#mygd

He hates you. He really does.

You always order the same, complex, monstrosity of a drink. Something about adding in fruit to cancel out the sugar, only to add the sugar back in the form of a syrupy liquid. Yoongi doesn’t get it. Yoongi doesn’t get paid enough to get it.

The worst part is you’re too sweet for him to actually tell off. “Good morning, Yoongi,” you chirp, aura brighter than the beaming summer sunshine outside. “How’s your day going?”

You are an Arab trans man in your twenties. You meet a young trans boy. He is pre-puberty. He still has relative freedom to express himself in terms of clothing and behavior, chalked up as “child’s phase”, and is confused yet oddly optimistic (or in denial) about the future. He keeps his feelings a secret, yet he has not yet learned to hate himself. He has not yet been battered by reality. Like you at his age, he does not have a map or an image for people like him in the near or far future. He is asking, waiting for you to help him, to tell him anything. He dreads becoming like his older sister, though he does not fully understand what that makes him. What should he do from here onward? When can he begin to live as himself? When can he feel safe?

You would have to tell him that there is no healthcare for youth like him here – not now, not later, not ever. You will not be able to take puberty blockers, or even meet someone who listens to you and understand. You will have to endure puberty for years, watch your body helplessly change day by day to something you don’t recognize. Into something that will make you utterly miserable. Everybody around you will change as well, treating you in relation to what you have and don’t have, what is visible and what is not. You will desperately try to regain a sense of control over your body. You might starve yourself in a stupid attempt to reduce the form of your curves, to curb their invasion. You might cut yourself, as a way to punish your body for not listening to your needs. Sometimes, you will be impressed by the terrible ways in which you can damage yourself. Your old clothes will stop fitting, and instead all you can see is a bulging, foreign chest and protruding hips. You will stretch them and tear them out in frustration. You will be embarrassed even by your own shadow. This is all but a prelude to the bleeding, the one that will brand you the most feminine of women, a symbol of no going back. Everybody will celebrate your dreaded fertility and supposed officiation into womanhood, while you think of wanting to die. You will have to learn to accommodate a bodily function that is all but useless to you. You will have to announce it to your family every month to explain why you’re not praying (with a suffocating izdal no less) or fasting or holding a Quran, because you are declared impure by their God. Maybe you will be forced to wear a hijab, to further keep you confined in your assigned gender boundary and emphasize the so-called inherent sexuality and sinfulness of bodies labelled as “female”, or maybe you will be one of the lucky ones who maintains little autonomy over your own appearance. Your growth will accelerate. You will be reprimanded for hunching your back, for not walking up straight, a futile attempt from you to conceal your hideous chest. You will put off wearing a bra, as if wearing one would be an admission and resignation of your chest’s existence and permanence. Your skin feels like sandpaper, only you can't peel it off. Your movements are robotic, running on the wrong batteries.Your parents will buy you feminine deodorant and underwear and you will hate them, yet you can’t request alternatives and you don’t have your own money yet. You will wear several layers of clothing in 40 degrees heat and refuse anything that shows even a hint of your bodily form. Your parents call you a picky nuisance for your clothing choices, and for any discomfort or gender-crossing behavior that you dare exhibit. Your parents won’t love you anymore. Your family won't love you anymore.

You will suddenly lose the ability to create or maintain friendships and relationships. You will not only be estranged yourself, but from everyone else as well. You will experience an astounding loss of intimacy; the word “connection” will no longer make sense to you – just an absurd notion. Dissonance and disconnection is where you will reside. You are in hell. You love girls, but you also hate them. They remind you too much of yourself. You don't want to be reminded. You don't want to exist. Boys your age are changing, changing into something beautiful, something beyond your reach. You love boys, but you also hate them. Being around them is enough to burn you. You don’t understand why you’re so in love with them, where to draw the line between consuming envy and invalidating attraction. Thin mustaches, cracking voices, excessive acne, awkward boners, terrible smells, visible veins, shoulders broadening, arms thickening, faces sharpening, apples forming, hair sprouting, patchy beards, low pitches, growing stronger, taller, leaner, flatter – you want it all. You want it all. You dream of it every day – it doesn’t matter if you’re awake or asleep. It is all you think about. You dream of running away. You dream of starting over. You dream of dying. Your grades drop. You don't play sports. You don't run. You don't laugh. You don't talk. You bargain with God. You plead with God. You beg to God. You cry to God. You still believe in him, until you can’t.

