Edge of Infinity

About

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ: ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴛʀᴀғғɪᴄᴋɪɴɢ/sᴇxᴜᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴏᴠᴇʀᴅᴏsᴇ, ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ/ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ, & ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ〛

Chey was born—as Kaspar Cheyenne Reykjavík—in the Hudson River Valley, to a young, meth-addicted mother and her dealer. Though she’d done her best to resist the siren song of methamphetamines through most of her pregnancy, Chey’s mother fell back into them heavily after his birth, and he began his life in what amounted to a drug den. His parents couldn’t nurse both him and their addictions—despite efforts to—and he ended up little more cared for than the ramshackle and rotting house he lived in. He was just barely 3 years old on a cool day in autumn when a neighbor caught sight of him—a crying, filthy toddler wandering the yard unsupervised—and finally called the police. His birth parents were arrested and Chey was put into foster care through an overwhelmed agency, stretched far too thin and failing to keep organized. 
Through a veil of normalcy and history as a schoolteacher that had afforded her the foster-custody of five other children, Chey’s foster mother turned out to be anything but the maternal figure a neglected child needs. Rather, ‘Nana,’ as the kids called her, was a disturbed and eventually terribly abusive old woman. Having apparently lost her son some years ago, and then her husband only the year prior to Chey’s placement in her care, she’d become increasingly obsessed with religious paranoias; believing the Devil was hunting her or that God was punishing her or both. As time went on, things became truly Hellish for the kids in her care. Already treated to her instability, to Biblical tirades and Proverbs 23:13 (and its prescription for physical punishment), they were eventually banished to the basement so that Satan couldn’t possess them to kill her as she slept...then sometimes deprived of food or water as either punishments or ways to cleanse them of sin. Her delusions grew with the children, and the abuse worsened. 

The overstretched agency failed to do proper check-ups, relying on self-reported success and occasional coerced notes Nana would encourage her charges to write about their happiness. Meanwhile, she was holding those same children beneath the bathwater with ritualistic madness; ‘baptisms’ of near-drowning. It was during one of these instances that eleven-year-old Chey found himself in the position of watching Nana holding his youngest foster sibling, Landon, under for so long he feared she would actually kill him. Chey intervened—saving Landon’s life—but earned himself the beating of a lifetime; in its wake he attempted to hang himself to escape the abuse. Fortunately, the rope was old and gave out—but he was left with a nasty rope burn scar on his neck.
Perhaps prompted by the event—unable to bear the ever-escalating tortures of the house, which now included watching her siblings succumb within themselves—Chey’s foster sister, Alaska, ran away. With Chey and the rest of the children too fearful to go with her when asked, she wriggled alone out of a basement window and vanished into a winter night. It became a turning point. Nana didn’t do as the children feared and track Alaska down, drag her back to the house, kill her as an example. Nana made no effort to find her beyond flying into a rage and interrogating them all. So when things grew worse yet, Chey took a page out of Alaska’s book. He fled his foster home, not even twelve years old; malnourished, undereducated and almost mute. He should have had no chance. 

