I stick the broken fingernail in my mouth and suck.
I look up to you. Meet your eyes seven meters above. Nineteen to twenty-six isn't that big of an age gap when we never expected to live past thirty.
A hundred and sixty-five meters to go.
It's terminal. Terminal illness. Women's bathroom at Terminal 2—a cis woman kicks me in the cock and I'm the threat because I scream like a man. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you—
Stop overreacting, Marlene tells me on the phone. She used to be my mom but now she's just Marlene. Just injust. Justin, she says, firmly, like she's trying to snap my back to dissociative unreality. A haze permeates the town and toxins fill my lungs. Dreams of youth and buildings full of euthanasia. You know—childhood?
I pick Charmander. The needle exits my thigh and you lick the blood that drips out. You're a freak and I tell you as much.
I write HIV+ on the used needle for whoever pulls it back out of the Walgreens bathroom sharps disposal.
What do I even get out of community? A beating? A borrowed Palestinian flag and blocked traffic? Skyways full of you? A map to the nearest tgirl?
I remember being on heroin with you. My head lolled to the side and I said to you, hey, and you said, what? and I said—something I regret.
"You can't keep doing this parkour shit," Marlene screams in the Raising Canes drive through on Lake and Hiawatha. I curl into a ball like a woodlouse and fall into the crack in the seat next to the middle seat belt buckle. Marlene continues unabated. "You're making your father scared—"
"He told me to man up and face my fears," I say.
"And you're throwing your life away!" Marlene says.
"You're throwing me away," I say back.
Rounds of discourse. I had a son / I had a mother. The take out is ready and we pay credit. Somewhere in this city, a woman is singing in the shower without caring about voice training, and that woman is you.
Euthanasia again. All the homeless shelters are pushing it. Execution like a court date, hidden in paperwork as irrelevant as the terms of service on social media. I'm doomscrolling on the Bird App. Lesbian sex juxtaposed with genocide. I wish there was a place in Minneapolis where women could go and scream and never be hurt again.
Nightclub bathroom. Washington Avenue Bridge. The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic. One call can save your life—but Goddess, what are we saving?
Tinder date. You. Nightclub bathroom. The collared boy metamour you keep on a leash has ecstasy and we pool funds for the Uber home. Where is home, exactly? The city? The land? Land that was here before, and will certainly remain after the stain we leave on this parcel of time?
One day, the world will be laundered like wet bedsheets. My emotions won't live on the outside. No one will save me, and I will be whole and perfect and forever.
"Hey," you say sideways against a bare mattress.
The heat is off and the cockroaches are in. Breath dissipates. My palms are wet and I slip again and I'm a hundred and sixty meters up and still clinging onto a metaphor of a metaphor of hope.
"How fast is too fast?" I ask.
You shrug.
Rain whips against us. We're free climbing a construction crane on the IDS tower for no reason but the thrill. We're idiots. We're in love.
Monsters on the skyline and the President vows to slit my throat on live TV. We will never own a house and we'll only barely afford groceries but it's the trannies that are the problem. I watch CNN all night and get my nipples pierced in the morning. You struggle to find the rubbing alcohol, and a cockroach crawls on my foot while I'm bleeding.
"They say they can survive nuclear bombs," you muse.
I look at the roach. "I'm glad."
Tinder date. Estrogen and Fentanyl test strips. You start smoking Newport menthols again because you find a pack under the anti-homeless bench you fucked me on. It's like an item drop in a JRPG.
We're fucked in the head, aren't we?
"Got the shit kicked out of me over there," you mention.
"Yeah?" I say, desensitized.
"Yeah. Broke a couple ribs." You pull up your camisole and I can't tell the difference between the assaults and the self-harm. "Knocked one of the fash out, though."
"No shit," I say.
"Got V-coded when the guards found out," you say.
We smoke, and the night is endless.
Eventually, I point up at a crane and tell you I'm going to climb it.
Trauma and the lies we tell ourselves. No, mom—I mean, Marlene, I can't talk right now. I don't want to. I love you. No, this is forever. Please come back.
Whisper. Fuck. Who the fuck are we? We work our lives away at the grocery store, selling food we can't afford for pieces of paper with numbers and colonizers on them. Twenty dollars and a genocidaire. You're making your father scared—
Stop overreacting.
Cold metal on my palms and a beating heart. You know, I picked the name Thorn because it's something that hurts people. It's something that wounds. Bad conversation starter. Bad home and a good heart. Always a thorn in someone's side.
"You were trying," you tell me, because you're good. You're so fucking good, Evelyn, I—
You know, sometimes I tell people stories about my childhood and it makes them start crying—I mean, Juno, sometimes I tell people about my life and it makes them start crying—I mean, burn the witch at the stake, right? How else would you start a forest fire?
"That's your first name?" you ask me.
"Yeah. Juno Thorn. It's also my bird account. You know. At you-know-thorn?"
"Yeah. I do," you say, and climb with me.
And yeah, I know I've got attachment issues. BPD princess climbs a crane and splatters on Nicollet mall just to prove a point about transphobia—I mean, I'm so fucking tired of trying—
Disorganized attachment. Me and Marlene and my dad and my mom and us? You know, us? You know how a third or fourth or fifth date with your ex girlfriend can change the world? How fucking long have I known you?
Six months. Halfway to a dream, and the clouds are beautiful tonight.
A hundred meters to go and I kiss you again.
The pull of the Earth and the threat of the fall. Forever in an instant. Endless.
At the top, only lightning can hurt us. The psychosis at the periphery of my vision is just psychosis. The damage stays the same but we can see all of it. My industrial piercing is rejecting, and—isn't the skyline beautiful?
We've fucked so many times. Fucked ourselves over once more than that.
What is the lie, here? What does it mean to lie here? Lying to ourselves about whether hope is possible, or whether our women's bodies will be our bodies, or—what is the juxtaposition? Hate crime at the end of everything?
Where will we go from here, and who will we become?
I pull my panties back up and my own cum soaks into the fabric. Vertigo at the end of vertigo, and I'm falling for you.
I laugh the whole way down.