and I'll pour all my sadness into you
should you like what I say and what I do
never let there be a pausing moment
as I had him in winter but he left me in spring
so now I wonder what fresh air should bring
every passing part of me gives way
and after everything here
I am still around
to welcome you in on a brighter day

you are the late night train i will never take, the cafe i will never stop in, the song i will never dance along to.
you are the late night drives with no destination, the grocery store runs, the song i have on repeat.

Recently, a turn of events has conquered my conscious. My transgender boyfriend came out to his parents as trans, and their reaction has been very volatile. They want him to break up with me, because they think he's changing himself to suit me. Yes, I'm a homosexual, and yes, I fell in love with a biological female. But I have done nothing but encourage him to be happy, and to love and support him through any and all changes necessary for him to procure happiness. They're taking him to therapy, and they're trying to divide him from me. But all they're managing to do is divide themselves from their child, for they're trying to remove me from their son's life; he doesn't want me gone. I've been there for him these many months. It's been my shoulder his head has cried on. It's been me that he seeks out when he's in despair, needing empathy. You are breaking him. He is hurting. The number of transgender youth that commit suicide each year is so high. Do you want him to be a statistic?

I have lost my respect for his parents. They want him to be a girl, but alas, he is not.

I'm weeping.

Love is such an incredible thing. We all have this idea of what love is fed to us throughout our lives; when we are birthed into this world, we experience love, see love, are taught about love. But it's hardly captured properly, I think, in books and films and other things.

    See, loving another person is almost an undescribable thing. I know that I would do anything and everything, change anything and everything, be anything and everything for for the person I love. When I first started dating my boyfriend, he called himself by a different name. A society-deemed "feminine" name.

    His whole life, everyone referred to him as a girl. Told him he was a girl. They made him behave accordingly, and told him it was wrong to act the way he wanted. They mocked him for displaying any sort of behavior that was deemed "unladylike". He learned to not trust them because they refused to be what they needed to be: supportive.

    I started hanging out with him when he still identified as a girl. At the time, he still presented as a female, but despite me being gay, I became instantly captivated by him.

    We had been friends on the internet for a long time leading up to actually spending time together. We had a foundation, we had stories to tell and memories to share. I remember there being a spark; it didn't happen when I first saw him, for I did not fall in love with his appearance. The spark happened when I began interacting with him and realized that he made my heart happy in ways that NO ONE had EVER been able to achieve.

    We started dating. At the time, I was out as "bisexual". I use quotations only because I'm actually gay, not because bisexuals don't exist. My family accepted him, but believed him to be a girl. Hell, I believed him to be a girl. A masculine one, but still a female. But then he went through this period where he identified as gender fluid, and then, eventually, came out to me as being fully Transgender.

    I'm an accepting guy. My heart, as well as my mind, is open to so many things. It didn't matter to me that his body would be changing, for I hadn't fallen in love with the body in the first place. I am gay; I seeked him out not for his body, but for the person behind the mask, who loved me unconditionally and aided me through all of my life's struggles, of which there are many. I accepted him, calling him by his pronouns, his new name, and doing my best to make him comfortable.

    I experienced fear, but only because his body and voice - which I'd grown so accustomed to - would be changing once he began transition. I was worried that he would become unfamilliar; but one thing doesn't change: a person's heart.

    Ultimately, I learned that it's my duty to be there for him always; I learned that my love needs to be steadfast and that it can't waver. He needs me just as much as I need him; we serve as life-lines for each other, and can only thrive with each other.

    Love, to me, is blind to gender. Although I'm gay, and am only attracted to the male body, I fell in love with a biological female. I knew that I could spend my life with him like that, a woman, because I cared infinitely about him. Now, I know he is a man, and nothing has changed.

    I will encourage him and support him until my light stops. And even then I hope he clutches onto me, hears my voice in his ear when he's burdened, and knows that I loved him unquenchably and irrevocably.

    That's love.

This is not a poem, just letting you know.

Do I believe in a god?
The short answer: not really.

