More to the story

Thanks much in part to Peterson's encouraging comment on the first part of my new story "The Eternal Dreamer" (aka "Yin and Yang"...maybe) I have decided to post the next part of it. This part's shorter, because there's very little speaking within it (actually, there's really just a monologue). But, here it is, anyway:

Sitting in my bathroom, fingering the syringes now full of my hormone cocktail, I felt more fear than I ever had in my whole life. I was more scared sitting my boxers and a T-shirt in my own house, finally taking this gargantuan step toward the life I had always known I was meant to have, than I had been every time I was raped or sneered at by macho police officers or beaten to a pulp by some Queer-phobic gang-banger. Some butch Transman I was turning out to be—I couldn't even inject myself with this grand hormone in the safety of my own home, so how could I possibly hope to become the confident person I always dreamed of being?

I kept hearing my mother’s voice in my head: “Don’t worry, Tabby. When you’re brave enough to be proud of yourself for exactly who you are, nobody will mess with you.” She’d told me that when she came to visit me in the hospital after I was raped the first time. Then she got sick—she was diagnosed with leukemia. As she lay dying in her own bed less than a year later, I told her the same words. Together we had cried, and I held her hand as the vibrancy in her continued to fade away.

“You said, Momma, that when I was truly proud of myself, everyone would respect me. But I feel proud of myself right now and I’ve only met one person who hasn’t been disgusted with me when they found out I’m Trans.! And you told me when I told you I was really a man trapped in a woman’s body that I was the bravest person you’d ever known, but I’m terrified!” Finally, through a mixture of exhaustion, frustration, fury, and fright, I jabbed my thigh with the needle and injected the fluid. I screamed in both horror and amazement of myself; I cried out in both pain and relief. I slowly pulled the needle from my leg and, noticing the bead of blood forming in hat pinprick-sized hole, adhered a Band-Aid to my skin. Then I put back on my pants, a clean shirt, my shoes and my coat and ventured out into the night to meet up with my newest friend.