bleakviolet

[bleakviolet]

dormitory imp (version 1)

Author's note: I wrote this one shortly after turning 21, and at the time, I was lonely, dangerously malnourished, and experiencing severe symptoms of what I presume might be classified as "mania". My writing here is clunky and unnatural; I'm well aware. For the sake of preservation, I don't have plans to revise it.

Context: I’m twenty. I’m a student. I bus tables for my campus cafeteria.

I pace the cafeteria with my head drooped as I scrub tables and fill napkin containers and restock silverware and trash empty salt and pepper shakers to make space for fresh ones and promptly forget that I accomplish any of the former tasks, and while shuffling between booths with my drippy towel in hand, I look up and find that an unkempt and vacant booth in need of cleaning is not, in fact, vacant, and that there is somebody still there, whose eyes meet mine only momentarily, just long enough that I catch their pupils contract before averting at the same time as the person exhales a short and embarrassed breath of relief—not so much, I suppose, the sort of breath one expels upon feeling relief but the sort of breath one expels in order to feel relief, though the exact qualities of sound and expression which contribute to one impression over the other I cannot place. An instinct, I suppose. In frank terms, I am unfocused, and I know I am unfocused because I assure myself of such; I warn me that I need to be careful of my physical surroundings to avoid startling another person while my boss or a coworker or someone willing to report me to either happens to be in the room and can get me fired, and I remind me of the reason for my being distracted in the first place, which is that I hate my name. And thinking about my name, or—as I learn in the next brief period of awareness due after several more fleeting chores elapse—thinking about how I need to stop thinking about my name, gets me thinking about how my roommate pronounces it (the correct way, albeit, but except for him saying it, it is easy to forget):

“keR-”: There is no letter in the English alphabet more masculine than the R. Robert. Roger. Red. GolfeR. CigaRette. EntRepReneuR. And there is no sound more masculine than keR. The first step to uttering my name is to spread the lips vertically, just as if to enunciate that R sound, only wider and while maintaining nearly clenched teeth. To pronounce a ‘keR’, one must bare their teeth like a snarling dog or a soldier slamming the side of his right hand against his forehead and barking “SiR, yes, siR”.

“-iSs-”: Next, the lower lip has to descend a little further, to make room for an I, and hold position—slimy yellow teeth still exposed—while the tongue pulls backward and a hiss blows over it, flinging all the mouth’s saliva behind the upper incisors.

“-chin”: Finally, the whole motion repeats, this time faster, but upon completion, the tongue slaps into the pool of spit gathered in speaking the prior syllable. 

Gwen, Emily, Kyle, Tom, Kobe—I speak names silently to the floor. I conclude as I march around the cafeteria that mine is not only subjectively shitty, but objectively, demonstrably so. I try perhaps two dozen names—all the ones that come to mind over the course of however many minutes are in one circuit of the room—and not one of them precludes me from kind-of smiling except my own. KeRiSschin. A name that can never be spoken sweetly, a purely professional name. KeRiSchin. I envision my roommate’s fat pink lips undulating before his corn-tinted teeth, two pulses in every utterance. KeRiSchin. It’s disgusting, try it. Disgusting and—I decide as I pace the cafeteria with my head drooped etc.—degrading; seeing and listening to this guy addressing me over and over and degrading the both of us: he, who snarls and laps up his mouth’s saliva to converse with me, and I, whom he can freely beckon to watch him do it. “Hi, keRiSchin!” “How’s your day going, keRiSchin?” “Are you doing alright, keRiSchin?” He speaks my name with the casual frequency afforded to a pronoun, like it belongs not particularly to me, nor to anyone, like the password to my attention is public property. Him and I have not even been acquainted; I had first arrived in the room I would be staying in for nine months when here had been this man, already situated, greeting me and my parents and talking about his degree and—by the time the room had vacated to just the two of us—continuing to ask vapid questions to which I would barely respond: just “fine”s and “sure”s and the kinds of nasal exhalations that emulated what it would be like to chuckle without opening my mouth. The impression I had tried to give was that I wanted never to see him nor to hear his voice, that I wanted to pretend to live alone, and, in return, I would keep my side of the room and the bathroom and the appliances tidy, just as if it were my sole responsibility to do so, on account of the fact that nobody else resided in my space. Of course, I had never voiced my wishes. I had needed him to understand without being told. We had been nowhere near to acquainted enough that he should have been allowed to know so much about me, and I had had no desire to shorten that distance between us, because here had been a man—tall, modestly overweight, and ginger-bearded, wearing plaid button-ups and blue jeans and whose only interests had seemed to be his very blonde, very traditionally pretty girlfriend and the Avengers movies—who had regarded me with the sort of faux-enthusiasm that meant ‘this is awkward; we have nothing in common, but I don’t know what I’ll do if there is even one person on this planet with whom I can’t be friends’. He is valueless to me, and because he is free to call me by my name whenever he wants without feeling guilt, without even knowing what he should be guilty for, I can be no more than his equal-in-standing. I.e.: because this person I do not respect acknowledges no amount of the disrespect he repeatedly commits in calling me by name, I too am valueless, delimited by he.

