I read a story today. I can’t get into the specifics; this is one of the burdens joys of being a publisher. I get a lot of manuscripts sent to me, and I hold them in strict confidence. They don’t even get shared with family or friends. I digress. Back to the story I can’t give you details about. I can say this much—there was no death of a queer character. Nobody was disowned. No one experienced fresh trauma. None of the characters were rejected or hated or punished or isolated. No one was displaced, no one was left to fend for themselves.

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By the time I wound my way through the last few pages, I had this barely noticeable hollowness inside, like something squirming, unable to sit still in the quiet. You see, I’ve come to expect violence. I’m accustomed to the narrative we have all been fed and believe is some normal rite of passage for queer stories. We get traumatized. We have to learn to be crafty and resourceful due to isolation and a lack of belonging. And so many of our stories still live under that umbrella despite us seeing and knowing and believing that there has to be more to us than that kind of thing.

The story in my hands was gentle and sweet. It didn’t feature anyone questioning the worthiness of a queer character. It wove words of belonging and legacy and family and community together into an intricate braid of pure loveliness, and I had no idea how to feel about that.

I was bewildered.

What kind of world could we build if our imaginations were filled with this sort of thing? If we dreamt in the soft colors of having our needs fulfilled, if we were more often shown to be loved and cared for?

There is so much awful stuff in the world around us. It’s horrifying. And I’m not here to sell you optimism or [gasp] hope. But I do think there is value in asking some basic questions not just about the stories we have told and been told, but about the structure that narrative keeps feeding into and from.

Who does it serve?

There will always be shelf space for the books that came before, for the stories about all of those hard things we faced and need to talk about. And maybe there is also room for something unexpected, something simple and sweet, something warm and tender, so that we can start to learn to tell our own stories in their best light.

If you’re so inclined, tell me in the comments what kind of story you would like to read that [maybe] doesn’t fit the trend.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

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This morning I awoke before my alarm went off. I threw on pants and a warm jacket, a hat to cover the mess of hair, and the key to my postbox in my pocket. The neighborhood was quiet while I walked down one hill and up another. There were bees in the Spanish lavender even though it felt awfully cold for them to be up without the warmth of the sun just yet.

Listen, walking without a dog honestly feels like the most ridiculous thing in the world. People do this? They just walk themselves without a dog tied to them? Pure silliness.

So there’s me walking myself, getting a bit of morning movement before I hunker down at a desk for the rest of the day, which is why I stopped at the postbox on the way back to the house to collect whatever recycling it contained. Mostly recycling, anyway.

Tucked between the advertisements and pieces of mail with someone else’s name on them were two little envelopes that felt different. They were special. They weren’t just addressed to me, they were actually *for* me.

I made my way back inside, started up the tiny coffee maker [oh my, more on this later], cooked breakfast, and sat at the table with my letters.

We used to do this all the time, right? We would write to one another, package our words up in envelopes, buy stamps at the store regularly, send things out into the world, and……….. wait.

We used to wait.

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If you were born after 1985 or so, I honestly feel a sense of sorrow for you that maybe you don’t know what the world was like before instant everything took over. You don’t recall the sound of dial-up internet (56K, baby), you never programmed an Atari game in BASIC, the mess of audio tape going into a reel-to-reel baffles you. But most of all, you may have missed out on the joy/hope/wonder of sending a letter off, staring at a calendar, mentally calculating how long it would take for your letter to arrive, how long it would take for their response to travel back to you.

And then you wait.

And you wait some more.

I had forgotten to wait. I signed up for a monthly letter in the mail from littledoormusic, and promptly forgot I’d done it. A friend mentioned they were writing something for me a week or two ago, and it slipped my mind. This would not have happened to me in the early 90s. I would have been checking the postbox daily, anticipation firing up my heart each morning, calm breathing keeping me steady when the box was empty so that I could withstand waiting another day to check again. Yet here they both were, two little gifts of words tucked into envelopes with my name on them, mystery unfolding in their pages. It was delightful just to wait to open them while the heat of my toast melted butter to spread.

So I sat down, switched into my reading glasses (look, I just told you about being born before 1985, so this shouldn’t be a shock), and spent breakfast with friends, quietly, reverently. I did not need to tap the screen to keep it from timing out. I wasn’t interrupted by ads. I did not get distracted by a desire to check likes or new posts or today’s weather forecast, another app, another site. I read a story, I was offered snippets of kindness and joy, I was connected to real people who did this real thing to connect with me.

