My monsters come out at night

Valentine’s Day is right up there with Christmas as far as “days that I hate the most” go. As a single aromantic person Valentine’s Day, and often the weekend around it, is basically hell for me. 

But this year the whole weekend around Valentine’s Day turned out to be really lovely. 

On Thursday, Feb. 13th, I reconnected with a good old friend, a sailing buddy from California who’d also been a friend with benefits for a while. He reached out to me, sort of out of the blue, and we talked like it had been yesterday. And his being totally unfazed by my gender-journey, considering that he’s a cis-het guy who had sex with me when I “looked like a girl”, was wonderfully affirming and comforting. 

On Friday evening, one of my closest nonbinary friends & I went out for a queerplatonic Valentine’s. And it was one of the loveliest evenings I had had in a while: a perfect mix of fun, spontaneity, exploration in town, lightheartedness and sharing, along with bonding and navigating some difficult emotions. 

On Saturday night, if it hadn’t been for the snow storm, I would have been out in friendly, fun, queer company with another of my closest & most supportive nonbinary/trans friends. 

On Sunday, I had my usual chorus rehearsal, which was super fun; and before that, I had coffee with a “potential new (platonic) friend” in the chorus, another cis gay man with whom I feel a lot of affinity — so that felt really nice, too. 

Yet, despite all these moments of lightheartedness and shared fun and positive feelings, my monsters are still haunting me.

They come out at night. Their claws rip through my sleep, their teeth gnaw at my mind, and once they’ve woken me up, I can’t fall asleep for hours and I lay in bed, tossing and turning, feeling exhausted, exasperated. And then of course, it becomes a vicious circle because the more they claw at me, the more they gnaw at my mind, the more my mind spins and all the worst thoughts come out, like all of the world’s troubles spilling out of Pandora’s box…