At five until 1:00, I return my rag to a bucket of grimy soap and leave the cafeteria. I show up five-to-seven minutes late to my last class of the day, as per usual, but due to my good standing with the instructor and a prior email pleading with him that because my shift officially ends at the very minute his class is to begin on its biweekly basis, could he please excuse my tardiness and leave the door to his classroom open until my arrival, to which he obliged, and so anyway nothing comes of my being late, and at 2:45 or thereabouts, class ends without trouble, and shortly thereafter, I arrive at the door to my dorm room. Rooting myself adjacent to the door’s hinged side, I hunch over and plant my ear against the wood. Nothing. In most cases, it is impossible to hear my roommate, but if he happens to be in the midst of a call with his girlfriend, listening to his Calming Scandanavian Music Mix, flushing the toilet, microwaving lunch, sleeping, or exercising, I can flee preemptively and spare myself from having to return a greeting. I straighten, then turn the door handle; but for what will likely be a barely perceptible moment for anyone potentially watching, yet which is, nonetheless, a deliberate pause, I do not enter. Hearing still nothing, I then press the door open perhaps twenty or thirty degrees without moving my feet, maintaining full cover from the pair of eyes I suppose linger above the desk chair beside the opposite wall from the entryway. Nothing. I stride into the room and lock the door.

First thing: I walk through my half of the room into his, passing between his one-by-four-by-one (measured in cubic slots, each of which is probably two feet to a side) modular plastic shelf standing against the right-side wall on the room’s median, whose (the shelf’s) every space is occupied by dozens of packaged foodstuffs semi-neatly arranged, and our two wardrobes align like a barricade parallel to each of our beds and perpendicular to the left-side wall, one wardrobe facing each of the room’s halves. On either side of the shelf are our desks, his far from the door and right of the window and mine nearer the entrance so that every time he enters or exits, I will have to sit up straight and wheel my little maroon swivel chair forward to provide him ample space to maneuver between me and the corner of my bed. His side of the room—contrary to mine, which, save for my desk carrying two monitors, a coffee machine, a rice cooker, and several nigh-empty notebooks, is unadorned and monochromatic—has been inconsistently decorated: several pairs of shoes and patternless rugs of mismatched colors occupy the floor before his bed. His wardrobe stays open to display a collection of plaid outerwear and two or three sweatshirts emblazoned with brands or colleges hanging below numerous supplement bottles on the high shelf, all above a modest pile of books, including Pet Sematary, which he seems to shift frequently to/from its place here and his pillow, yet which he never seems to get any closer to finishing, and likewise a copy of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck that I know he had been reading but that remains perpetually bookmarked. His walls look for the most part like the hall of a theatre that only plays Marvel films, except by the left side of his desk where he hangs a corkboard of motivational quotes and minor academic accolades, among them something of a people’s choice award for pleasant and productive dorm residents. Upon the desk itself, a coffee brewer he uses only for hot chocolate, as well as an instant pot, a laptop, a spare monitor, and always a psychology textbook or an associated notebook, sit. His side stinks because of the food he leaves around some days in his pot, occasionally so long as from morning until evening, braising in the near sunlight.

