All of a sudden

I'm 21.  Gina's 24.  We're at R Place, Seattle's closest answer to Babylon, and there are women dancing in go-go cages.  It's the first time I've ever been here--Gina is the story of all my first times (save one--but that's a story for another time).  It's years yet before Gina's own go-go cage, but I imagine her up there anyway.  Her hand on the small of my back makes me startle, violently, almost falling off the edge of the stool.  I don't look at her, in case I can't look away.

I haven't seen Gina in months.  She brings out this violent, tremulous angst in me, my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears.  The anxiety she inspires in me is second only to aching, dizzying desire.  It's been that way since we met.  It still surprises me.

Gina orders a Long Island Iced Tea.  I order a rum and Coke.  She's drunk, and I order another.  Stacy's there, too, and my pulse spikes, anxious, nerves singing.  I order another rum and Coke, and then a Long Island because it tastes so good on the end of the straw Gina pokes into my mouth, teasing--always teasing me.  I lean against the wall and drink, knowing the only way out of conversation is to make sure my mouth is always full.  But maybe I just want to be drunk.  Already, I'm drunk enough that I can't feel my cheek when she prods it, can't feel the pressure of her hip any more as she leans against my own.

This is all a separate memory from what I originally came here to write about.

I'm drunk.  I drink the Long Island, order another.  Gina's dancing.  I don't know how to dance, and even if I did, I'd be too drunk.  I can barely navigate the stairs.  I stumble down, clutching at the handrail, confident that she's not going to come looking--I wasn't there as an accessory, after all.  She's enlightening me, trying to bring me out.  It's not working.

I'm downstairs now, drink gone--I shove the empty glass onto the bar, looking for a place to sit, but there isn't one.  Instead, I totter out the side door, onto Pine Street, my breath catching in the November fog.  I can't feel my face any more, frustrated and dizzy, stomping across the road.  The need to vomit hits me all at once.  I bend next to the gutter, facing away from the bar, thinking I'll pretend I'm tying my shoe, but I'm too drunk to compensate and fall on my elbows, already retching.  The noise carries, impossibly loud.  When the hand hits my shoulder, I think it's Gina, bearing witness.  I contemplate death.

"Hey, buddy," the voice says.  "Rough night?"

I turn, startled, swallowing desperately, and it's just some guy--a dude in a T-shirt and jeans, beer in hand, hand stamped like mine.  I can't answer--I'm afraid I'll be sick.  I nod and look away.

"You okay now, man?  You need some help?"

Man.

And impossibly drunk, world reeling, my gut boiling with nausea and adrenaline and panic, I pause.

He thinks I'm a man.

It's not the first time this has happened to me.

But it's the first time I've paused.

And for the briefest of seconds, I think to myself, lightning-hot, don't say it.

But I do.

"No," I say, soft, my throat raw.  "I'll be fine."

I can trace the startle in his eyes; I can feel it in the pressure of his fingers on my back.  He stands upright, backs away.  "Oh, cool, ma'am," he says.  "Sorry, ma'am.  Have a good night."

And then he's gone.

And the nausea rocks in my stomach, flooding my chest, and I sit down on the sidewalk, folding my arms tight across my torso to keep myself intact.  I put my head on my knees.

I never went back into the bar.  I texted Gina from the bus stop to let her know I wasn't feeling well.  I never saw her again.  It's probably better that way.

It was almost a year earlier that I'd gone to her Halloween party in a tuxedo; almost a year earlier that she'd leaned over, drunk, as I sipped tequila from her bellybutton, and whispered that if I was a boy, I needed to fuck women who liked boys.

But even then, I hadn't said it--had rolled my eyes, licked the salt from her shoulder and said "lesbians wear suits, too."

She knew.  But that night, I got to pretend that she didn't.

And for another three years, I got to pretend that I didn't, too.

It's hard to write in this thing.

It's really, really hard.

It's finals right now, and everything is building to a crescendo--the term, the workload, the stress, and the absolutely palpable inevitability of transition.  It's not a good time for transition to become inevitable.  That was not in the plan.

Why has it become so inevitable so quickly?

I'm working and shouldn't be stopping to write this.

I'm so high.

I want my therapist back.

Maybe I'll send her an e-mail.

A conversation with my mother

She calls.

Seven times.

She leaves three voicemails:

"WHY are you so hard to get ahold of?"

"What are you DOING?  Call me back!"

"Aaaaaaggghh, you NEVER answer your phone!"

A Facebook message.

She calls on Skype.

I'm in the shower.

The Skype chime rings, and rings, and rings.

I get out of the shower.  I call back.

"THERE you are!  God, you NEVER answer your phone!  What have you been doing all day?"

"Same thing I do every day, mum.  School.  Work."

"But you're never around!  I call and call and you never pick up!"

"I'm at work, mum.  I have to go to work during the day."

"We just never hear from you, that's all."

We talked for over an hour three days ago.

"Mum, what's up?  You called a bunch of times.  Is it something important?"

