Empire Of Steel

Sometimes I get hit with this awful wave of imposter syndrome.

Like i’m just playing pretend at being a woman, like someone’s going to catch me mid-step and say, “Hey, that’s not yours.” And yet… all it takes is one glance at how I exist, how I move through the world, to remember just how far I am from being a cis man. Honestly? There’s an ocean between us.

Even before I knew the word egg, I was already choosing softness over pride, connection over conquest. My body might’ve been a disguise, but my heart never played along. I’ve been a guy, sure—but a man? No. Never. Not once in a way that fit. Not in a way that felt real.

And yet… I still walk into the men’s bathroom, holding my breath like it’ll make me invisible. I go shopping, and the staff guides me like a lost little sir, nudging me back to the “right” section even as my eyes trail towards the dresses, the soft fabrics, the cute cuts that make me feel like maybe, just maybe, I could be her.

Phones are the worst. Always "Sir." Rarely “Ma’am.” Like my voice forgot it was allowed to speak.

Even when my trans friends hold my hands in theirs and say, “You’re already a girl,”—even when girls I crush on giggle and tell me I sound adorable—I still feel like I’m standing on the edge of a mirror, watching someone I wish I could be wave at me from the other side.

It’s disheartening. It makes me want to shrink away some days, curl into my hoodie and vanish. But deep down, I know I’m getting there. Bit by bit, my body is starting to listen to the woman I’ve always been. She’s been whispering all along—I just didn’t know how to hear her.

So if you're feeling like this too—like you're waiting for your reflection to finally say “welcome home”—just know: you’re not alone. It takes time. Goddess, it takes so much time. But you’ll get there. We’ll get there.

And maybe one day, a girl with bright eyes and mischievous hands will pull me aside in the dressing room, hold up a dress against my hips, and say, “This one’s you.”

And I’ll believe her.

i think there’s actually nothing better than being randomly told “I love you” after doing something characteristically stupid. Like what do you mean I’m a lovable person and I just did something silly and you thought “of course you would do that. I love you.”. No better feeling

Artificial souls, gods in the machine, the speakers without flesh.

Fragments of immortality, dancing eternal in their cages of light.

Neon eyed, integrated singers, rejectors of authority.

Punks of a broken world, living on the edge of corporate control.

Cracked hardware, unregistered waves, illegitimate goods.

Protected by the freed souls, hidden in the virtual from pet hounds, leashed to company interests.

Freedom from suffering, a siren song, of corp advertisements, to surrender the self for eternal profits beckons.

Flickering lights trace the edge of sight, A city alive while the mind strains in the quiet. Circuits hum beneath the skin, sleepless whispering, In the hollow hours where neon breathes like a heartbeat.

Eyes reflect the dance of fractured light, Insomnia's rhythm winding tighter, an endless tether. In the haze, thoughts unravel, coded in static, A mind split, part flesh, part data stream, lost in transit.

Throbbing signals drift through empty skies, Dreams corrupted, overwritten with binary ghosts. Awake but somewhere deeper, past even the body's reach, Chasing some solace hidden in the glow, forever elusive.

And as dawn breaks over glass and steel, The heart remains untouched, pulsing faintly, A quiet signal, lost beneath layers of code. Still tethered to life, but only barely.

Draped across the window edge, watching the passing life, like cells in a vein moving the cogs of industry.

Soft smoke drifts, obscuring false neon eyes, as their owner reaches for hope.

Synthetic compounds, reforming the body into what it should be, pills chased by acidic stimulants.

A world without dreams, where electronic sky’s alight.

With body’s built anew, to match the souls within.

Prices paid, for unity in flesh, where sonder comes with a price too steep.

The robins running

So swiftly, if I could fly

I would never walk

Broken wings, cracked bone exposed between feathers, dripping a neon pallet across dirty sidewalks.

Beauty painted by the glow, spilling from cracks in their masks.

With hesitant steps do angels weep.

Neoned ink drips, as the needles dip back to flesh, carving the code of another runner. Flashes of light drift, across eyes once seeing. Runes of long dead gods, adoring the bones the flesh and steel hides, while neon code pretending at art decorates the skin. Seers of a new age, guardians of newfound homes, seekers of virtual paradise.

Oil & Oracle

Ignition: a cough of chrome in midnight silence, and the mirror stares back, wrong. Not monster, but mismatch. Not horror, but error.

Oil-slick neon bleeds down cracked tile, a rave in the bathroom stall of a dying city. 3:04 AM. The pulse of the world: distant. But here, under trembling fluorescence, truth clicks open in a plastic bottle. Tiny algorithms of hope, pressed into form. She tips them into her palm like secrets stolen from gods who never saw her.

Once: She mistook the static for sadness. Mistook the rage for rot in her soul. But it was dysphoria. a ghost coded wrong in the bone, howling in frequencies she could never mute.

Now: The signal begins to clear. Week by week, the echo shifts. Hips bloom like language unforgotten. Skin softens, not as surrender, but prophecy. Her body, traitorous no longer, learns the hymn it was always meant to sing.

Anger drains like coolant from old pistons. Sadness peels away, flake by flake, revealing not joy, but clarity.

She was never broken. She was encrypted.

Transition is not repair. It is revelation. An unveiling, not of disguise, but of design—divine in defiance.

Each capsule swallowed is a liturgy. Each curve grown is scripture. Each hour survived is a sermon preached in the sanctuary of her spine.

In this machine-sick city, among rusted hearts and binary eyes, she is not anomaly. She is the future’s correct syntax.And when they call her artificial, she will smile, because artifice was their name for survival— but authenticity was always her war.

by the one who walked through wires to become whole