I take one of his mugs from its place beside the brewer and fill it with tap water from the bathroom (left of the foyer; my side of the room). When I return to where I had been, I set the mug on his desk, unplug his laptop, then submerge the snout of its charging cable. I remove my hands like extracting a Jenga block, and—satisfied that the cable will not slip out of position—flee to my own chair and shake my mouse until my screens reignite. On the left display I can keep track of my online friends while on the right I watch video somethings. I don headphones but leave my right ear uncovered. As I put something on and listen impartially, I leap my feet to the forward edge of my seat and hug my shins, resting my chin between my kneecaps.

My room is so close to an outside entrance that I will hear anyone entering or exiting the hall, and because said entrance happens to be airlocked, I can differentiate entering from exiting based on the order of closing sounds, as the nearer of two doors always makes a bigger noise than the farther on account of being impeded by fewer walls. Therefore, the first door in-sequence slamming louder than the second denotes someone’s exit, and the second slamming louder than the first, someone’s entering. I can disregard leavers; what matters is that I prepared for him arriving. Given the sparse number of residences closer to this entryway than any of the building’s others, few people come through these doors, and few of those who do are without nagging friends or extensive daily occupations to keep them elsewhere constantly. Probably roughly half of all entering persons are my roommate.

crash-click. Crash-Click.

By the second click I have already punched pause on whatever it is that I had been listening to and risen from my seat—a singular motion: legs craned down propelling the chair backward, my body upward—both—such that without so much as an extra step, I can reach my roommate’s drowning charger cord and pluck it from the mug, which (the mug) I take and hide into one of my desk drawers upon realizing how obvious it might otherwise have been that I am the only one who could have filled his mug while he was away. I then push my chair into its slot under the desk and flee to cover behind the wall separating the bathroom from my bed. I open the Fellowship of the Ring—which had been planted on my pillow in advance—and pretend to have been reading it.

Creak—thump-thump: A neighbor opens and closes their door two rooms down.

I flip Fellowship onto its open pages and return to the cord. I shake the plug in the air and then rub the head with a finger and a thumb until it feels cool and dry. After plugging his laptop back in, I redraw his mug, dump its contents in the sink, plunge it with one of his hand towels I find hanging by the bathtub until the mug looks as though it had not been full of anything since morning, and return both to where they had been before I came in. I try really reading after that, but find myself distracted by the repercussions I might face for ruining his laptop. I figure that it will be impossible for him to deduce personally that I had done it, but suppose he gets it checked by a professional, might they establish water damage as the cause? If so, how else except by someone’s tampering can the cable have come into contact with so much water for so long? And the timing!—owner leaves his perfectly functional laptop in plain view of a stranger for just one entire day and, coincidentally, it happens to sustain water damage? Perhaps I can spin it that my roommate keeps all his appliances within inches of this laptop, that a leak or a spill may easily have spread over the exposed cable to cause the rusting. But only the cable? The rest of the computer is untouched. Will they check the laptop itself against my story? Whatever the case, a charger cable on its own is not too big an expenditure; I can handle that—ah, but I may be expelled from the dorm for bad conduct. Not to mention, living here with a man of indifferent opinion toward myself is too much to bear already; I am not prepared to progress to a relationship of mutual hatred. My computer sits unguarded in its place under my desk with hundreds of little air holes exposed, through which a retaliatory water-based attack can be made against my motherboard, processor, and what had been, just a couple years prior, a state-of-the-art graphics card. I cannot afford a replacement PC—especially not a more modern model, which it will have to be, because games’ ever-improving graphical fidelity threatens obsolescence for my current card as it is.

crash-click. Crash-Click.

I whisper a flurry of screaming into Middle Earth: “You fucking son of a bitch asshole worthless piece of shitty useless flesh! Go the fuck away! Stay outta my fucking room!”

A key clatters at my room’s door handle for several seconds.