But escape brought euphoria, brought a sense of rebirth. Chey shucked off his first name and left it in the dust, starting to go by Cheyenne. Prepubescent, his androgynous name and build paired with his long hair would sometimes confuse people he encountered...which he found he didn’t necessarily mind. Craving distance and a life anew, Chey managed to crawl aboard a boxcar trundling south along the Hudson, and eventually ended up in New York City. Out of (and miles from) his foster home, enthralled with his freedom and in love with his new city, living on hope and the kindness of strangers—Chey began to find himself. Buried beneath a childhood of dissociation and fearful silence, Chey was gregarious and impulsive and eager...and despite his abuse leaving him dogged by severe PTSD symptoms, he trusted easily. Perhaps too easily.
Some time after his escape, he was recruited as a drug courier. It was a gig he accepted readily; life on the streets was hard and hungry—money wasn’t something to turn down. And since really his primary role was to play the part of innocence, it wasn’t particularly hard, either. Smiling and goofy as his truth, a snapshot of boyhood naiveté enough to put any policeman at nostalgic ease, Chey took to it. That employment was what carried him to California. 
In 2008, on the return from a cross-country delivery of a couple kilograms of coke, Chey met Anarchy in a Fresno freight yard. Beneath the desert sky and in boxcars on the way back east, the pair became totally inseparable. It was love for Chey before he had a way of knowing it, so in lieu of that label the two of them settled into being ‘best friends.’ Chey gave Anarchy his name, his first tattoos, a job. Anarchy gave Chey some semblance of impulse control and tattoos of his own. The halcyon days didn’t last, though. There came a time when the pair of them got paid not in cash, but in pills. Oxy. And then it happened again, and more and more; not just from randos but the Boss as well. And it was easy, easy as hell to slip into, because there was no effort to keeping the trauma at bay with opiates involved: It just numbed out and slunk away like a scolded dog, leaving behind the high, and it didn’t feel like addiction at first…it felt like medication.
But then things changed: The Boss told them that the drug muling jobs were drying up, employment opportunities there were thinning out. But Chey and Anarchy couldn’t go without, not anymore, and the Boss knew where they could still find work: In hotel beds, in the fantasies of strangers. Everything spiraled out of control from there, and Anarchy and Chey fell into that hell together: Into selling their bodies for another fix even though they were just fifteen, into track marks that scarred with infection and clients that cut. But somehow, despite the chaos of it all, the pair remained undyingly loyal to one another. Puberty hit late and confusing for Chey; he'd readily embraced androgyny as a tween but hadn't expected his body to run with it. He felt at home with his body's failure to truly broaden his shoulders; with a lack of peach fuzz and the presence of a chest. But feeling safe in his identity didn't render his body safe to inhabit, and plenty of clients felt entitled to him for his femininity. Anarchy was his sanctuary and his anchor; albeit as confused as Chey, he acted no different; treated anomaly as ordinary and Chey as Chey. Normalcy was nowhere but with each other.

The December after Chey turned 16 became the winter his world was wrenched apart. He was young, barefoot, and shaking, and finally got spotted by a couple cops who took him in for "truancy." They found his agency, but were unable to send Chey back to his original foster home—due to Nana having been stabbed to death by one of her charges only a few months earlier. Chey was placed in a different home, but he was traumatized and troubled and unable to find somewhere that “stuck.” He lost himself in his separation from Anarchy, and he bounced from foster to foster for two years; stealing drugs or household products to abuse, throwing fits, making desperate suicide attempts and suicidal gestures that he wasn’t even certain he wanted to make. Chey was finally diagnosed with Klinefelter syndrome while in the foster care system, but by and large refused attempts to put him on testosterone therapy, fearful of losing his androgyny and hating the rest of the world for failing to accept him the way 'Key had managed with such ease. Certain that Anarchy was dead, he allowed himself to spin entirely out of control.
After finally “graduating” out of the system at age 18, he slipped directly back into what he knew: Heroin addiction and prostitution. He ended up with his first CPCS 7 conviction and stint in jail that same year. He spent the following fourteen months sticking nearly exclusively to a life of addiction-fueled illicit activities; sex work and stripping and stealing; buying, dosing, dancing…dealing. He did whatever he could for a fix, whether that was selling his body, selling narcotics, or selling stolen goods. (His withdrawal-fueled smash-and-grabs are still a great source of guilt for him, and while he never did mug anyone, he knows he considered it and that eats at him.) He spent the year in and out of jail and failed diversionary attempts for various petty offenses, racking up over a month of jail time when all put together—before even hitting his nineteenth birthday. He was only a little past it when he got yet another CPCS 7 conviction, along with a count of CPSP in the 5th degree. Though he dodged getting charged with intent to distribute and they couldn’t prove larceny, either, the courts were losing their leniency, and he spent three months in jail. 

