Trans Fiction, Trans Imagination: I Will Answer Your Questions, If You Listen Closely
You want to know where you came from, is that it? Do not be embarrassed. Nature did not see motherhood in me, either.
You want to know where you came from, is that it? Do not be embarrassed. Nature did not see motherhood in me, either.
If you keep pumping your arms, your legs will know what to do even when the world is crumbling around you.
The same things I need in order to manage my Long COVID are the things we all need for the future we are creating: mutual aid, seasons of receiving along with our seasons of giving, self-care that is directly connected to community care, less work, body trust and disability justice.
“Building ofrendas unite the living and the dead; they give space for our stories to be held. I light candles and kneel before them to say prayers because doing so reminds me, even when I’m my most lost – I’m never alone in this world.”
“It’s taken me five years, but the feeling of joy, freedom, excitement, and fulfillment that I feel when I can dance to bachata with my queer kin, when I don’t have to choose between being Latinx or being queer, when I can honor all of my identities at once, is worth risking my safety.”
Me: still confused
You: the elusive chanteuse
Maybe I would have been something you’d be good at.
I think of the moment I was born, how I must not have cared at all how loud I screamed. I needed to breathe. I needed everyone to know I was here.
This is the story of the birth and death of my name, which means that it is a story about transition, which means that it is necessarily a story about the border between two places and the force with which one rends it.
You: Sophomore, bought me a beer the night Obama was re-elected
Me: Freshman, about to have my first relationship with somebody else
Going viral holding a sign that reads “My grandpa didn’t survive Auschwitz to bomb Gaza,” is not how I planned to start a conversation with my family condemning Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people. I’m not the only Jewish person who has long chosen to self-silence rather than stand with my values, but it’s not too late for other Jewish people to join me. The moment for Jewish-Palestinian solidarity is now.
You: The two women from my past who I judged too quickly during a chance brunch encounter
Me: The dyke who apparently projected her own hangups about middle school onto you
Sitting there, eyes closed, I could feel the subtle movements of the two people I was touching. To my right—someone I’d never met. I’d glimpsed basketball shorts, ragged tee, short hair. Muscular, athletic body. My hand on an unfamiliar, living knee.
Loneliness is an old bedfellow of mine; despair, my oldest friend. If I can come to embrace those parts of myself I’ve always tried to push away — perhaps, that is the only lifelong love I can count on.
“Everytime a healthcare provider said it to me, it came out of their mouth like that SpongeBob meme. LiStEn tO yOuR bOdY. Well, and I was tired of hearing what my body had to say.”
“As wonderful as this time together has been, as close as we’ve gotten, we both know that once the world opens up a bit more, we’ll finally get to have a lot of our “firsts” — and that it may be bittersweet to finally have our first date six months into being a couple.”
“This was after that night, when I moved into the guest room with the little bathroom, when I moved my toiletries onto the shower floor, when I moved all the books I was reading, and my perfume bottles, my department-store boxes filled with eyeliner and lipstick. And I texted my spouse that we were separating and that I had moved into the guest room, and they called me and wanted to come back to the house and I said, ‘No, no, don’t, I don’t want you to,’ and then sat on the front porch smoking, waiting, as I had set the stage for another cinematic moment to happen. And my spouse did not come home.”
We were hoping not to have occasion to revisit this conversation as a one-year anniversary, but we do, so here we are, exploring the question: What do you feel like you’ve taken away from this past year of pandemic life?
“I spent years not thinking about my penis — or, at least, thinking about it as little as possible. After I transitioned, my penis became the most important part of my body — at least, to other people.”
All I have is an ellipsis. Grief is a flat circle. And I never imagined I would have to live through grieving her.