To read on my bed I sit with my legs as right angles, knees in the carpet, abdomen pressing into the side of my mattress, book upon the covers, my eyes an inch from the pages, and I think—or maybe hope, rather—that this posture impresses of great concentration, so that when my roommate’s fat hairy fingers finally remember how to finagle that key into the lock, he will open the door, walk into my side of the room, see me (barely at the edge of his field of view, preferably), and decide I seem too engrossed to disturb. But really, when he does get that key to fit and the door handle squeals from turning and his heavy footfalls come slowly into the room and the door bangs closed and strikes its little metal tooth into the securing niche and he keeps walking into my half of the space carrying a sorry iceberg salad in a black plastic bowl with his right hand and forearm—which I guess is why the door had been so hard to open—what he does is in fact quite the exact contrary to what I think or hope: he turns to me with a smile on his face and speaks: “How’s it goin’, keRiSchin?”

Too late to ignore him; I have already obviously pivoted enough that he is full into my left eye’s ambit. “Fine~,” I say.

He stands there a second before disappearing behind the wardrobes. The rubber pads underneath his laptop roar as he pushes the computer across his desk to the wall, presumably making space for his meal, though I am not looking. He sets the salad onto the desk—presumably where the laptop had been—with a high plastic thud and drops his backpack at the foot of his bed somewhat delicately. He sits down, his seat creaking, and he slurps on the salad, for minutes. I know he must have seen the book in front of me.

Between the time he starts eating and the time he finishes, two or three pages have elapsed, but I remember not a phrase thereof. The swish of a shopping bag signals my roommate’s tossing an empty salad bowl into the garbage, after which point he scoots his laptop back into position—again, this is not actually seen, but rather implied by the horn-like cry of rubber friction—and, most quietly, he opens the machine and begins clacking keys. The budding hairs on my arms stand. He types on; meanwhile, I get through probably fifteen pages, the whole time overwriting Tolkien’s fantasy with my conceiving a means of leaving the room unsuspiciously. To that end I conclude that I will keep reading for a few more minutes before packing my satchel as loudly as possible to let my roommate know I have places to be in a hurry and that my subsequent leaving has nothing to do with him being in the room—because (from his perspective:), ‘see? He tolerated my being around for so long that I even finished my salad; it couldn’t have been me that made him want to leave. And look! Such haste! He must have just remembered something pertinent. I shouldn’t bother him.’

“Hey, keRiSchin? Can we talk for a second?” He says abruptly. A creak from the floor as he stands from his chair and a creak from his wardrobe as he leans upon it. Text bleeds into itself and congeals on the pages before me.

At length, I respond: “Sure,” a soft, elongated syllable terminating with a lilt to connote innocence and ignorance of whatever crime was committed that I must be innocent of.

“Are you doing alright?” He pauses. I say nothing, offer him the air. He is patient.

“I’m fine,” I say. A beat passes. “Why do you ask?” I flip my book onto its face and turn, staring, though, at where the wheels of his chair meet the floor.

“Just checking; when I came in it almost looked like you were crying.” I was not. He begins his chickeny chuckle but cuts it after the first cluck.

“Nope. I’m fine.”

“Alright,” he says, before returning to his seat.

The text has become illegible. There is now no feasible way for me to leave this room inconspicuously. Whether I exit now or in another twenty minutes, he will suspect that I had just lied to him, even in spite of my having told him the truth.

Idea: I shut Fellowship over a folded page corner. I reach under the bed’s skirt to where several shelves open up in the bedframe and draw from one such alcove various Dungeons & Dragons manuals. I thump them (noisily) onto the covers, ruffle the satchel I keep by my bedside and unzip it (noisily), then one by one deposit (noisily) each of the manuals into the largest of the satchel’s compartments. I sling the now rather heavy bag over one shoulder and hurry to the door.

My second foot is on its way out when my roommate says his “Ope! Seeya later, keRiSchin.” I let the room door fall shut and shove through the airlock. Outside, the sky gradates upward from yellow to blood orange to periwinkle and blues darker from then on, culminating to an ultramarine cosmos periodically obscured by fiery cloudbanks. The sun lays arms between campus buildings in an otherwise saturated and lightless suburban desert. My dormitory stands across a road from the back-east corner of campus, perpendicular to the sun’s rays, merely half the height of the towers on the horizon: the psychology ward, like a slice of concrete penitentiary; the newly constructed freshman hall, all glass and artsy geometry; and along the distant frontward face of campus, the old “normal school” towers, which, so far away— with their vaulted roofs and cyclical windows—make clock tower silhouettes. I exhale the entire capacity of my lungs and without urgency don a pair of aviators, drenching all of everything in bronze film.

