By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, I lived in a small house surrounded by a great big forest. I won’t lie to you and tell you that my childhood was idyllic because in many respects it was anything but. I was a child trapped between genders beneath the weight of the Catholic Church during a time when the world didn’t even have a word to explain my existence. There are entire chapters of my childhood that are quite frankly too traumatic for me to even remember and there are other chapters that I dearly wish I could forget. But I felt safe beneath the branches of the tall oak trees that were every bit as much a part of my home as the four walls and black tar roof gently caressed by their swaying shadows.

I would lose myself for what felt like years in the hollows of those groves, dancing between the massive, knotted tree trunks, turning over great boulders clothed in moss to commune with the strange tiny creatures that somehow thrived beneath their mass, chasing after frogs and snakes amongst the ruins of rusty pick-up trucks and abandoned refrigerator carcasses. No one cared about my Queer ways in that sacred space. The trees never tried to hang a gender around my neck like a noose. In the great big forest that surround my small house I was afforded the criminally rare right to simply exist unmolested by the preconceived notions of the outside world. It was a place that seemed pregnant with the magic of spirits too rare to label and I was one of them. A world not unlike those captured in dreamy films like My Neighbor Totoro and Uncle Boonmee. Naturally, it couldn’t last.

As I grew and my body betrayed my spirit, the violence of the outside world slowly creeped in like smoke to strangle my sanctuary. The forest where I spent some of the few happy moments of a childhood haunted by gender dysphoria and clerical abuse slowly mutated into some beast called a neighborhood. I still remember how the rampage began. Skipping merrily through the trees one day, I came upon my favorite frogging hole to watch the tadpoles grow only to discover an empty can of gasoline floating like a corpse in the water. It felt like someone had plunged a dagger deep into my tiny chest. No amphibians would ever leap from that pool again.

Then came the bulldozers, terrifying armored beasts belching black soot and pulverizing everything that dared to breath clean air in their wake. Then came the houses that seemed to grow taller and taller with zero regard for their wild-eyed neighbors at the edge of the trees. Then came suburbia with its toxic manicured lawns and its ear blistering rider mowers and its petty greedy citizens with their authoritarian neighborhood governments and their unblinking judgmental eyes. The Vatican may have grievously wounded my childhood, but it died a lonesome death with that great big forest that once surrounded my small house and I have never forgiven civilization for shattering that strange little girl between the gears of its cruel progress. The wind begs me for revenge daily between the branches that still stand tall enough for the breeze to cry between their dying leaves.

People tell me that I take politics too personally. Friends tell me that I shouldn’t let it get me down and editors tell me to remove my uncomfortably intimate prose from the stories I tell. They all just sound like the machines that murdered the trees to me. Their logic feels cold and meaningless. I take politics personally because politics wounds my soul with its madness and my writing is the only thing that I have to make sense of that madness without hurting anyone, including myself. A few weeks ago, the politics of madness slaughtered one of my people for trying to protect a forest not unlike the one I grew up in and since this heinous crime was committed the cry of the oak trees has grown into a mighty scream.

READ  MORE