And then—bonus—I got to listen to a song one of them created after I’d read the process of that song coming into being, and… fucking magic right there. If you get nothing else from this post, I hope you’re inclined to go sign up for “the letter” from , because we all deserve a sprinkle of magic in our lives, and this is the real kind.

Listen to me, now, if you were thinking about *ever* paying to subscribe to me and what I write, just don’t. Spend it on this letter instead. Let’s be efficient about this kind of thing, shall we? I create what I create without getting paid [much] for it, and I’ll keep writing here even if you don’t ever pay to subscribe [which you won’t ever have to do], and it would make me incredibly happy if you spent your hard-earned cash on one of these letters instead so that you could feel the joy of reading one over your morning cup of [insert favorite beverage] just like I did today, and for real, the minimum cost is a buck, $2 to cover the cost to the artist, more if you’re feeling generous, and it is the best $2 you will spend this whole goddamn month. For realsies.

Letters don’t time out. They don’t need your eyes to make contact with them. They are patient. They don’t feed an algorithm. They don’t contain ads. They won’t make you spontaneously *need* to buy something. They do not add to your to-do list. They can be opened again and again, and each time you’ll feel a tingle of that initial magic you first felt when they showed up in your life. You can smell them. You can rustle the paper in between your fingers.

Best of all? You can create them yourself.

If you’re in one of those moments, a kind of a lull in between things happening, and you’re about to pick up your phone or tablet to scroll to fill the emptiness, consider reaching for paper and pencil instead. Doodle. Scribble out a list of things you like or love. Write down what happened to you today or last year or when you were seventeen. Then go find an envelope, write the address of someone on the front, stick on a postage stamp, and send it.

Send it.

Start something. And then ask for something back, like a letter, like a song, like a poem, like a picture. Magic doesn’t just happen, it has to be asked for, beckoned into being, summoned, sacrificed for.

Your trans friend,

Robin

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PS – Like a lot of artists, I struggle with how to value my own work, my own creations. I know I’m not alone in this. Sometimes it is easier for me to point you to someone whose work I value as a way to express that art deserves to be funded and promoted and seen and cherished. This kind of sharing, to me, feels thoughtful, humble, and sincere. I can also acknowledge that the kind of work I do needs its own funding, but you won’t typically see me pitch anyone to pay for it. I’ll work on that. In the meantime, I really do want you to go sign up for a letter. It is so worth it.

I am thinking today of a young woman named Juniper, someone I never met. Or maybe I walked past her on the sidewalk once on a summer day and simply didn’t know. Nor did she. That here I would be in some strange future, mourning the loss of her life, mourning her murder, mourning a pain that my community, my beautiful trans community, bears so often that sometimes it feels like the only note we can sing.

You’ve heard it, that low hum, that soft cry of pain, that note which resonates deep inside our chests for this loss. And you might think we’re a one-hit-wonder too. That’s the only song you know of ours.

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But did you know that today—right this very second—you are surrounded by our voices singing a range of tones? That we are smiling and laughing and dancing nearby? Some of us are sad, some are hopeful. We are patient and bored and busy and overwhelmed. Sometimes we can’t carry all the grocery bags in all at once, and other times we give of ourselves in ways that astound you.

So I was standing at the door to my neighborhood library, and it cost me nothing to wait for a beat and hold the door for the next person coming. She tripped, and her armful of books tumbled, and I bent low to help scoop them off the ground, and we smiled in a warm way as I helped her drop them into the book return slot. I think she said thank you, and I think I shrugged, like isn’t that what anyone would do? And what if I am the next one in a laundry room who is stabbed 41 times, and that woman from the library only sees the news story and thinks this is what trans people are, murder victims, loss, sadness, mourning, and I wish that I could turn around and find her and smile again and say no, no, we are here right now.

Celebrate us right now.

Wake up and see us standing beside you, holding the door, shrugging off the thank yous, doing blatantly human things, being boring and vibrant and alive. Wake up and love us in this moment of shared imperfection, in a space where dropping your books brings us closer.

Slow down. Trip. Look up. See us. See me. And then say something. Make a memory. Tie yourself to this moment, to what your eyes know is true.

Look into my eyes so that someday—hopefully a long way away someday—you can mourn me for all the things you remember, not for the things you missed out on. Mourn what we shared. Mourn that we lived. Mourn that you knew us well.

Your trans friend,

Robin

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If you or a trans person in your life are facing crisis and need support, please contact TransLifeline or the Trevor Project. You are loved, and you are worthy of love.