An older man he met by chance at the end of his sentence struck up an acquaintanceship with him, and pointed him in the direction of a program for homeless youth with addictions that was reaching out in the area, for when he got out. When he did, Chey did find the program, and got medical help in the transition from heroin to methadone. He got therapy; one-on-one and group, and got tested for HIV; caught it and started antiretroviral therapy before it could progress into AIDS. He received assistance applying for unemployment and food stamps—and began a long, slow road to recovery.
At first he struggled to commit to therapy; he couldn’t quite wrench himself from his old life. He kept ‘dancing’ at shady clubs and dancing at raves and continued to self-medicate with non-opiates; primarily MDMA and codeine, though he turned down next to nothing. He relapsed into heroin use for the first time not long after beginning treatment, his ‘first strike’ in a three-strike system that the outreach program employed: Relapse three times, you’ll be deemed a financial loss and kicked from the program. Three strikes, you’re out. With that hanging over his head, Chey started trying a bit harder; tried to do less self-medicating and sex work, to instead learn more about the production of the music he loved to dance to—but struggled. He still found himself sinking back in when times threatened to be hard or hungry; still spent colder months exchanging his body for room and board. Drugs still felt like where he could find happiness, sex still felt like where he could find work. 

While collecting food stamps in early 2016, by total coincidence, Chey ran into his long-lost foster sister, Alaska. They caught up, reconnected; she introduced him to her boyfriends, Reggie and Nathaniel, and all of them became close. It was fortunate timing, for Chey to have found family: Later that year he relapsed for a second time. His second strike. When he told Alaska about it, she noted the hopelessness of his tone, the hang of his head. And she fretted over the fact that her brother seemed to be resigning himself to an inevitable third strike: To failure, to life in a hole of addiction that he could never escape from. So—she invited him to come stay with her for a little while. See if he couldn’t find his way back to the optimistic, smiling, sunlit boy he described being when he told her about life after running away but before addiction. She encouraged him to really commit to the therapy his program offered him, to strip less; dance for the love and not the money, and focus more on learning his way around computers like Nathaniel was doing. All of it, especially the therapy, helped him immensely. He was one of the lucky ones, and by now has made almost a full recovery from PTSD.
Despite her insistence that it was fine to stay, he felt like an imposition after a few months—and wary of Reggie’s occupation eventually tempting him back into substances harder than weed. So he returned to the streets, and though nearly chronically homeless in an expensive city, Chey followed Alaska’s advice for the most part—even if he still paid rent with his body when it got cold. He didn’t go back to full-time sex work, never returned to stripping, and kept himself fed and clothed through digital means; freelance post-production work for independent artists, mostly, supplemented by some website coding and design. 

Chance and coincidence featured prominently in Chey's life, and didn't stop. In 2018, while scrolling through a bandom blog he followed, he saw a photo of Anarchy: Playing bass in a band, looking healthy, looking successful—looking alive. Chey found out when and where EoI was playing next—and went, just to see, to make sure—even though he knew. Anarchy saw him as he left, chased him down, and they fell back into step like the years had been hours. Though it took a few months after they reunited, Chey and Anarchy ended up dating...and then got engaged—and as of June 2021, married: The love that blossomed in a boxcar over a decade prior never faded, and now Chey holds its permanence in his new last name.
Chey’s managed to reconnect too with his foster brother, Jordan, and with a couple other friends he made and lost contact with in all the chaos of life: Sylvie & Jett, a couple he knew during his stripping days, managed to break out of the life, too—and open their own club, Neonize, where Chey occasionally DJs.

And it's not just his DJing gigs: With Edge of Infinity, Chey’s ended up playing a more major role in music than he ever dreamed of doing, freelance: He’s in charge of not just the soundboard and keys onstage, but post-production, too. He does marketing, merch, press & publicity. On occasion, he’ll sing. And of course he’s never stopped dancing. 
Now, with his band, his friends, his husband, his family—? Chey’s on top of the world. He’s found his joy again and loves it. He strives to be sunlight for others to warm themselves in, to be energy for the worn and tired, to offer hope to those that have given up. And in so many ways, he’s succeeding in being the light breaking through the cracks for his friends. He couldn’t be happier.

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★彡 ᴀᴅᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɪɴғᴏ 彡★

ȯ He has two sugar gliders, named Jayyvon ("Jayy") and Libertine ("Libby")

ȯ His favourite band is Breathe Carolina

ȯ Despite his past, he doesn't have a poor relationship with religion these days, and considers himself "casually polytheistic"; he believes that human love & faith are forces of creation and that all gods therefore exist due to people's belief in them

ȯ Quasi-vegetarian

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