Magneto Manifesto

By Rae

Living long enough to see yourself become the villain you never wanted to be. I was never anyone’s sweet dream, but I never thought I would become the nightmare. I wanted safety and security and fucking freedom. Charles wanted to ask for it to gather ourselves up in our own cages, categorize ourselves in neat orderly lines so that they could gas us in one fell swoop. No! I’ve lived that story already, the compliance, the self identification that led to the lost-and-found of shoes and ash. Never again will I suffer someone else’s idea of safety. Never again will my people be on display for the pleasure of the curious and the torture of the malicious.

I will not beg for their acceptance or plead for their understanding. I’ve kneeled long enough. I am done pretending my power is not my refuge or my salvation. If you won’t to make space for me and mine, I will tear down the very fabric of your foundations before I let you cage me again. I will build this world a new because some broken things can not be fixed. Your children will take to their knees and carry your burdens like the albatross it is. You will wish you returned my wistfulness and shared my dream when I carried you in it. When I wanted nothing more but to walk the streets as a man and not a monster. Oh, but today I will become the villain you feared. You have whipped the empathy and humanity out of me. You have left me nothing but my rage, thus that is what I have left to give you on this day. Not bread or forgiveness, but cold dishes and chewed iron. Now I have a new dream, a new scope. The Magneto Manifesto.