I am in a warm, comfortable, nicely decorated house. The bed I slept in was lovely. My dog is here, and he’s getting along well with the resident pooch, well enough that we’ll walk to the nearby off-leash area later today for a romp. The sun is shining. I was even handed a perfect cup of coffee by my host while I tended to some work items on my laptop.

I’m fine. I am absolutely fine.

And yet I am ridiculously stressed about accepting this kind of help.

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In my life I have a few core rules. Most of them revolve around maintaining a fierce independence that isn’t really about my need to be independent; it’s about my inability to trust others or rely on them for assistance, even when I need it. Trusting other people is hard. Asking for help is nearly impossible. It is awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t like it. But today I need it.

I worry that my dog is shedding on this family’s nice floors. I worry that I’m not doing enough to cook or clean or support myself here. I worry that I am taking up too much space in the guest bathroom, or that I am making too much noise during early hours when everyone else is still sleeping. I worry about them hearing me snore. I worry about the dog barking, even though that’s just what dogs do sometimes.

These are not rational things to worry about, and so I’m spending an equal amount of time chiding myself about these worries, about my inability to relax in this environment, about my inability to trust that this is not an imposition, and that my host would say so if it were. But I’m not in a rational headspace right now.

I met up with a friend recently, and he asked if he’d just been missing regular posts from me here. No, I said, I’ve been absent or quiet a lot lately. And I do not think that is unique amongst the many trans writers I know here. A lot of us are feeling the intensity of local and global political and legislative pressures, the constant onslaught of bad news, and the mounting dread that these things are not getting better anytime soon. I’m no exception. And I realize now that I am behaving in the same way here on this platform, just like I am in this lovely home where I am a guest—I’m afraid to be too loud or to take up space, I’m afraid to ask for help, I’m afraid to reveal that this moment I am in is really too much for me to bear on my own.

But in quietly watching and reading the words of others here, I am reminded that many of us have built a resilient community in this space. I’m grateful for the respite it provides me, even when I don’t say anything in response. In moments like this one, I am reminded that I am not a guest asking to crash on the couch for the night. I belong here, and so do you. And it really is okay if we take up space, or if the dog barks, or if we use the wrong towel in the bathroom. Because we need each other, and we need safe spaces where we belong, and we need the help now more than ever.

The instability I am facing will not last forever. Once things are more settled, I’ll talk about it, and I imagine that my words might resonate with those of you who are also facing instability or feeling worried about asking for help and support. In the meantime, I’d like to offer my thanks to those of you who have provided me shelter, even though you might not realize it. Y’all are like a queer community center with a kickass foosball table and comfy couches, and I’m so happy to land safely with you.

Your trans friend,

Robin

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Hey there. This is Robin. You’ve reached my answering machine. Or maybe it’s voicemail. It’s possible this is also my out-of-office email reply. Different vectors, same message transmission—I’m not here. If I were available, we would be laughing and enjoying some micro-stories together right now, and maybe you’re wondering how it is that you called/emailed/messaged and didn’t end up with me on the other side of the connection, but given the nature of these static messages, I’m forced to be brief.

Have you seen the fucking news this year? Maybe this month? Or even just for the last three or four weeks? It’s been pretty incredible and terrible, especially for trans people like me. And my tank is on empty.

So.

Feel free to leave a message, or send an email, or say hello in passing, but please be gentle and patient if/when you don’t get a response from me. My nervous system said I’m unavailable, and it sounds pretty confident about that.

*BEEP*

Your trans friend,

Robin

PS – I can say with a lot of confidence that the trans people in your life are likely all feeling this way right now. Please DO NOT send them updates on the latest news headlines. Please DO send them funny cartoons, love letters, pictures of pets or flowers, or a nice box of cookies. Please DO NOT say things like “I am so sorry this is happening,” and that’s not because we don’t understand your feelings and the sentiment, but rather because we’re already weighed down with so much that we do not need to hear that. Instead, try saying, “Two guys walked into a bar. The third guy ducked.” Or insert your favorite joke in place of that one.

Growth is a concept I have to face everywhere I go.

Whether it’s personal…

Emotional growth!! Overcome distractions, be a better “you” today!

… or professional…

Grow your business! Get more customers!

… or parental…

Raise smarter kids! Spend more time with them! Teach them to hustle!

… or exercise…

Lift more! Row faster! Swim further!

… or food…

Eat more of this! Eat less of that! But don’t grow too big!

