Content warnings

Suicide mention. Dysphoria.

Cloud-soft, our animal floated through the room like slow music.

You were still crying, phone in hand, when its pink mist spread and put us to sleep again. And we saw our underwater heaven.

Seagrass swayed silently and a thousand multi-colored organisms took a breath.

Here, we were something new. Without eyes, and yet, with sight all over our body, we could see miles of blue. Without bones, we could fit into anything, and anywhere, and lose ourselves—our faces, our memories—and sleep somewhere in the folds of the sea.

When we wake up, you say what you always do. You can’t believe how much one night of sleep can help you forget. And that’s true, in a way, but we both know that everyday dreams can’t make this kind of feeling disappear.

This is why as soon as you found out, the moment you heard those loud words and your eyes swum with pain and confusion, I knew to do nothing else but hold you and call its name.

It floated to us softly and mewed with longing.

Hungry, nestling between us, its myriad of arms changed colors and patted the skin of our faces to try to understand. When it couldn’t, for a moment, its body bristled with alarm. Its small head expanded in our hands, and as you were having trouble breathing, it finally floated up and released a heavy mist. Pink clouds of summer, pink clouds of dream.

Just an hour earlier, we were both naked, and you were braiding my hair.

Your warm legs wrapped around my waist to keep me still, to keep me from hurrying up and looking in the mirror again. I’ve felt so ugly recently. I’ve felt like maybe I’ll never learn the patient steps some trans women learn to care for their hair, to care for their bodies.

I’ve gained weight too and I tell you this as you braid and you shush me and kiss my neck and your warmth holds me.

You’ve also gained weight, but to me, you look so handsome. I adore your shape and your changing body. I want to learn to see myself that way too. To love and treat myself like someone learning how to read a new map.

Two years before, you wore your first binder.

And it didn’t fit perfectly, and it was too hot, but I still remember the disbelief in your eyes. The singing triumph of the first time your breasts almost disappeared.

The word almost was beautiful and enough in that moment.

(That same night, we finished watching the devastating anime Monster and wept with pizza in our mouths. In total awe, we held each other at its finale, and minutes later, touched. Kissed clumsily and laughed at how weird it was to orgasm after such a mournful ending.)

The fact is, these are my favorite kinds of dreams our animal can show us.

Not its ethereal visions of color and timelessness, of painless reveries under the waves. But the eternal minutes of our lives, those foolish minutes. The secret hour of you.

Lately though, our animal has understood us less and less.

When we first came into contact with it, dysphoria was the root of so much of our stress. It was a miracle when its soft arms first touched my throat, soothing my gruff voice into a girlish pitch. I trembled as it wrapped itself around my waist and held me for what felt like an hour.

When its suctions let go, I cried uncontrollably.

I didn’t even need to head to the mirror to know my body had changed. I could just see it in your open eyes. The sister of my body, now free from my mind.

Desperately, we dressed me in your old clothes, and the transformation seemed complete. You took pictures with me in bed so I could remember this. In case it didn’t last.

And it didn’t last.

By the morning, my changes had worn away and we understood the gifts of our animal to be limited, short-term wonders.

We tried everything at first. Every conceivable conception of ourselves it could possibly materialize. Fantasies of height and weight and shape were ours. All parts and semblance and erasure of gender was here through its touch. But even touch was only our beginning, when we finally realized what it could do to our dreams.

When its pink plumb of mist first flowed soothingly past our lips, then the echoes of possibility sounded through us.

And the worlds we saw were everywhere growing.

Everywhere, a lost, abandoned wonderland. But for weeks that unending summer, and on that day, the hidden places we returned to were those oceanic halls and seagrass beds.

Something about the blue silence of our imagined memory.

In our mind’s version, the bottom of a seabed was the softest, safest, loneliest world. Wrapped in sand, tall, tall grass grew from your own body and you swayed and you moved to an invisible rhythm and forgot for a little while about your phone call, your cousin taking his life earlier that morning. For a moment, dreaming could be more than dreaming and echoes of what’s happened to your family were only an echo.

Yes, but there are limits to what the animal can give and take away.

There are limits to summer, and even escape.

And when tomorrow finally comes with its duties and realities—with its overwhelming, sometimes paralyzing uncertainty—I promise, I promise you I’ll be there with tomorrow.

END

Author’s note

This story was inspired by the suicides of family members from my own and my partner’s life. It is also inspired by the small ways people can find comfort after trauma. For us, sometimes talking isn’t as comforting as quietly playing games together. Exploring worlds knowing they’re right there.

Angel Leal

Angel Leal is a Latine, trans, neurodivergent writer who finds solace in games that spend time underwater. Their work appears in Strange Horizons, Heartlines, Uncanny, and elsewhere. They’re a poetry editor for OTHERSIDE and a 2025 Clarion West fellow.