The bottle of testosterone in my hand is “letting go.” The bottle in my hand is the way to become myself, cozied up in a scant inch of plastic.

Before I start slathering myself like a greasy little snail, I’m taking a moment to record my voice. Part of the reason I upload things to Soundcloud and Chirbit and Clyp so often is that I want to compare it later down the road; I want to hear the person I once was as the person I will be.

(And yes, it’s my damn post, I get to link my music! Even if I’m a clown!)

Here’s a short video of the exact moment I pop open the lid…

💫 goomyluca! @ 🔺 RATHER DIE THAN LIVE A LIE 🔻 on Twitter

day 1 https://t.co/Y7M2PCJBUe

Here’s to whoever I am tomorrow, and in the coming days. Here’s to all my friends still in limbo, waiting for the hormones to hit just right. Here’s to the people in the world who never got the chance to try. For them and for us, I accept my role as a guiding light for those closeted, for those suffering, for those in need.

For me, being transmasculine is to be a messenger. That was how I rationalized it, back when I first started coming to terms with my identity. I carry my experiences as a woman in a past life into the present — I use the way I’ve been socialized as a gateway to compassion, to understanding, to loving and doing good recklessly each day. One day, I’ll pass on these messages to any cis men that I engage with, to anyone at all. As trans people, we have the gift of experiencing many different lifetimes in one, and offering our wisdom once we’ve “crossed over”.

There’s a certain power, too, in the concept of “surrender”: one can choose to accept what the universe brings forth, and roll with every time it punches you in the face. Sometimes you’ve got to pull through the winter and ride all the way back to the spring. Right?

Anyway…

Here’s to crossing over, and like the autumn leaves, letting go.

Can you touch it?

Can you eat it?

Can you kill it?

… Are you a star?

My first playthrough of Undertale took place on a chilly autumn night in my college dorm in Western Massachusetts. I reached Waterfall around three in the morning with all the lights off in my tiny white-walled haven with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos™ by my side (as you do). I squinted at the monitor as some little, vaguely-onion-shaped friend asked me what a star is.

Using the small amount of my brain cells that still functioned at that hour, I filled in the blanks: a star is an amalgamation of gases in space that light up the night sky. A star is a symbol, a guiding light, a small reminder that our fears are not as large as they would have us believe. It’s knowing that even if you’re skipping class for late-night depression gaming and counting the lights outside your window, there’s still a chance you’ll end up okay with or without that game design degree. It’s hope.

But what is a star to people who have never seen them?

I took my hands off the keyboard and stared at the bumpy, speckled ceiling of my dorm. What does a star mean to a group of people living under miles and miles of dirt? What ancient legends have they heard about the lights that float in the sky held far beyond their reach, if any? Do they even believe in stars?

These moments of reflection demonstrate the power of games as a storytelling medium: games make us question what we know as fact. Our understanding of truth is limited to our own perspective, but in the rich, fantastical worlds of games, we are not only immersed in what we don’t know, but we learn what we think we know all over again.

Games very literally put us in someone else’s shoes; they allow us to experience being someone else in a world that fascinates us, one that we don’t quite understand. As players, we cherish games that make us reflect and ask questions; as developers, we strive to make those moments possible. Small narrative design elements like the short and sweet interactions in Undertale go a long way in starting conversations between players and the content that speaks to them — especially in worlds where rendering every single blade of grass in a lush, high-poly, high-budget forest may not be possible.

Interactions with non-playable characters, even the smallest and most fleeting, can make a player’s experience unforgettable. That one extremely minor piece of dialogue from Undertale is still fresh in my mind nearly three years after playing the game for the first time; the divine (and the devil) is in the details, where indie games have incredible potential to shine.

OneShot, a 2016 puzzle adventure developed in RPG Maker, makes incredible use of its ethereal, quiet atmosphere and colorful characters in telling a story. The stiff, disjointed speech of the bots living in the Barrens, the childlike whimsy of the Glen’s eccentric birdfolk, and the industrial gloom hanging over the residents of Refuge — all of these people have stories to tell, and their own ways of surviving their world’s gradual collapse. The often nameless strangers you meet across The World are as transient as their home; in a way, this makes their acts of kindness all the more lasting. There is always room for you on their rowboats, always a bed for you to crash in after a long day, always an elevator buddy, always little greetings and thanks to light your path ahead. As everything slips beyond the grasp of The World’s people, they never abandon who they are.

