What dreams may come

I had the strangest dream last night.

I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing my teeth, and I noticed that my lips had become terribly chapped--they were cracked, little lines of blood rising up through the foam of the toothpaste.  I stopped brushing, rinsed my mouth, and reached up to tug at a flake of dead skin, dangling from my upper lip.

But as I pulled, the entire lip came away--the skin tore up my face in a long ribbon, and without my prompting other strips dropped like water from my chin, and then the blood was everywhere, just pouring out of me like a fountain, and knowing there was nothing to be done, I stood aghast and watched the whole of me trickle down the bathroom drain.

I wonder what it means.

A new beginning, or is this the end?

I think I'm really going to do this.

I'm 25 years old.  I've lived like this for so long, running, hiding, hoping to escape.  And the more I think about it--and I think about it a lot--the more convinced I am that the only way out is through.

I heard this song for the first time a few days ago, and it literally brought me to my knees.  It's by the Silent Comedy.  I heard it as part of someone else's transition video, which I'm gonna go ahead and link:

I don't know what happened to me.  I couldn't watch it all at a shot, with that song. 

Oh my God, please help me
Knee-deep in the river trying to get clean
He says "Wash your hands, get out the stains
But you best believe, boy, there's hell to pay
Yeah, you best believe, boy, there's hell to pay"

I paused, got up, paced, came back, got up, paced some more.  I left the room, went out and paced in the kitchen, stared out the window, came back, left again. 

Oh my God, please help me
Waist-deep in the river, can you hear my plea
He says, "Son, you come like a beggar in the streets
You might make it, boy, but by the skin of your teeth
You might make it, boy, but by the skin of your teeth"

I could feel myself sweating.  I beat my fists against my thighs, craving the sting, searching for the ground beneath the treads of my boots.

I've rambled with the worst of them
Fell in love with a harlequin
Saw the darkest hearts of men
And I saw myself staring back again
And I saw myself staring back again

I watched, listening, intent, until the music changed.  Then the music changed, and I felt my heart surge, every thought I've ever had, wish I've ever made, every single emotion I've ever felt churning behind my eyes, and I talked to myself, but I don't know what I said.

Oh my God, please help me
Neck-deep in the river screaming for relief
He says, "It's mine to give, but it's yours to choose
You're gonna sink or swim, you're gonna learn the truth
No matter what you do, you're gonna learn the truth"

That song changed everything.

Ate the bread that once was stone
Fell from a cliff, never broke a bone
Bowed down to get the kings overthrown
And I'm all alone, and the fire grows
And I'm all alone, and the fire grows

I'm pretty sure that I'm running up against the closest thing to a religious experience I'm ever likely to encounter.  I don't know what will happen to me next.  I'm pretty sure everything will be okay in the end, but I don't know if everything will be okay in the beginning, and for that reason I don't know where to start.

My aunt Christy was diagnosed three days ago with Stage 4 triple-negative BRCA-1+ breast cancer.  It's unbelievably rare--less than one in a million.  Everyone in the family has to get tested now for BRCA-1, which is an "oncogene" responsible for many rare forms of breast and gynecological cancers in women, as well as prostate cancers in men.  If it turns out that I have this gene, I will have to have a prophylactic mastectomy and hysterectomy--persons with active BRCA-1 have a 90% risk of developing breast cancer at some point in their lives, and a 65% chance of developing ovarian cancer, so right now prophylactic removals are the first line of defense.

When my mother told me that Christy was sick, my first thought wasn't even about Christy.  It was about getting to buck the system.  It was about hoping that I might get sick too--that they might take my breasts and my uterus and my ovaries and there would be nothing my mother could do about it, and I would have absolutely nothing to explain.

It makes me feel sick, knowing how selfish I am.

But it also tells me something else, because I meant it.  For a few spasming seconds, I couldn't wait to get breast cancer.  And THAT...well, that's something that's going to have to change.

Where can you run to escape from yourself?

Sing, sweet charity
Take what's left of me
A new beginning, or is this the end?
Sing, sweet seraphim
Take me back again
Or watch me make the messes of men 

Dancing with myself

My therapist keeps asking me whether I ever "felt different" from my peers, growing up.  I did, but not in the way I think he expects.

I think what he wants me to say is that I always knew I was a tomboy.  That I tore the ribbons from my hair and threw tantrums over dresses, that I shopped in the boys' section from the time I was five years old, that I told my parents to call me "Mel" or "Melvin" as soon as I was old enough to talk.  He wants me to say that I looked in the mirror and knew that my body wasn't mine.  He wants me to say that I traded my Easy-Bake Oven for the neighbor boy's ride-on tractor, that I cried when I got my first period, that I wore five layers of clothing to hide developing breasts.  He wants me to say that I've always known I was different--that I was not a girl.