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I can’t seem to escape this message to embrace more, to say yes to every opportunity, to desire that which I don’t already have, to need and to want and to gorge myself until I choke. I even did this with my garden. I tilled up another square of grass to make way for a few extra beds, maybe to move the crowded blueberries, maybe just to have more space for flowers, but the end result was additional growing room that fell to weeds and more weeds and slumped sunflowers and a touch of despair every time I looked at it. The bunnies ate through the temporary fence that was only put up to keep the puppy out, and I didn’t have time to build a gate or move the heavier fence material in, and by the end of the season that square plot gave me the side-eye every time I passed near.

It was too much. I got bested by weeds and by flowers that fell over, by bunnies, by squirrels, by crows, by the lack of time and daylight hours, by a body that is teaching me more about rest and less about action, by a family who deserves my time as much as the plants do, by a dog who wants another walk, and sometimes by a cold beer or a dirty martini with six olives.

My wife raked out the sad little beds I’d carved into that space just last week. I bought a bag of grass seed, we spread it, and we wait now to see if the lawn might willingly reclaim what I tried to segregate from it. As a gardener—nay, an urban farmer—this act breaks my heart. “Less grass, more vegetables” is my motto. Grass is a waste of space. It’s a monoculture. It’s what every other white man in this neighborhood obsesses over, and I’ll be damned if I’m joining their ranks. Grass is thirsty all the time, and it’s one of the biggest wastes of gasoline from mowing all year long (the grass doesn’t really stop growing here in winter, it just slows down a little). And… it’s boring. I can’t eat it. I can’t do anything with it.

(Okay, hang on—yes, I could go get a couple of sheep and solve some of my grass woes, but I don’t really want my wife to divorce me, so that’s not actually an option.)

More garden broke me. It was the straw, and I collapsed under it. Sure, too much of a good thing, blah blah blah, but that’s not even what I mean here. I literally hit a wall of overwhelm by trying to manage too much space and too many plants, and I just can’t do it anymore.

Grass rests the eye, I once read in a landscaping book. It gives us a place to settle when we look at a yard, to not have to think, to not absorb complexity. Grass lets us rest in unexpected ways. It invites us to sit, to lay out a picnic blanket or a warm towel after a pool splash. It asks if we want to kick a ball around with the kids or laugh at the dog romping on goofy legs. The root system of grass can provide forage and home for insects, for things that crawl and squirm, for frogs quietly hopping from the stream nearby. It holds seeds for birds and mice, dry material for nests, a late afternoon salad for the rabbits.

Is this what I need? This place to rest, to be less complex, to sit on a blanket and just stare at the clouds overhead? And can I get off my environmentalist, farmer-minded high horse and just accept that grass is a good solution in a world where paved surfaces displace rainwater and prevent natural warming and cooling? Is it really so bad to have a patch of lawn?

I know that the garden I have built in the many years of living on this little piece of soil is more than enough to sustain me, and that it will hold the shape of my onion and carrot and tomato dreams when spring shows up. But I need rest, too, and the grass and moss and low-growing weeds of that lawn are the perfect place to find quiet balance.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

seed

imagine yourself a seed
with tender wings of paper
or a puff of softness
but no, you're a burr, spiky 
and caught
in the fur of a passerby
certainly not the floating husk
of a coconut
rough and sweet
more likely an acorn 
someone else's lunch
dropped
forgotten
rolling flying riding swimming
covering
covering
as we drift through the grass
or trees
or sand
or sidewalks with tiny cracks
we will inhabit by brute force
by resilience
by stubbornness
by sheer determination 
my dear traveling companion, compatriot 
we may feel the wind calling us
tugging
we may be yanked from our seedpod
our flower
our home
and whisked off to 
somewhere unknown
a totally different hardiness zone
the lining of a coat pocket
the trampled mud on old boots
and yet
we always
find home again

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So many of us are adrift in mental, emotional, and physical relocation, and I know that it can feel ungrounded and scary. Sometimes it helps me to remember that seeds do this all the time. These tiny packets of DNA and familial legacy carry only the very smallest piece of what they need to survive and thrive wherever they land, and… sometimes they fail. No wonder it’s scary. But sometimes they succeed.

Sometimes we succeed, too.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

the end

2025 was kinda shitty.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

cupholders

I bought my first car, a new car, when I was just 22, and, having been stuck with my girlfriend’s incredibly old, worn out, slightly neglected “racing” car from the early 80s (and hating every minute of it), my list of desires for a new car boiled down to “cupholders,” which the car guy said he could absolutely satisfy for me.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

horatio

At one point we had three dogs (yeah, not doing that ever again), and if one of them was in trouble, I found myself wanting to call them by their full name (like any good parent who knows how to scold does), but managing three unique middle names felt really tough, so we gave all of them the same middle name—Horatio—which has persisted for all of our pets since then (and sometimes our children).