[bleakviolet]

stuck (version 1):

It was a week or two before Christmas (today being January the fifth) that I decided to consider that the thing that’s wrong with me might be that I’m bipolar. In high school and college, I had presumed it was sociopathy. I was sure by my sophomore year that it was specifically “high-functioning narcissistic anti-personality disorder” as if that were a thing I could just know, like I could palm my brain blindfolded and recount its full contents with such surgical accuracy. When I realized my naivety—a little before my graduation—I jumped ship to dysphoria. Check. Then to depression. Check. Then to manic depression (bipolar II)—which to be fair to myself still may be plausible; my family has like a history. Then to something called derealization, which as I understand it is usually either a byproduct of dissociative substance ingestion or a symptom of severe anxiety and not something a professional would ever diagnose me with in isolation. Then back to manic depression. Sometimes I think about schizophrenia. How hard are the lines there? Is believing something false with my whole heart the same as hallucinating? Would I know the difference?

Now I think I’m bipolar (bipolar I) because my boyfriend got a vibrator stuck in my asshole and sent me to the emergency room where I was held down bleeding and bleating for fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes within audible range of a dozen (or so) non-consenting bystanders and it’d been years (probably like two of them) since I’d gone to sleep smiling like that.

Put me in a dim blue bedroom with the smell of weed and orange essential oils in the air. Youtube is babbling and my boyfriend is telling me “not to let this fall out” as he’s slipping a small rod into my hole. There’s like a button on the back, I guess, and he presses it, and the thing starts buzzing and vibrating. It’s pretty narrow, this vibrator, and not very good for what he’s using it for. But I don’t say anything. The vibrating numbs me completely; I have no idea whether I’m letting the thing “fall out” or whether it’s staying where he wants it. I don’t know how much time passes, but eventually I’m mulling the ‘is it/is it not’ quandary around and around and I decide that yeah the vibrator is probably falling out of my ass, and without saying anything, I retract.

“Wait, Gwen, what are you doing?” His voice reverberates for several moments. And I realize the rod is gone. The vibrating is coming now from several feet deep into my intestines. I’ve swallowed a locust backwards. “Gwen, push it back out.” He laughs in that way one does when nothing funny is happening. I can’t push. I don’t know how to push. Am I supposed to have control over those muscles? I shoot up from the bed just as he’s beginning to say sorry many times in many ways in rapid succession.

“You’ll have to pull it or something,” I tell him. My voice is high and far-away.

“Get back on the bed. Lay like how you were,” he says. I do. But I can’t open up for his sandpaper fingers. I’m suddenly crying. “I can’t reach it. God it’s so deep!” His voice has this way of starting low and peaking shrill. He withdraws. “You’re okay but we’re gonna probably need to go to the emergency room.”

I’m up from the bed again. I feel the locust lose its grip and fall an inch. The walls of my insides stretch and bounce. My bones are shaking. I’m standing with my knees bent and apart, involuntarily. I’m moaning in the tone and at the volume of wailing, and that, too, is involuntary. “No, no, no,” I demand, from the gap between whines. “I can get it out I can get it out.” It’s like this little plastic toy inside of me has got itself tangled in all my body’s cordage, and the weight of it is tugging on veins in my arms, my hands, my neck, my jaw. I watch my nerve-stricken fingers fumble at the bedroom door handle until it is God who deigns to let me free.

“It’s really not a big deal. This kinda thing happens all the time,” he says as he follows me out. I’m already halfway to the bathroom. “I’m so sorry,” he says, reducing his tone. I can hear the tears in his eyes.

I cross into the thankfully unsealed bathroom and turn to face the doorway. My boyfriend hasn’t even entered frame before I start to almost scream the words, “Leave me leave me leave me!” I’m fully bawling, now.

He enters. Most of his body is eclipsed by the blurry puddles adhered to my eyes. I’m just seeing his curly beard and his (I think I’d call it an) afro, and his lips. “If you stand still I can give it another try, but I really think we should go to the hospital.”

“Please just leave me alone I need to calm down.”