You will hear yourself being called a cursed imitator, a perverse deviant, a sign of judgement day, a harbinger of doom, a freak, too many things to name them all – even from people who claim to love and care about you. You are but a lonely child in the center of a relentless behemoth, a behemoth so daunting you can’t discern its beginning, middle or end, armored by immovable notions of what is true that poison every aspect of your life. Thus, you will come to understand it as a fact of life, drilled into the very essence of your being - hating yourself will be the only thing that you know, the only thing that you feel. You are unable to find the freeing word – that one word for who you are - underneath all this hate. You feel like a metal detector surrounded by nothing but plastic. You try to look. You are stumbling. Maybe you find it, or you find something pointing to it - but you lose it, no, you forsake it. You feel ashamed. You try to bury it, choke it, kill it - anything! You pretend you didn’t see. You pretend that nothing clicked. You stop looking…you don’t stop looking.

Perhaps the worst of all, is that through all of this, you will have to find the strength to keep going, and to stay sane. It is a demand that is too big to ask, I know. If you somehow manage not to be crushed under this ceaseless agony, that constant weight plaguing you with an indescribable heaviness, you will still have to spend the rest of your life unlearning and re-educating yourself and those around you, in a tremendous effort of healing, only to have the scabs on your wounds inevitably torn apart every day of your life.

In a kind world, you would not have to endure all of this- maybe even any of this. I am sorry. I wish I can tell you that it will get better, but I do not know. Even if it does get better, at what cost? The formative years of your youth (maybe even your adulthood) will be long gone, drenched in a relentless blur of depression, violence, and unfulfilled desires. Pathetic desires which mostly consisted of simply being able to wear a t-shirt - without feeling anything. Maybe you will learn to make peace with that, maybe it will always haunt you; sometimes you will feel so sorry for yourself it’s hard to breathe...just a gasping husk formed of everlasting regrets and longings and sorrow. You don't even know if you will ever be fit for a genuine human relationship anymore. It has taken too much out of you; you don't know if you lost more that you've gained, maybe you'll never know. How much of who you are now - who you were - is even here? Did anything matter? Does anything matter?

(a/n: inspired by all too well - taylor swift)

jimin [18:05]: hey are you okay

jimin [18:06]: respond to me please

jimin [18:10]: please, y/n

you are okay. you swear you’re alright and there’s nothing to worry about. but you can’t bring yourself to reply because your mind is too clouded and your fingers are trembling and your heart is racing. every thump against your chest is painful. almost suffocating.

you down a glass of water to drown out the emotional turbulence in your system but it doesn’t work because the reality is—you’re not fine. and you haven’t really been since, but dammit you were getting there. five years were hard to erase, but baby steps, jimin would tell you, and you had been trying so hard… inch by inch, piece by piece—until… until this. until the heart you had desperately sewn together has been ripped back to shreds. until every wall you had built has crumbled down to the ground.  

until min yoongi decided to show up once upon an afternoon.

you ran and ran. from the studio to your apartment, distance not meant for one’s mere two feet, but your first instinct was to get away from that area as far as you could and your mind was blacked out to think about buses. jimin kept calling your name but you didn’t look back once. your feet, too, screamed after you, but thank god they still cared for you enough to bring you back to the safety of your own home despite your lack of mercy.

you collapse onto the chair next to the counter and finally let go of the tears you’d been denying once you’ve given up trying to convince yourself you were fine. you hate running away. running away is never the answer. people don’t run away from their responsibilities because they’re bound to catch up. people don’t run away from their problems because they don’t really disappear. most certainly, people don’t just run away from the person they love without explanation. especially when they’ve sworn to be by their side ‘til the very end; especially not on the day that’s supposed to be the happiest day of their lives. because if they do… the other person gets hurt. they hurt and they hurt and they wonder what went wrong. it keeps them up at night and they can’t count sheep because they can only count the things they could’ve done better. or what would’ve been.

and how dare, they don’t get to show up again after eighteen months. after eighteen months of leaving the other in the dark. no anything. that’s not how it fucking works.

when yoongi ran from the altar, it was easily the most painful thing you’ve ever had to experience. the murmurs, the gasps, the yells from both your fathers, they rang in your ears for months. but what was the hardest to forget, one that’s haunted you the most, was the look on yoongi’s face. there was nothing like it. it was like… like he was scared. that he had chosen to spend forever with the wrong person. that you were not worth it. that everything had been a big mistake. like if he didn’t run then, he would’ve regretted it for the rest of his life. your heart ached so much thinking about it you couldn’t bear.

because you had never been so sure about anything else in your life. you were so sure about yoongi—you wanted to love him, cherish him, spend every next second with him because he was worth it. nothing else had felt so right. and if you stayed and made your vows, you would’ve never regretted it. because if it wasn’t yoongi, there would have been nobody else. so when he left, there was nothing that could have readied you from the impact of hitting the cold hard ground all the way from cloud nine. you were so sure yoongi would never do such thing—and the reality that he had done it, that he had left, it was more than too much to accept. but he was so good at disappearing that it left you no choice but to face the fact that he was out of your life.

