Being Ace: An Anthology of Queer, Trans, Femme, and Disabled Stories of Asexual Love and Connection

Let us cut ourselves from all the things people call living, cut those earthly ties, and become what they’ve always wanted us to be: unnatural, strange. Not part of what it means to be human.

Because you can’t let go, not when family means so much for people like us, the ones who seem to threaten the very notion of touch because our happiness does not include it. No matter how family stands to you, they will always be a part of you, define who you are. The warmth and peace they can bring.

Simply understanding that something is a lie doesn’t mean you’ve let go of what it’s done to you. I’m still giving in to it, the lie. And by giving in, I’m giving it power, giving it control over me. I’m still under its spell.

I nod. 'I’m just used to a totally different response.' How do you know? How do you know when you’re a teenager who knows nothing? How can you be missing that part of you that supposedly makes you human?

That the hard work wasn’t enough. That they’d fucked up, again and again, and would probably never be able to make up for that, get that back. That the way they loved him wasn’t enough. Wasn’t the right way.

He was right. “Halcion” was a ridiculous name. But … it had felt right when nothing else did. It had felt safe, and comfortable, and funny, and ironic.

How could I be worth anything, how could I ever hope to be worth anything, when I was missing what some considered one of the only unifying human experiences.

'Death protects for a time, but it doesn’t truly forget. It doesn’t forgive.'

Better I pull the knife from my back and wield it than leave it in.

It was so dismissive, as if love was some step up from friendship and the steps vanished as soon as you surpassed them. Love wasn’t a ladder. It was an ocean of varying waves and currents, and I was drowning in what I’d never told and still couldn’t say to Athy.

and I loved watching water swirl down

the plug hole afterward

washing away the world

leaving only me behind

and Aphrodite

well

Aphrodite is never here anymore

though she says she is

but she isn’t

not properly

because she has already

gone

to the shadows with her skin and bones

because how can she love anyone

when her heart’s been clawed away

shredded and burned?

but we all remember her

It is all people seem to care about—single or taken, both words somehow a violence. But there is a space outside those words where Brindle and Fig reside, and it is part of what makes them so well suited for each other. They are not single, floating through life independently and alone. They are not taken, like a victim of some theft. Perhaps what they are is given, honestly and hopefully, to one another in equal partnership.

'Fig is a perfectly respectable name for a magister, I’ll have you know.' I chose it because of you, they don’t say. Because fig is your favorite fruit, and I want to be your favorite person.

'Who will you choose?' Euphemia asks.

'Yes, who will you choose?' the others echo.

Brindle stares into her champagne glass, wishing she were as small and light as one of the bubbles dancing about inside it.

'You must choose.'

When she smiles back and the recognition fills her eyes, I know there’s only one way to describe this.

It’s cosmic.

'I remember looking out the window and realizing how big the universe was. It made me feel so scared. But then I turned around and saw the plants growing, and I realized that life doesn’t have to be big to matter. It’s okay to find a small part of it that just makes you feel safe.'

A brown vegetable sits in the center.

'You, uh, brought me a potato?'

'It is the least I could do on your special day,' Sora replies.

Then, filling a duffel of clothes, declared she’d rather sleep on someone else’s couch than stay under a roof with a woman who couldn’t love her back, and left their apartment to fill with her tears.

'What if there is no right person?' she protested. 'What if there is never a right person?'

'Would it be okay if I never bring someone home to you?'

...

'Don’t speak of never, ah. That is too much time to ever be sure of anything.'

So asexuality is not just hard for men to imagine; it’s an identity in contradiction to how society conceives of “being a man.”

Seeing ourselves depicted in stories—be they films, television shows, or books like these—is one of the most powerful ways we come to understand ourselves. Depiction shows us we have a place in the world. It proves someone like us, someone with our experiences and thoughts and feelings, can live, dream, act, and occupy space. And it proves we can do those things as ourselves, without hiding, without denying our truths.