None of those things happened, of course...except for that very last.

I have always known that I was different. 

Different from the girls, of course--different from every single girl I knew, and radically so (as they were all too quick to remind me).  But beyond that.  Different from the girls, different from the boys--just different, profoundly and irreconcilably different, as far back as I can remember, before school, before language, I was as strange as they come.

That, in itself, sounds like an incredible conceit.  Perhaps I've always been this narcissistic.  Maybe that's my only real problem, here--shameless, irredeemable self-involvement. 

But that in itself is strange.  And I have always been strange.  Not just different--certainly I was awkward, clumsy, "nerdy," out-of-sync, all the sundry attributes that contribute to childhood isolation, but at the same time, there was (and often is) something so far beyond that that it becomes difficult to articulate. 

As far back as I can remember, I have felt...alien.  There's really no other way to put it.  Sometimes, I feel such a total disconnect between myself and my surroundings--so all-consumingly "Other"--that I have to remind myself that I am even human.  I have to work damn hard to place myself within the context of my kind--my gender, sure, but everything else, too, the totality of my being, everything so palpably off about me that it goes way beyond anything I think my therapist will be able to resolve.

Sometimes, I feel like I can't even trust my own reasoning--like I have the power to deceive myself, to con myself into believing the impossible, the power to will things to life.  Sometimes I feel like there IS no "essence" inside me, no doer behind the deed--like I'm just a pile of other people's ideas, a reproduction, a regurgitated synthesis of someone else's truths.  I feel like I am no one.  Of course I have never been a girl.  I have never been anything.

I feel different.  I will always feel different.  But where the therapist thinks that this anomie will dissipate given adequate quantities of testosterone, I know otherwise.  Changing my sex will not save me, for I have never felt my sex was "wrong"--I've barely felt my sex in general.  This is fundamental, unresolvable, and core-strong.  As I come "into my own," over here, I come into another copy, another simulation of a self that doesn't really exist. 

Who is he to say that this one is better than the last? 

My mentor

Sent Clarke an e-mail.  Now I'm just sitting here, tapping my fingers, waiting for a reply.

I miss him so much more than I had ever expected to, and I had expected to miss him a lot.  I hope he can feel how badly I wish he were here. 

I need my Jack Donaghy, my Doctor Cox.  My mentor.  My cheerleader.  I need someone to have my back, someone to point me in a direction, someone to tell me I'm doing the right thing.

I'm such an idiot.

Why do I need people to love me so much?  Am I really the narcissist I hear, reading this back?

I don't know.  If Clarke were here, I trust that he'd tell me the truth.

I hope he does anyway.

Matches

I remember my mother telling me never to play with matches.

This is my first day with a cock, and trundling down the hallway of the Student Union building, it feels like a lit match, edging back and forth between my thighs.  I keep looking at it, shifitng a hand in my pocket to make sure it's still there, quiet urgency pressing at the edges of my consciousness, reminding me to let go, LET IT GO, lest the matchstick crumble and my fingers singe.

That's what this whole experience has been--trial by fire, smoke-choked, lungs burning, an endless boundless cresting sea of flame.  I hurt.  Sometimes I struggle to breathe.  My nerves, bare, throb relentlessly against the inside of my clothing, twitching and flexing and tensing against the heat.  I am red and raw, scraped, bleeding, blackened, searching for that boundary where the pain bursts through a final crescendo and I emerge, impervious, invincible.  If I can do this, I can do anything.

I am so afraid.  I am no Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, or Steven Seagal.  I hate sports, and I hate pool, and I drink fruity pussy drinks with thick sugary mixers and tiny umbrellas, and I don't know how to dance, and I am shy and awkward and uncomfortable and short and my hips are too wide and my shoulders are too narrow, and my hands are small and sometimes I still shave my legs and I will never be able to do this, never be taken seriously, even by myself.

I know all of that.  I repeat it, endlessly, everything I'll never be spooling around inside my head like Shari Lee Lewis, until my mouth is dry and my hands are trembling and sweat beads warm and wet against my temples, and I can't stop.  I just can't stop.

I nudge my dick again, like an addict feeling their hip pocket before getting off the bus, or a mother looking in on a newborn in the night.  Just to make sure you're still there.  The tension is impossible,
one moment strung into another like beads of water sliding down a blade.  Do you know how hard it is to play hide and seek with yourself?

Clarke sent me an e-mail asking where I've been.  I don't know what to tell him, other than that everything is different.  That I've been here, crouching in the dark, bright heat in my chest and my pockets and my head.  That I've been playing with fire.  That my bridges have all caught, are all burning in my wake.  That there's just enough light from the match head to see my own face.  That even if nothing happens--if I can't do it, can't go through with it, change my mind--there is still the inevitable truth that nothing will ever be the same.  I am not as I was.  I don't know yet who I will be, but that person will never be again, and that in itself is transformation.

Lighter

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's fun.  I'm not talking about being high--I'm talking about the actual, literal, smoking of pot.  I love everything about pot.  I love the way it smells, the way it tastes, the way it looks when I singe my fingers and wipe them on my thighs.  I love the way a new lighter sounds, that first spark of warmth against my eyebrows.  I love that first breath, thickness funneling into my chest until I can barely hold the heat, then feeling the ricochet of blood through my temples as I exhale.  I love my tongue, dry, the parched cavern of my mouth like cotton and cracked sand.  I love the way my eyes burn.  I love my pipe, love my gorgeous bong, tigers and snakes and Amazon breasts sandblasted into the side.  I love wiping trichomes from the inside of the Ziploc with my finger.  I love everything about the process of smoking pot.

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's FUN.  And here, I AM talking about the high--dizzy, swirling, lightheaded, insatiable, every single second of the high.  I love sprawling on the couch, my limbs nitrous-weightless off the edge, against the floor.  I love talking to myself while I make Pop-Tarts.  I love standing up and feeling blackness creep into the corners of my eyes.  I love hearing my heartbeat in my ears, tipping my head back and dropping,

dropping,

faster and falling and spiraling into the carpet, a rollercoaster of my own design.  I love the way food tastes, the way the breeze smells, the way light filters in through the trees on the other side of our sliding glass door.  I love everything about being high.

And sometimes, I smoke pot because I don't want to feel anything.  Because the panic and the tension and the shame are overwhelming.  Because if I think about the work I've put off for the past three weeks, I'm afraid my heart will stop.  Because I don't belong here, and I know it, and everyone else knows it even better than I, and if I stop to think about it too hard, or for too long, my coach will turn back into a pumpkin, and the mice will scurry away into the shadows at my feet. 

Sometimes I smoke pot because it's easier than not smoking pot.

Sometimes I smoke pot because, when I close my eyes, I can't feel my breasts any more.

Sometimes I smoke pot and fantasize that my name is Tony.  I smoke and imagine myself with a mustache, a beard, a cock, a flat chest, bigger hands.  I listen to taped recordings of myself at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty-two, and I realize that years of smoking pot have gradually--almost imperceptibly at first, but more and more prominently with the passage of time--lowered my voice, deepened it, dropped my childhood soprano to a raspy contralto (at best), which just makes me want to smoke more.  Sometimes I smoke and honestly believe that my clit is a penis.  Sometimes I smoke and fuck, unleashed, hungry, devastatingly free, and laugh out loud because the shame and discomfort have finally evaporated.  Sometimes I smoke and get anxious, agitated--sometimes, I see and feel and know too much of myself and have to smoke even more to forget myself again.

Sometimes, pot saves me. 

Sometimes, I think that I need pot just to be able to live with myself.

Sometimes, I realize that without pot, I wouldn't know myself in the first place.

Now with 100% more LESBIAN poetry!

I found a bunch of poetry assignments from undergrad on my old hard drive, and figure this is as sound a place to store them as any.

Poem Beginning with A Line By Thom Gunn: 

And it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused,

confused by the stilted spill of breath across my fingers,

by your lipstick, slick and glossy on my palm.

We steep between cool sheets, all my intention

stacked and thick upon my shoulders, my chest wracked

with the effort of your breathing.  White lace-wrought gown,

no paler than the peppermint-rose lacquer of your skin, whispers air

into the space between our hands.

I wrap a shaking palm around your knuckles, strain to

swallow my own thirst.

We struggle through a soft and hollow breath that

lifts my name unbitten from your tongue, pulls

syllables through lips as smooth and foreign as the melted

sweet of Swiss-pressed chocolate petals, the tender

sheen of Asiatic silk,

and when exhaustion melts across your cheeks,

your ankles fused with mine

in sweet impermanence,

I close my eyes, remember eight and plucking

April lilacs from a tree, smearing pollen on my forehead,

trailing home to file them between Jude and Revelations.

I pressed them between half-transparent pages, slammed

the cover:  let the weight and dust leach oil from their perforated

stems, the subtle dampness that loss carries curling thin

throughout the chapters as veins faded, petals pale and driven flat,

until I rifled through the text, unburied treasure,

lifted weeks of effort slowly towards the window, watched it crumble

into powder on the rug.

It’s odd, I know, the business of salvation:

the chalk-streak line we hopscotch between pressing close and pressing on.