“Okay.” He puts a hand on the door handle. “I’ll check back in in five minutes, okay?”

“F-five minutes? Please please I’m gonna need like an hour!”

If he begins with a refusal, I don’t hear it. “Okay,” he concedes, and now he’s really crying.

“Close the door close the door please—” The door closes. “H-oh~” The buzzing. I am couch cushions suffocating a busy phone. There is no reprieve. I’m beginning to think in words: ‘I didn’t do this to myself, did I? Aren’t I just a whole bunch of pointless atoms spurred into predetermined motion by forces beyond my comprehension?’ Everything has foreshadowed this moment. In this life, I’ve wanted nothing. I’ve loved nothing. I’ve been nothing. Utterly inert, like dust; that’s me. Everything I know, everything I’ve learned, a whole lifetime of accumulated experience—the equation only works out one way: I am me. I have always been me. I will never escape me. So why does this feel like punishment? What for?

I squat over a towel on the floor. I am not sober. My bones ache. I push. Brackish lube sputters out of my hole. I pause until a sudden burning sensation dies down. I push. I squirt. It goes on like this a while. The vibrator doesn’t come out, somewhat unsurprisingly. By now I’ve already attributed special karmic significance to my ordeal; I would be almost disappointed to have it over-with so quickly.

My insides shiver. The thing must only be a few inches, I surmise, above my sphincter, lying diagonally across a more-or-less vertical tube. As a consequence of all of my internal vibrating, the rod drags slowly downward, but at this angle will miss my hole and jab instead into the unfathomable meat surface spanning the area between one edge of my pelvis and my asshole. It stops falling. I reach a hand underneath my buttocks. With the tip of a finger, I find my ass aperture swollen and protruding, more a hill than a hole. At the press of this organic button, plastic bites into flesh—just an inch or so above the hole. The thing is still lying diagonally, jabbing me with just the edge of its bottom face. If only I could reach it, I could guide the thing uprightly down with one finger and simply shit it out, provided I could fit one finger and the thing simultaneously through. ‘Not a problem,’ I naively presume; ‘My boyfriend is bigger.’ But no. In order to achieve my necessary circumference, I quickly discover that I will either need to plunge all the way in, hook my finger completely around the vibrator, and press from the top side to force it through, or I will need to stretch open my hole with two fingers and tug like a crab.

First I try the finger-hook method. Coincidence: by pause-push-squirting as I’d done, I’ve already spilled nearly all of my lube onto the towel beneath me. Second coincidence: my fingernails are clawed as of like a few days ago—black and red acrylics. So anyway I rip myself to tatters in there trying to find the thing, and I do, but it’s all I can do just to scratch at it like a shit-digging raccoon. It’s like maybe ten or fifteen seconds of fingering before images of bullets in brains and brains on walls are skipping between neurons and my eyes are merging and if I had a gun—I don’t, but I give the bathroom a once-over, just to make sure. So far as I’m concerned, it’s death or presenting myself to a stranger at an operating table with a vibrator in my ass and a cock and balls between my thighs, and I’m definitely favoring death. And it is in this moment that I retract my finger, dislodging the vibrator from a stretchy corner it had been cowering into, and it falls and lands upon a diaphragm that apparently must exist down there, because once it hits that shelf, the buzzing immediately begins to reverberate throughout my entire body. By reflex, I make a move to stand on shaky legs, but—remembering that in a few hours I might be lifting my hospital gown for a doctor if I concede now—I stop halfway to standing. I squat myself back down and ease that finger back into my hole even as the buzzer screams that I’ve already lost Operation. My finger slides parallel to the now-upright rod, and I only just barely cannot quite hook my finger completely around it. Nonetheless, I give it a push, and the thing misses my hole and jams instead into what feels like a wall of bone. It’s so close to where I want it to be that when I really force it (and I really force it), the sharp edge of the vibrator’s flat end prods the very center of my bloated sphincter. I’m squat here plunging myself for what must be like at least ten minutes. I try a hundred minute adjustments to my position: moving my finger all the way around the vibrator and retreating and diving again and again. I even learn how to relax and contract my colon in a wave-like motion over a targeted area using my mind. I had had, prior to this moment, no idea that I possessed such authority over the confines of my body. