The Maybe Miracle
Finding a Future Where We Win
Last night I performed this piece in my final show of 2025. This year has been a tumultuous and difficult and beautiful year of love, hope, fear, and finding myself. It was also a year of going to the fucking movies, of talking with my friends, of laughing and connecting and praying in bathrooms. So much of my transition has been about the self, about mining inward into discovery and expression. 2025 became about reaching out. About community and radiance outward. Community, church, performance, and friendships are more important than ever, and my work is beginning to reflect that. It’s the future I want, one where I live out.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
Going to the movies while the sun is still out always feels like getting away with something. After our latest crime, my friend and I are coming out of a Brendan Fraser movie and talking about the future. Our future, not Brendan’s. We are talking about taking next year to explore. Maybe dance classes. Maybe the seminary. Maybe comic books. Maybe maybe maybe. Maybe Brendan Fraser will look giant and clueless and earnest in movies for the rest of his career. Maybe next year we’ll get it right.
The miracle that keeps pecking at the back of my head like a slender-necked, sun-yellow bird is that in all of our maybes, survival doesn’t come up. Despite us being trans in 2025, death doesn’t come up. Surrender doesn’t come up.
Even when my company gets rid of 10,000 jobs. Even when we lose friends to shitty diseases that don’t make sense. Even when the government continues to vomit up reasons for despair with each phone-lit minute. We’re still here.
And we’ll still be here next year. And there will be movies, some of which may star Brendan Frasier. Some of which will make us cry. When we talk, my friend and I are giving each other maybes, intricately knotted into bows around the secret wish at the heart of each one.
“Yeah, I think you’d like dance class.” Please stay alive.
“Seminary has a lot of scholarships, who knows?” Please stay alive.
“Well, if it makes you happy you should definitely keep doing it.” Please stay alive.
We know we’re begging. We know we are purple-fingered and grit teeth underneath our joy, but for once it doesn’t have to be everything. I am further from the gun in my father’s closet than I have ever been. Today. Right now. Scared shitless and shivering and on the phone with my mom. I am terrified and lonely and hurting every day, but the bird is still there. Its beak is still clamped around my neck. It still wails and honks. I am still feeding pieces of each day’s loaf of bread to the miracle of sticking around.
Birds are on my mind because I keep seeing baby animals on my social media feed. This baby sloth eats a carrot stick. This rhinoceros eats a pumpkin. This otter goes absolutely sicko mode on an oyster. The secret joy of all baby animals is that we might watch them grow up. We are fawning over the cheeks and teeth and little sounds, but also for the stretch of ebullient pink time laid before each animal in promise, like an anteater’s tongue. We are watching hope stumble behind its mother with eyes large and clumsy as Brendan Fraser in Japan. (it’s in the movie, trust me, it’s like “can he even fit on their trains?”)
2025 was the year I rediscovered hope. It’s the year hope became a screaming engine at the heart of everything I do. Every movie I saw, every book I read, every conversation comes back to hope. The little girl in my chest, the little boy who didn’t kill himself waiting to be beautiful, the woman who lost her job worrying about what the Republicans will take away from her, I am holding so many frightened versions of myself in the floral tissue of my hope.
2026 will be another year of feeding the baby animal of my heart a carrot stick until she stops crying. Another year of stupid hope. Bruised and bloodied hope. Of helping my friends, praying to God for everyone I love, taking hormones, vocal training, googling seminaries, watching movies, texting my friends and just saying “thinking of you”
This is a future spent thinking of you. This is a future where we win. This is a future where they didn’t kill us. If you’re hearing this, they didn’t kill us. We still have time to bake cookies, to pass out toothbrushes and mouthwash, to donate toilet paper, to write your congresspeople, to take up self defense classes, to talk to your neighbors, to join a gun club and get better at making hard choices, to tell your friends you are thinking of them.
Brendan Fraser’s career stalled throughout the 2010s from lawsuits and poor box office and a grim procession of personal tragedies. In his darkest days, I wonder if he ever saw a way back until he did. And we gave him an Oscar for coming back. And in 2026 my friend and I watched him wander through Japan in a movie that was, honestly, pretty good.
Then we went out for pizza and talked. We talked and laughed and snuck pieces of pepperoni under the table to our sun-yellow birds of getting through this. We talked about the future. A future we believe in, where we might take up dance classes. Where we might become priests. Where we hope.
And just by hoping we survive. Just by hoping we beat them. Just by hoping we win.
Maybe we win.