Waiting

There are some things that are hard to believe, even as we live through them.

I never really bought into the line that "truth is stranger than fiction." But there are parts of my life I couldn't invent, no matter how much I tried.

There is a story - part of my story - that was over twenty-four years in the making. And after it was over, it was another two years before I even realized what had happened.

I don't think stories really have beginnings. There's always some antecedent, some context, some background, something prior. There are moments that are easier to start at than others, however, so that will suffice.

The starting point for this fragment of my story took place in a small house off a nondescript side-alley of a minor road, in a city most people reading this in English would never have heard of.

The house didn't matter, to this story; the city didn't, either.

What mattered was that I had my bedroom in that house, and a small single bed. I was eight years old, or perhaps nine; somewhere around late second-grade. In that bed, one night, I had a dream.

At such a young age, I had not yet begun to appreciate the subtleties or the intricacies of human dreams. I'd dreamed many dreams before. But that night was the first time I had a dream that I remembered vividly, that seemed more real than waking, that stuck with me - haunted me - for days after.

Or, as it turned out, for decades.

I dreamed of a girl, about my age, who was powerful, beloved, amazing in every possible way my tiny young imagination could conjure. As often is the case in dreams, I had no notion of how we'd met, why we were together, or why any of it felt so important.

We adventured, together, in that vaguely abstract and indescribable way of dreams; I had no idea what it was we were doing or why, but I knew it was important.

I knew I had some kind of connection to her, one that I couldn't quite explain, either in the dream itself or the days after that I spent brooding on it all.

There were many firsts, in that dream. It was the first I remembered so clearly, and it was the first that had a profoundly confusing symbolism within it.

At the end of our adventures, and what I somehow knew even in the moment was about to be the end of the dream, the girl pulled me aside from it all. There was a foundation, a place to build a building, to construct something. I knew it, even then, as the life that somehow we were supposed to share.

She gave me a watch - not one that worked, but one that seemed frozen, that made no sense... as the notion of time often tends to do, within dreams.

And together, we buried that watch, under a corner of the foundation, knowing that somehow it meant a promise - albeit a tragically delayed one.

I knew she would be back.

Or rather, I knew she wasn't really gone.

But as she evaporated from my awareness and I drifted awake that morning, all I could process was that I'd lost her, somehow.

I spent days, carefully trying to hide how much the dream had unsettled me, pondering and contemplating it constantly, trying to understand what had happened and why this nonsensical event during sleep had rattled me so deeply.

I couldn't articulate why - not for many, many long years after - but I kept it secret. Somehow it felt like betrayal, like sharing her secret - our secret - to even whisper about it to anyone else.

And so after a few days, I concluded I'd probably never understand why I'd woken up crying, that morning, aching for the loss of a girl that wasn't real and didn't exist.

And with my mind made up, I set about slowly forgetting what I'd sobbed quietly to myself before leaving my bed; the name I couldn't make sense of, the person I couldn't understand from a place in my head, the connection that I wasn't quite sure actually even occurred.

Twenty-four years later, I was sitting in my car, in traffic, one late afternoon... the afternoon of April 8th, 2019, to be precise. I knew I wasn't who I thought I was, but I had no name to call myself; or so I thought.

And I flailed, for just a heartbeat, mid-sentence in a thought in my own head that no one could hear, trying to figure out how to refer to myself, this trans person in the midst of self-discovery.

On that day, in that moment, I remembered my name.

I struggled to describe it, for almost two years afterwards; it couldn't really be a memory, could it? It felt like a reunion, like coming home, like returning to something long lost and deeply forgotten. For months upon months, I caught myself thinking of my journey as going back - I kept stumbling over the word "again" as if part of me knew that this wasn't the first time I'd understood myself.

But how could that be? There was no way; surely just a meaningless slip of the tongue. I scoured my memory - fragmented and traumatized as it was - for indicators that I'd ever known "before" or that there was any real precedent.

And now I've finally found them: the signs that there was understanding before. Prior to the dysphoria. Prior to the social struggles. Prior to anything I'd thought was relevant.

When I was eight years old, I awoke one morning from a dream, crying over the vanishing of a girl I didn't know was me. And I knew I had to keep her secret, forget her name, hide her memory, even as I knew it hurt, and I had no conscious idea why.

One spring day, not long ago, at the age of thirty five, I remembered who I'd been crying for all those long years ago. What I said, over and over, for the agonizing minutes after I'd awoken.

My Princess Amelia.

It turns out I kept that promise after all. Dreams have always held a profound, almost mystical, fascination for me. She turned up, over and over again, across the years - to the point that I even broke my silence about her at one point, without even knowing.

Maybe it's all just a bit too hard to believe, maybe it's just easier to brush it off as revisionist wishful semi-fiction.

But I'll always know the truth.

I love you forever, Amelia.

Monday, May 17th, 2021

I have nothing against being wrong - not in general, not in principle. Being wrong is part of guessing, and guessing is part of trying something new; and, after all, one of the biggest reliefs of my entire life was discovering just how wrong I was about who I am, a couple of years ago.

But there are times when it's harder than others. Times when I have to just admit that I was wrong, and if there's any usefulness to be had from the mistake, it's lost in the sheer pain of how awful the mistake was.

I made the mistake of thinking things were OK with my relatives.

This is the only way forward now.

* * *

The trash cans are just sitting there, on the curb.