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

phish

Before my youngest was born, I suffered from incredible nausea, bad enough that I actually lost weight in the first term of his gestation, and so I felt entirely justified feasting on Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food during his second (and part of his third) term, enough so that I gained back the right amount of weight (and maybe a bit more, but who’s really counting), and to this day I contend that he was made from ice cream and love, and I have absolutely no regrets.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

heaven

When I was in the third grade (or somewhere around that time), Heaven is a Place on Earth was an enormously popular song, and I paid very close attention to precisely what time it played one night on a long car ride home, because I figured radio stations played certain songs at certain times (like TV shows, I mean come on, it was a reasonable hypothesis), and I was tremendously disappointed when it did not play at 6:12 pm the very next night.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

Mr Jam

Gender affirmation can come in a variety of forms, including as jam made with our own marionberries and raspberries—hence the name, “MR jam”—which both I and my trans kiddo love to make in the summer and eat all through the winter, all the while calling one another “mister” or “sir,” simply because it makes us happy.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

belief

I never thought Santa was real when I was a kid, not even when I was really little, but when my own kids came along I snuck little things in their stockings “from Santa,” and we wrote letters to Santa, and I eventually told them it was me and their mom doing these activities, because there’s something special about our willingness to believe in things we cannot see or prove, and—after all—I can’t actually show them definitive proof that Santa isn’t real, and so I like to keep that wonder going even for myself.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

fluff

Having a Great Pyrenees in the house means frequently picking up tufts of hair so numerous, so thick, so fluffy, that you could construct an entirely new dog out of them with almost no effort.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

tangles

We always went to church on Sundays (I mean, come on, my dad was the pastor), and we always dressed nice, and our hair was always clean and combed (or braided), but my mom got a job one year as a pianist at a different church, so she left early in the morning to drive there and trusted my father to get his kids ready, and my hair was long and very tangly that day, so he looked through the cupboard for the bottle of spray detangler (johnson & johnson, IYKYK), and he sprayed and combed and sprayed and combed, but it just got worse, so he sprayed some more, and the knots were huge and terrible, and I started crying, and finally he realized that the bottle he was using had long-since been emptied and then re-filled with windex with a little taped label across the front in my mom’s handwriting (serial recycler that she was/is), upon which he threw his hands up in disgust and took me to church where he asked some random “nice lady” to brush my hair.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

light

The decision to sell our house was slow and difficult, and we talked about it constantly for months before we listed it, during which time we were cleaning and fixing little things everywhere, but the moment we decided to actually pull the trigger, every single lightbulb in the house went out, one at a time, as though the house had been listening that whole time and was hurt and angry at us for leaving.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

cabbage

There is a single, full-headed red cabbage still lingering in the greenhouse, and I have been waiting for a solid freeze to come and turn its leaves sweet with sugar before I harvest it, and maybe today is that day.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

patience

The first time I tasted whiskey—lips and tongue and gums and throat on fire, a flaming trickle warming me inside out, spice and pepper lingering in each exhale—I felt (but did not understand) a connection through time between myself and generations of people who grew the grains and milled them finely, who built their own stills and checked wooden casks for leaks, who held a strong faith in patience, and whose work is so divinely perfect that even now we have yet to make it better than it was done when there was naught but rough hands, hard labor, and several seasons of waiting, and I ask you this—what more perfect gift through the channels and rivulets of time is there?

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin

family

When I left my ex in the middle of the night, with only those things I could grab and take in the moment, I left my dog behind, and (only a week later) I negotiated to have her brought to me in a discrete location with third party handlers on both sides as an exchange, because I had managed to depart with my ex’s cat as a bargaining chip, and though we were reunited and I felt whole again, I quickly realized that walking a dog in public with an ex (armed and violent) who was hunting me was dangerous, and that meant I had to surrender my dog to the humane society, and when my friend drove me away I collapsed in on myself, shuddering snot-flying convulsively wailing my grief out into the car as a part of me died by giving up the only family I had left.

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For the month of December I’m writing One Sentence Stories (OSS) every day as a way to find a little light in the darkness. They’re all true. They’re all 100% real. And yes, run-on sentences are somewhat required. You can also join in the fun if you’d like. As long as your story is one single sentence, it’s a fit! Feel free to tag me in a note so that I can read along and share your stories with others.

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Your trans friend,

Robin