"What does Travis want for Christmas?  Can you make me a list?"

"Sure, Mum.  I'll send you one tomorrow."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm doing my homework."

"What kind of homework?"

"Nothing, ma.  It's just notes for class."

"What else are you doing?  Are you ready for Thanksgiving?"

"No.  I haven't shopped yet."

"What do you mean you haven't shopped yet?"

"I haven't shopped yet.  I'm going to do it tomorrow.  I haven't had time."

"What do you mean you haven't had time?  It's Thanksgiving."

"I haven't had time."

Silence.

"Well, I guess we'll just let you go, then."  Her voice is pathetic, Eeyore-like.  She turns the corners of her mouth down, stares at the floor.  "We don't want to take up your time.  We know how busy you are."

Is that why you called seven times?

"No, ma, it's not that.  I want to talk, I do.  I just don't really know what to say."

Frown.  "Just say what's new!"

"Nothing is new.  I do the same things every day.  I just told you earlier this week everything that I'm planning to do between now and next weekend."

Silence.

"Well, that's sad for you, then, I guess."

Silence.

"I guess so.  Sucks to be me."

Silence.

"We just want to talk to you, you know.  We just want to be part of your life.  I know there isn't much room for us any more."

Silence.

She talks to fill the gap.  A friend of hers I haven't seen in ten years--she ran into her at the Fred Meyer, isn't that incredible?  She has a ninth-grader, loved seeing pictures of the boys.  She talks about parent-teacher conferences.  She tells me my eyes are too dark underneath.  She tells me all of this every time we talk.


Am I a bad daughter?

I'm leaving that word because it's the first word that came to mind, and maybe that's more telling than I want it to be.

Daughter.

Her daughter.

Her little girl.

"What have you been doing?  Why didn't you answer the phone?"

"Where have you been all day?"


My job.

Being twenty-six.

Being an adult.

Writing a journal is stupid.  I don't know what else to say about any of this.

My shrink calls it "emotional inertia"--a spring that snaps back to scare me away from real progress.  Says that every time I start to feel something, to think something for myself, I wake myself up.  I say "I don't know" because it's easier than working.  Depressed people do that, she says.  They become so detached from themselves that all they can say is "I don't know," "I don't know."

"You have to move," she says.  "You have to work.  I want you to feel something."

I want to feel something, too.

But I don't really feel much of anything.

I feel like a handbag.

I feel like an attachment--a vacuum hose, a PC peripheral.

Like I'm here to get a job done.

Like maybe I'm just here for display purposes.

Like my job is to feel her feelings, not mine.



You selfish bitch, you selfish bitch, you selfish bitch.

I don't know if I'm talking to her, or to me.

A post that was left in draft for a long time that I just finished

When I was a little kid, I went through this phase where I thought that I wanted to become an astronaut.  (It was 1995 or so, and my favorite show was Space Cases--had Star Trek entered my life around the same time period, my future might've coalesced into something entirely different.)  I read books about NASA, watched space documentaries on television; I imagined what it might be like to take off in a rocket, to work on the International Space Station, to look down at the Earth from a capsule in space.  It took me a few years to give up the ghost and let that dream die, pending a striking realization:  I'd never really had any genuine interest in studying astrophysics or aeronautics, nor did I have any real desire to spend months working on the space station.  My dreams, at the time, had hinged firmly on three concepts:  being able to flip around weightless all the time, having an unrestricted supply of dehydrated ice cream, and being able to pee in my suit.

Nothing has changed.

I am the same naive child that stared up at the night sky and wondered whether sleeping in a space blanket was basically like being a burrito (I was a weird kid).  I'm the same kid who pledged for nineteen years to become a pediatric neurologist, only to flunk out of my first college chem course and take up drama instead--and then, with a sudden raging ambition to work on Broadway, to summarily fail out of drama and flop into sociology as a last resort.  I wanted to be a doctor SO BADLY for those nineteen years--I never doubted for an INSTANT that I would become one.  I imagined myself in the coat, striding purposefully down hospital corridors, making life-or-death calls in the ER during my residency.  I was fascinated by medicine--I read medical dictionaries, textbooks, and web pages incessantly, for years.  I consumed everything I could about the medical profession.  I got straight-A's in high school, took on extracurricular activities, everything I could think of to prepare myself for a high-quality college education and for my future in medical school.

And when I got into chemistry, I looked up at that blackboard, and I thought, "Eh, I never really wanted to do this anyway."  And I left.

But I HAD wanted to do it.  I'd wanted to do it DESPERATELY, for more than three quarters of my life to date.  I was dying to do it. 

Or so I'd thought.  Had I?  Had I really?  How can I ever know?  Clearly, I was unprepared for chemistry; clearly, I lacked a full understanding of what being a doctor actually entailed.  If being a doctor meant I had to learn chemistry, I didn't want to be a doctor any more.  How badly could I have wanted it in the first place?  Maybe I just THOUGHT I wanted it--maybe I'd talked myself into it, kowtowed to parental influence, convinced myself to want it even though I didn't.

And my God--if I can talk myself into wanting something I don't really want, what CAN'T I talk myself into?

That's how I know that it's entirely possible I talked myself into thinking I'm a guy.

That's how I know that no matter how much I might think that I want to, I cannot and should not pursue surgery, hormone therapy, or any other form of medical transition.

If I can't trust my own mind, what the fuck can I trust?

How am I supposed to know what I want when I can make myself want anything?

Why, of all the ludicrous, impossible, unfathomable things, would I want to make myself want this?

EVERY NIGHT FROM NOW ON, DAMN IT

The first step in posting more frequently is to actually post more frequently.

It's not that I don't want to post--I do, I really do.  I feel better when I do--more in control, better equipped to process whatever it is that I'm processing.  And it's not like I don't want a record of this time--if anything, with Travis being sick and the possibility of transition looming, I feel like I need a record now more than I ever have.  This time will never come again, and it will never be as fresh or sharp or present or urgent as it is right this very moment.

But maybe that's why I can't post.  Sometimes I feel like sitting down and committing it all to paper makes it feel too...fast, somehow, like if I put the time to paper it leaves my hands entirely.  I feel like keeping these moments in my head--forcing myself to remember them, to constantly rehearse them in my mind, to be as viscerally present as I can make myself be in any given interaction so I don't forget it--means they stay mine.  That's silly, though.  If anything, I'm losing them up there--memory is hazy, and it lies, and I have trouble remembering to begin with, the urgency aside.

I'm very scared, sometimes.

I'm scared that there will never be enough time.

I'm scared that time seems to pass me by so quickly.

I'm scared that it gets wasted--that every second idle is a second misspent.

Sometimes I worry that all of this time is just trickling through my fingers--that all these years I could have been happy, could have been present, and I threw them away because I didn't know how to want.  Other times I think that I've already wasted so much time, what does it matter if I waste any more?  We make our beds, and we lie in them.

Some times--times like these--I feel like transition is almost inevitable, like it's falling forward, without me, out of my hands.  I feel like there is no other way--that to go back would be heinous, a fabrication, a death.  But the feelings change so quickly that I can't reconcile them, can't decide, can't commit--sometimes I feel the opposite, and for that reason, I know that transition is impossible, know that I could never, should never, would never think to do such a thing.

I waste time thinking about all of this, instead of studying for prelims.

But there's such an incredible effervescence to it, a brilliance, an undeniable strength some times, so rich I can't turn away, my thoughts absolutely captivated by it--this confidence, so taken aback sometimes by my reflection in the window that the laugh comes before I can catch it.  I'm building strength.  I'm building presence.  I'm building a self.  I feel so earnest, some times--convicted, drawn forward, compelled by destiny.  I feel like I'm almost there, even if I don't know what "there" is.

But I don't know what it means to be a man, and I'm ashamed, and I'm scared.  And I spend all my time stoned on pot, trying to still the crackle, the electric flutter of my nerves and my neurons and my neuroses, too full of knowing to admit what I know.  So high right now, even, that this entry doesn't even make any sense, and ashamed about that, too.

What will I look like when I'm forty?  Will I have crawled my way back into lesbianism, a butch bi-dyke with a punk haircut and an attitude?  Will I be a nerdy, effeminate academic--the older self that my ten-year-old self imagined growing up to be?  Will I be a guy?  (Spoiler alert:  If I'm not now, I never will be, and I shouldn't be, whether I think I'd fancy being or not.)  What kind of a man could I possibly be?  A man without a boyhood?  A man who never learned to talk to other men?  A man, no doubt, who could never be taken seriously.

But that man--he gives a great speech.  He gave one this afternoon, and it was well received--a little shaky on the introduction, but altogether mostly well-executed, and with good presentation.  He's young, inexperienced--a little shy, awkward around people he doesn't know very well, but he's improving with time.  Today, he was ready.  Today, he was confident.  Today, he got up, and put on a suit and tie, and went before his colleagues and spoke without fear.  He found his footing, and he stood.

That man doesn't know how he's going to do it yet, but he's starting to think he's going places.

Who (and what) am I to tell him no?

I will try to post more frequently.

I really will.

Everything is old is new again (again)...

And how strange this fire, this figure

That draws such things from still and silenced hands

That calls me to write her

The gentle dark inside my eyes

A warm itch beneath my skin

The siren heart beating, beating

Until the wave bows back

Aching, crumbling, crushed by gravity

And the restless turning of the earth

I need to hold her

So intensely that I cannot hold myself

Tight in my cheeks, in my bow-string shoulders

The surging blood of every lost and agonizing Romeo

God, to sleep inside her voice

Is to know that my heart will never truly sleep again

And in her I hold everything

But my own compass,

A surrender spinning what was lost

With what might be

To love like this is to be possessed completely

To love like this is to inherit the earth