The Unicorn

In my dreams I am a rainbow. A being of pure light filling the sky with infinite color, blanketing the world with magic and inspiration. I am unstoppable. I am inevitable. I cannot be contained. My essence is the total expression of truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, love.

Ewan McGregor would have been so proud of me.

I wake from my dreams with a sense of longing, an unfulfilled desire. Today my alarm clock is the small insistent paws and uneven purr of my best friend Bagel. I untangle a sleepy arm from under my sheets to scritch at the mottled brown fur of his head, and he immediately presses his eyeless face into my hand, his purrs increasing in volume. There’s a very simple reason I gave him the name Bagel. Ever since I rescued him from the shelter as a blind little kitten, he’s been everything to me.

After far too short a time, I hear the crashing glass and pounding of leather-clad flesh on wood that announces my backup alarm. After a moment of perfect tension, Carrie-Anne Moss orders me to Get Up, Trinity.

Get.

UP!

And I do. Hello, Monday, here I am again.

I gently place Bagel on the floor and roll out of bed. Shaking out my long blue hair, I do some stretches and breathing exercises, working out the kinks from my very full weekend. Stretching my legs, I undo the cramps from my Saturday night spent dancing and my Sunday afternoon spent walking in a sun-dappled forest on a low dose of shrooms. Moving my arms, I release the tension built up from last night, when I’d spent a lovely long time giving handjobs to three lovely girls after I helped them discover they were girls. Inhaling and exhaling deep, steady breaths, I let go of the last shreds of anxiety from yesterday morning, when I’d chased some neonazis away from my local library. Those losers had decided threatening kids at a Drag Queen Story Hour was a better use of their time than going to church, so I'd treated them to a little divine wrath.

As I did every day, I ended my routine on my knees before my altar to Saint Hedwig and her Angry Inch. I make a little prayer like I do every day, thanking her for teaching me the courage to be my whole self. Today, I hear her answer back. Not in words, of course. That would be impossible, at least with the relative lack of psychedelics flowing through my blood. No, instead, it’s a feeling. A reaction. Her flowing blonde wig, her fierce red lips, the pain and longing and joy in her singing face, reach down within me and touch something. A desire. A need. An absence. I’ve brought my whole self into my whole life, being unapologetically me everywhen and everywhere, living with joy and freedom in all places, but one.

Work.

Work is the one last bastion this cruel, boring, senseless system we live in has staked out in my life. Despite making a nice bit of extra money on the side from my creative writing and OnlyFans, I still need to trade forty hours of my life every week to Big Telecom in exchange for food and shelter and medicine. In that place, I need to lock away my heart’s desires, divorce my outer reality from my inner truth, and pretend to be a good well-behaved citizen. Someone who follows the rules. Someone who can be contained.

Not anymore, Hedwig tells me, using my own beating heart as her voice. Starting today, I will unlock my desires and free my soul to be exactly what I want to be all the time, and the consequences can damn themselves. I rise from my altar and cross the room to my closet, taking in the array of options I have, man and woman and everything in between and beyond. I reach down inside myself, listening to my soul, deciding which facet of my infinity I will show the world today as I begin my quest to satisfy my deepest desires.

What, exactly, are those desires that I’ve been suppressing? A natural question, and the answer is simple.

I’m going to fuck all my coworkers, and make them experience the rainbow.