Maybe for some people it’s "just" a "simple" matter of opening the garage, pulling them inside, and disappearing into solitude again.

Not for me.

I can’t go out there.

Instead, I have to be in here, fighting off the whispers of anxiety and dread that say someone out there is judging me for not having taken the cans inside yet.

Never mind that half the neighborhood just leaves their cans on the road all week.

Never mind that even the people who do bring them up a driveway, into a garage, around to the side yard... they often take a day or two to manage it themselves.

I almost wish I could say something, as if to explain what’s going on and just avoid further conversation entirely. Tell everyone. But why? I don’t want their pity, their offers of help, or their involvement.

All I want is to be left alone… and they already do that. No one ever bothers me here.

But I can’t go outside.

They know I’m here. It’s not some kind of secret. I’m not fooling anyone. Nor am I trying.

I know why all of this is.

It has nothing to do with being left alone. It has everything to do with not being rejected. Not being treated as a problem, as a freak, as an abnormality, as a monster.

No one here has ever given me a reason to think they would respond that way.

But I know who did.

There’s a flashing storm of images in my brain, words and sounds and faces, a parade of horrible people doing horrible things. Echoes of long-faded physical pain flash through my nerves.

Being beaten by my father at a party, him hauling me into the driveway of the host’s home and hitting me over and over again, for embarrassing and inconveniencing him. I’d had a social anxiety attack and lost control of my bladder, surrounded by strangers in an unfamiliar setting. Somehow his impression of the right response to that was to begin smacking his eight year old child.

That was the right response to everything. Hit me.

I remember exactly one time - eighth grade - when I dared to walk away from him when he started getting angry at me. I left the room, went upstairs, and quietly locked the door to my bedroom behind me. Without even leaving the kitchen table downstairs, he yelled for me, promising that if I didn’t come back down and listen to his tirade, he’d "make me remember" the consequences. I didn’t get hit - that time - but I remembered anyways.

I have no idea what he was even pissed about, all these years later.

All I remember is the depth of how awful, how profoundly terribly incomprehensible, it all felt. To be struck time and again, for almost two full decades. "This is only for your own good. I’m only doing it because I love you. It hurts me more than it hurts you."

Bullshit.

I’m not afraid of my neighbors saying something shitty, or being ignorant or rude. I can handle people acting badly.

What I’m scared of is the remote chance that I’d see the same look in someone’s eye, that tiny flicker of disgust, the judgment, the silent hurrying away as if I’d ruined their day just by existing.

The look he gave me all the time.

I dread trying to talk to them, trying to help them understand that the strange woman living on the corner lot just needs some space and some privacy... I dread the beginnings of things starting to work out, people still being just as respectful but with a little more knowing behind the casual waves from across the street... I dread the eventual outcome of the illusion shattering, the bubble bursting, and someone finally telling me they couldn’t handle being kind to me anymore because I’m just too much.

The way my mother always did when I sought refuge with her after yet another incident with my father.

* * *

I tried again, all those years later, to make it work. To tell them the truth - who I am, what they did, why I struggled for weeks deciding whether or not to even give them another chance. I sent them the recommendations… books to read, documentaries to watch, people to talk to.

For a little while, it seemed like it might have worked. We talked on the phone, now and then. Occasionally even ventured past the petty small-talk that I always find so exhaustingly pointless.

And then it stopped. The illusion broke. For everything that has changed, nothing really changed at all - not with them.

A year and a half ago, my father promised to answer the letter I wrote him explaining who I am. He has since disappeared again into whatever obsessive religious hole he’s finding interesting these days. I’ve heard nothing from him, but he’s found plenty of time to write letters - to absolute strangers, trying to sell them his advice. 

A year and a half ago, my mother promised to try and build an actual relationship with her youngest daughter - with me. And when we’d finally reached a point where I felt comfortable telling her that I am autistic, and relating some of my struggles to her, she fell back into the same old habit she always has. It’s just too much, can’t we talk about something else?

I turned thirty-five years old over a month ago. I have heard absolutely nothing, from either of them, since the beginning of this year. For all their promises, for all their assurances that they’ve changed and become better people, they’re still just as problematic as ever.

I spend most of my nights and weekends working through the leftovers of the traumas they both put me through. Violent abuse on one hand, and dismissive neglect on the other.

Someday I will be able to get my trash cans without seeing their shadows hiding around every corner.

I am breaking the cycle.

This shit stops with me.

Terminology

Yes, I am trans.

No, I didn't "transition."

Not the way you want to think of it.

You could say I transformed, perhaps.

I transferred decades of pre-existing experience into a better life, a better existence, a relentless insistence on forging a better reality.

I exist in transit - not from one place to another, but having left behind something less than real, to chase a dream that was more factual than the fantasy I occupied in the material world. I can never reach my destination - but not because it is unattainable. I've already reached so many, and there will always be more.

My body has been transmogrified - the power of science interwoven with the magic of self-knowledge, the undoing of ill-fitting habits and the creation of new ones, authentic and truthful and full of vitality.

Hand me a transducer, I'll make some noise; listen to what I shout to any who will hear me, and be transported into a world that is so much more vast and wonderful and healthy than this one.

The thirst for life is transitive. It cannot stop with me. It will spread. We'll go somewhere lovely, together.

And heed this warning, all you passers by, whose gaze flits past me in the chaos of your day: be careful how long you let your stares linger, lest you find yourself unable to look away - transfixed.