    Now, allow me to expand. I can't believe in a god anymore. Evolution is very understandable, if you really open your mind to it. The idea isn't that humans evolved directly from monkeys, but that monkeys and humans share a common ancestor. Other than that, according to the bible, Earth is a lot younger than is reasonable; scientists are able to test dirt, and rock, to date the age of our planet. Many Christians believe the earth to be only 6000 - 15000 years old. That is ridiculous. By testing ancient rock in Australia, scientists have determined that Earth is probably around 4.54 billion years old.

    Another scientific reason that I believe God, and religion, is probably malarkey, is that there isn't a single speck of proof. Supposed miracles aren't proof. Faith is not proof. There is NO proof. Also, the fact that scientists can strip down most anything and look at the chemicals and other substances that make it up seems to go against the idea that an all-powerful, perfect creator poofed everything into existence. Scientists are able to explain how everything happens - gravity, orbiting, radiation, etc.

    If it was all created by a magical being, I think it'd be impossible to analyze and pick apart the way we've managed to. We've managed to cure diseases, increase life spans, and do remarkable things with science, and yet it is all dismissed. There are more scientific reasons I don't believe, but let's move on.

    I also have ethical objections; I don't believe that an "all-loving" god would subject young children to cancer, ravage innocent people with natural disasters, or **** a bunch of Egyptian adults/children because the pharaoh refuses to listen to God. That's right, I'm citing Exodus 11:5, when God proclaims that all first-born sons will die if the pharaoh will not allow the Jewish people to leave.

    I don't understand how an all-loving god would allow ******, ****, and other atrocities. I don't understand why an all-loving god would create some of his children as homosexuals only to **** them for something that they cannot alter. I don't understand why an all-loving god would proclaim women as inferior, and say that slaves must be obedient to their masters. I believe that we are at a point, as the human species, that these things and whether they're ethical is being brought to the fore-front of discussion.

    Quite simply: I don't believe in God. I can't anymore, and I refuse to even entertain the idea. If there is a god, he is either cruel, or very detached and nonchalant. Others may believe as they want, but I believe that the wrong type of religious people are holding us back as a species; preaching hate, delivering scripture meant to inferiorate and belittle people with differences. If religion can alter itself, and become more facilitating, more loving, more encouraging, then perhaps it will no longer hold us back.

    But right now, it is. And that's MY belief.

The manifestation of my heart sits across the table.

I steal occasional glances her way. Rather, she steals my attention. With her big lashes batting away, eyes crinkling and twinkling and the corners of her mouth lifting in amusement at the pages held between her tiny hands.

There’s a rhythmic tapping against my shins as she swings her legs–which are far from reaching the floor–underneath our table. I like to think that the action isn’t completely subconscious–that some part of her is reaching out to make sure I’m still near.

I am. I always will be.

I don’t think she’ll ever know how much I love her, how much I’ve loved her and longed for her even before she was born…how impatiently I’ve waited for her and how she was the inspiration of my writings…and dreams.

Now here she is, barely two feet from me. My life with her so far has been a paradox of my stone heart shattering and being blissfully renewed in the exact same moment whenever I look at her. Or hear her giggle, or feel her hand in mine. Or see her eyes widen at the magic she sees in everything I've grown to take for granted.

Has a man ever known adoration stronger than this?

I don't know.

But what I do know is this: the manifestation of my heart and all the love it can ever possess sits here in this bundle of beauty and boundless hope.

And she just turned 4 today.

Snow, snow
constantly falling.
Why can't it go
away and stop stalling
the inevitable boring
classes and stuff
but instead I'm snoring
and surrounded by fluff
My muscles, or rather the lack of,
cannot take the constant movement
of shovel and snow. Punishing my love
of the bad weather and it makes me lament
The days of snowmen and such are gone
slipping through my fingers like the white
powdery snow that falls on the lawn
as I continue to do what is "right".
Trapped in a house with colder souls
oblivious to the sharp ice in my heart
as I watch my siblings happily roll
in the white snow. just a part
of the big wide world
That I do not fit in
my empty shell curled
into a lonely mass of sin
                                       M.C.M