It has been a long year. It wasn't quite one year, although it was close enough, that I showed her some essential part of me and she responded. When I saw fear and hope mixed in tears she'd not let flow for a lifetime. When I crumbled next to her, so close she almost touched but did not and promptly left like all do. It has been a year and a week since I first wrote her [wrote you]. And, if I'm being honest, she's all I've been writing to since.
There is little point in declaring a single moment an anniversary or, perhaps, a beginning. There are so many single points. But it's the constellation that really matters. My constellation, of the past year, has been a cocoon. Woven of three threads, I've been growing. And in a month's time [or so] I'll inch out and my life will begin anew.
Of the three threads, two have grown firm: I've more or less “completed” the more salient parts of my transition to female, and I've been accepted into graduate school for the career I've always been best suited for. The third will be more or less resolved within the next month, and while it is in no way assured and I am not optimistic, I nevertheless feel hopeful. And if it, too, grows strong, I feel I will have transformed on a fundamental level into someone alive. The butterfly spreads her wings..
I have learned, too. Lessons I already knew, lessons I will never know and will relearn and learn again.
Love heals but does not cure.
Forever and tomorrow are not real; they are intangible. All we know and feel is now. Waiting is a form of death, and I have been dead too long.
Trauma happens. Some sans cause, some sans solution. We can grow. The wounds will never close. But we can grow out, over, around, and through them.
All will end, if we do not first. Love, joys, sufferings, nows. All will end. They exist, no doubt, as we do. But they will end. And, knowing this, we must not waste them.
Words are clumsy, stumbling over what is in the dark. They may say what we want, but their meanings are not our own when we give them away. Often, they are still worth giving. But sometimes, when what they become is so disparate, we give more than we get back. And we pay the difference.
It all strikes as cliché, and it is. Axioms that are not true insomuch as they feel like the time and place of my now. I may look back upon this, in another quarter century, and know [or glimpse] a self I am no longer.
The resonance:
“Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.”
“They know my name because I told it to them/
But they don't know where and they don't know when.”
“'Farewell' is the song that Time sings.”
“I love you so much I want to die.”
“And I'm trying.
I'm trying.”
You crying.
You not letting go.
“Can I see you?”
The way you held onto me the first moment, like breath to the drowned.
“I want to tear you apart and put you back together with me inside of you.”
“That's hi-larious.”
The cold wind and looking at you in front of me so far away.
Your eyes, moment by moment, swallowing me whole.
The ripples of your back running through me.
Stop signs in January blizzards.
“You're not even saying anything very funny, but I'm still laughing.”
“i cant love anymore, it's not right
please say something to me”
silence
help, please, and silence
I decided to live, at some point. There was a definitive choice that I remember, after I frantically scrambled through the clinic searching for a way to overdose on pills locked too far from my reach. But bridges and balloons beckoned, still, and I decided to live. And I think I will be alive. If I survive long enough to find a “you” who stays, to complete the last thread.
But even if they stay, they'll leave too. Or I'll leave them. It ends, it all ends. And they'll cry for help and no matter the ink used or the ways your lips move, we'll get silence in return. It all ends.
And I will still fail and disappoint and hate and hurt. And if “life” is feeling, then life is sorrow as much as it's joy.
But almost a year ago today, I cried for hours, aching for what I'd lost. It hurt because I'd loved it, because I cared for it, because it was gone. And I may never find it again. And even if I find it, I will never keep it. And even after I've found it, I will still lose and hurt and fail and feel.
The hurt is the price I pay for being alive. And in your arms and eyes, though arms let go and eyes close, it's still a cost worth paying.
There is little point in declaring a single moment an anniversary or, perhaps, a beginning. There are so many single points. But it's the constellation that really matters. My constellation, of the past year, has been a cocoon. Woven of three threads, I've been growing. And in a month's time [or so] I'll inch out and my life will begin anew.
Of the three threads, two have grown firm: I've more or less “completed” the more salient parts of my transition to female, and I've been accepted into graduate school for the career I've always been best suited for. The third will be more or less resolved within the next month, and while it is in no way assured and I am not optimistic, I nevertheless feel hopeful. And if it, too, grows strong, I feel I will have transformed on a fundamental level into someone alive. The butterfly spreads her wings..
I have learned, too. Lessons I already knew, lessons I will never know and will relearn and learn again.
Love heals but does not cure.
Forever and tomorrow are not real; they are intangible. All we know and feel is now. Waiting is a form of death, and I have been dead too long.
Trauma happens. Some sans cause, some sans solution. We can grow. The wounds will never close. But we can grow out, over, around, and through them.
All will end, if we do not first. Love, joys, sufferings, nows. All will end. They exist, no doubt, as we do. But they will end. And, knowing this, we must not waste them.
Words are clumsy, stumbling over what is in the dark. They may say what we want, but their meanings are not our own when we give them away. Often, they are still worth giving. But sometimes, when what they become is so disparate, we give more than we get back. And we pay the difference.
It all strikes as cliché, and it is. Axioms that are not true insomuch as they feel like the time and place of my now. I may look back upon this, in another quarter century, and know [or glimpse] a self I am no longer.
The resonance:
“Everything dies, baby, that's a fact.”
“They know my name because I told it to them/
But they don't know where and they don't know when.”
“'Farewell' is the song that Time sings.”
“I love you so much I want to die.”
“And I'm trying.
I'm trying.”
You crying.
You not letting go.
“Can I see you?”
The way you held onto me the first moment, like breath to the drowned.
“I want to tear you apart and put you back together with me inside of you.”
“That's hi-larious.”
The cold wind and looking at you in front of me so far away.
Your eyes, moment by moment, swallowing me whole.
The ripples of your back running through me.
Stop signs in January blizzards.
“You're not even saying anything very funny, but I'm still laughing.”
“i cant love anymore, it's not right
please say something to me”
silence
help, please, and silence
I decided to live, at some point. There was a definitive choice that I remember, after I frantically scrambled through the clinic searching for a way to overdose on pills locked too far from my reach. But bridges and balloons beckoned, still, and I decided to live. And I think I will be alive. If I survive long enough to find a “you” who stays, to complete the last thread.
But even if they stay, they'll leave too. Or I'll leave them. It ends, it all ends. And they'll cry for help and no matter the ink used or the ways your lips move, we'll get silence in return. It all ends.
And I will still fail and disappoint and hate and hurt. And if “life” is feeling, then life is sorrow as much as it's joy.
But almost a year ago today, I cried for hours, aching for what I'd lost. It hurt because I'd loved it, because I cared for it, because it was gone. And I may never find it again. And even if I find it, I will never keep it. And even after I've found it, I will still lose and hurt and fail and feel.
The hurt is the price I pay for being alive. And in your arms and eyes, though arms let go and eyes close, it's still a cost worth paying.
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