After a lifetime of letting life happen to me, being shepherded through it all while half-asleep, the seasons changing with little event, it took courage to fuck it up with a leap of faith, rather than with further, protracted mediocrity.
Despite this being a form of surrender, I always knew this was my destiny. My first unraveling was a question. And then another. And another. Gradually, my spirit was worn down by resisting the answers.
I don’t know what I am or exactly what I want to be. All paths for what I may become spelled my doom. Motivated by the wrong reasons, I would be nobody’s idea of a woman. But I didn’t leave one form of dogma to suffer under another. More and more I’ve realized: there is no answer. I want to be some kind of androgyne. The thought of my form becoming dimorphic, increasingly masculinizing, funneling me down one path of toiling and growing up when I want the world and all of its people to be mine: it frightens me. For you, I will be a boy, a girl, a pretty thing…
I want to be everything and nothing.
More than anyone, I am something driven by their limbic system — at the whims of chemicals and runaway emotion. I no longer have a conscience. I like to think that if I were to be struck right here and now, I would writhe on the ground in a mess of gears and sprockets only a watchmaker could understand. Maybe he would discover, as if I were a hound that had always a splinter in its mouth, that there was a fatal flaw in my engineering, and somehow that made everything I did okay. That it truly was inevitable. Knowing that would give me closure… it would even be forgiveness.
But I felt shame at this admission.
In a world that is, to me, full of absolutes, I live in constant contradiction. Like a virus, it has made me doubt everything throughout my life: foreigner or national, child or orphan, straight or gay, judgmental, rule follower or vile hedonist. Now, even something so fundamental as my being a man or not hangs in painful oscillation. A question that is surely, always, one ruminating away from an answer. But it is not. But learning to become comfortable with these lingering, unanswerable questions, was perhaps a victory or a new low. Because if I am nothing, what harm is it if I warp for my success? That would be the same measure of honesty I afford to myself, because just as equally as my confusion, lies and deceit sanction my very survival. Miriam was right: I am completely non-committal. Maybe because that little lingering voice of shame will never truly leave me.
In a final act of blind faith, I redirected this train — this imposing engine of life, to somewhere else entirely, my hand forced by both a mixture of shame and shamelessness. For now, I am prepared to bind and to conceal. To switch things out before I get home and play the role again. Recently, I have been more comfortable in this lie, more present to my father, more attentive and helpful to my mother and my family, volunteering again for responsibilities I long ago abandoned. Every thing is a lie now after all. Then when I can, I hope to move to the city and experience the carnal life I was promised, in a race to make up for gaping deficiencies when greater things were shut away.
I sped and bounded over these hills which I have grown so familiar with. In this promising spring air, these lush branches renewed with leaves again blotted out the sun for moments at a time as I passed under their shade. And as the cabin of the car swayed and flickered with light, my thoughts wandered to a reel of film: how it is just a sum of stills, individual moments that are testified to by some chemicals. I thought about a flickering film — how for moments at a time, it too would flicker in lapses that would threaten the lively illusion it produced. Even amidst my struggle, I have reached a more advanced state of decline where I began to doubt one more thing. Am I doing this for myself?
As I neared the clinic for my consultation, I felt I also was flickering in and out of existence, fighting to not disappear for good. If my life up to this point was a reel of film, there would be many gaps where I was solitary. In those moments I was always idle as I waited for something better, allowing all that used to be important to me to fall to neglect as I became more inured to the feelings of others. Desperate chapters where I would live or die by my captors’ approval or dismissal. And when they left, those moments were left hollow and unaccounted for, slowly fading from my memory. I just had to trust that even if I could not remember much of this life, that even if nobody was left to testify for my existence, that I was still real.
Will I still be here when I depart with you? Only I know the answer.
As for here, I could never reveal the truth. I just have to hope they don’t find out. I don’t know if I have the conviction to stand firm in my decision, one which my friends and family would view as suicide. Could I really be put on trial for killing somebody they cared for? How could anyone? I could see it now: the initial, exasperated laughs, the denial, the pointed fingers, the imposed isolation, and finally, the point at which they gave up on me.
“Because I’m always wrong.” I hissed, grinding my foot into the pedal.
I have to keep these worlds separate and partitioned. I have to prevent contamination. But there would come a moment when this is untenable, like every contradiction I have ever known. Perhaps it would be best if I could fake my death. Then I could pick up where the original me left off, in some separate epilogue that was never meant to be.
And yet I willed it into being.
If I was flickering in and out of being, I would have to leave them with something that could never fade: One final, lasting testament. Incorruptible.
A memory of the last time they ever saw me, where I would forever remain the young man. Untouched by time or my folly.