Months after playing the game, I remember that they were there.

Liminality is an underestimated force in game design — as players, we exist as visitors in every place we roam, only glimpsing the lives of the people we meet. This in-between space is rich with opportunities to color the player experience by reminding them that this, too, shall pass.

It’s no coincidence that both Undertale and OneShot, two titles that make frequent use of liminal space in their small NPC interactions and respective atmospheres, excel narratively for it. The strongest stories can be told not only in large, overarching cataclysms or conspiracies, but also in the whispers of the world those greater melodramas take place in.

Every time I took that first step outside, I always thought I’d be the next boxcar kid with a mysterious, rich grandpa returning to find me, the next Annie to be adopted by some other sad, rich gentleman (man, where are they all hiding?). In every breath I drew was the implicit hope that I would be the Matilda of my own story — that if I just kept on going and not looking back, I’d get to give my own Ms. Trunchbull a piece of my mind and run into the arms of a sweet teacher who wanted to protect me.

That’s probably what I was thinking when I dialed my study hall supervisor, Mrs. Simler, after falling asleep in the cathedral downtown for about seven hours. Maybe, I must’ve thought, maybe this is the part where she realizes I’m the kid she always wanted and whisks me away to a garden-walled house by the sea.

When the cops rooted me out with flashlights, they told me “it still counts as breaking and entering even if you don’t break the door”. How was I supposed to know that? I walked in carefully, didn’t smash any glass like they do in the movies. I played by the rules, I thought.

A few hours later I was back in the top bunk of my bed at home, crying into my pillow. Mom and Dad were screaming at each other in the next room.

That’s the reality of growing up with abusive parents. The very laws in place to protect you, the rules that exist supposedly in your favor, they’re all designed to put you back at home and in the hands of your tormentors. For a society that puts so much value in these heartwarming tales of sad orphans being adopted by good parents, we severely fail our children when we don’t take their needs and their stories seriously. When I laid down on the hard, cold floor of that cathedral in the shadow of the pipe organ upstairs, I thought I could break that cycle — I thought that if I stuck it out long enough and just hid there, I’d be declared missing or dead and be able to rewrite my previous life into something better. I thought I’d finally be taken seriously. I thought the law couldn’t catch me, couldn’t stop me if my heart was in the right place.

I left my body in that cathedral. It’s been sleeping there ever since.

With or without explicitly abusive parents, Millennials have been hiding out in our own cathedrals for years, now. We’ve been taking those first steps out our back doors and off of cliffs without parachutes. We can’t make plans — we’re nearsighted by force, unable to see a future for ourselves while we are blamed by adults for their past mistakes. If we weren’t on our phones so much, society wouldn’t be in the decline. If we just went out to Applebee’s more, the restaurant industry would still be thriving. If we only stopped furiously shoveling avocados into our mouths, we too could afford mcmansions and Lamborghinis in the Hollywood Hills.

But the playbooks of the past can’t help us. There are no guides for us that lead to the same places our parents went. As society begins to reconcile with the massive economic crisis devouring it whole, we are left in the dust; when they finally realize that none of the advice that worked for them will work for us, so many of us will already be broke, homeless, without insurance, or dead. We’ll join the others among us who are already gone.

Our guardians, our leaders, the ones who were supposed to protect us — our parents turned their backs on us. We are Boxcar Children without rich grandpas, we are Annies without adoptive fathers, we are Matildas who never learned how to fight back against Ms. Trunchbull. We are a generation of orphans with nobody to show us the way.

On my lowest days, the quiet ones, I slip through the crack in that back door again — I lay down on the creaky wooden floor, I curl up in the shadow of the pipe organ. Stained glass washes over me, blue and gold and rosy light streaked with rain falling softly outside. It’s my cold, dark home; it’s where my bones are buried. Every time I hear a bell ring, it reverberates down to the marrow of my soul.

I left my body in that cathedral, and I’m still waiting to wake up in that garden-walled house by the sea.