it was almost embarrassing you’d recognized him right away despite his look being different from what you had remembered of him: black hair with bangs covering all of his forehead, and sweaters. now he had purplish grey hair, bangs carefully styled and parted in the middle, slightly swept to the side, dress shirt with top buttons undone and something else you could not pinpoint that gave him a glow you’d never seen before. overall, he was blooming that you couldn’t completely blame yourself for the immediate recognition. he stood out from the rest.

that brief moment felt like centuries. you were peacefully walking with jimin when it happened. he was at the other side of the street, in his car, and he, too, had met your eyes—the very reason why he almost ran the red. you were stunned, feet paralyzed, breath caught in your throat, until the bustling noise of your surroundings resumed and pulled you out of the cliche scene and soon you were running out of there.

hands in your hair, you’re still struggling to put yourself together when the doorbell rings and you instantly regret not replying to jimin and telling him you were fine. you heave out a sigh, using the end of your shirt to wipe your wet face before standing up. not forgetting to throw a quick glance at the mirror to make sure you looked okay, you head for the door and twist the lock before pulling it open.

it takes you a full minute to register the man at your doorstep and the feeling from earlier repeats itself—stunned, feet paralyzed, breath caught in your throat, heart thumping like crazy, and you’re at a loss of words that all that could come out of your mouth was a quiet and shaky “huh.”

it looks like yoongi, too, is unable to make sense of what’s in front of him, wide eyes blinking a few times, taking all of you in, until he remembers it was him who came here. “y/n...” he begins softly, in fear that you’d disappear right in front of him if he raises his voice any more than that. your name rolling off of his tongue feels foreign, unfamiliar. tragic. it used to feel like home. “y/n-”

“leave now,” you say calmly but with a hint of anger laced in your tone, folding your arms over your chest.

“y/n, please,” he tries once more, hand reaching out to your elbow, to which you immediately flinch, causing hurt to flash in his eyes. “let’s talk.” 

you scoff incredulously at this, eyes darting away as you bring your hand to feel the wetness of your cheeks before hastily wiping the tears away. you look back at him. “talk? a bit late, don’t you think?”

“i know. i know.... please, i’m sorry. give me a chance to explain-”

“eighteen months, yoongi. eigh. teen. months. you had that long. but what? you had to wait until we’ve accidentally bumped into each other to finally realize you owed me an explanation?” 

“i- i didn’t mean to. y/n, it was hell for me too,” he says pleadingly, looking down at the ground in shame. the pain in his voice is thick and heartbreaking, but you don’t let yourself crumble at that despite the urge to run to his warmth. it’s only right, you think. he deserves it. “i'm sorry. i’m so so sorry. i was-” he pauses, “i was scared. i don’t expect you to forgive me. i know what i’ve done is beyond forgiveness but it’s the truth. i was scared. not for me... for you. i wanted to spend my whole life with you. i wanted to give you the best... but i wasn’t sure if i was enough.”

you finally break and let out a sob you’ve been holding at this, closing your eyes in pain as the tears fall freely through your cheeks and he’s crying too. “i hate you. i hate you. you were more than enough. i hate you. i was ready to risk everything.... i was so happy. i was the happiest. look now, are you happy? was your question answered? was it for the better?”

“You’re staring again,” Yoongi says, and how he could tell, you’re not sure.

As far as you know, his eyes have been zeroed in on the Sudoku book on his lap, the one he bought last week and has been carrying around like a newborn ever since. He hasn’t looked up once, too preoccupied with his stupid brain games to catch you ogling him. So it’s with the utmost conviction that you lie your ass off. “Nuh uh,” you huff, hiding your pout behind the rim of your coffee cup.

Yoongi’s set-up is very… unique to say the least.

You place his sandwich beside him, triangle cut because that’s the way he likes it best. It finds it’s home right next to his elbow, tediously balanced on an assortment of wires and cables that you couldn’t differentiate between to save your life. Across from your boyfriend is his friend, Namjoon, fellow podcaster and frequent visitor of your home. “Thank you,” Yoongi murmurs, purposefully covering the black head of his microphone with his palm as Namjoon begins his dramatic reading of today’s Dictionary.com Word of the Day.

You find out halfway through your third beer, when the liquid almost comes spurting up your nose. “Excuse me?” you cough, hurriedly wiping your chin with whatever napkin you can find before that downright schoolgirl-esque expression disappears from Yoongi’s face. “You’ve never kissed anyone?”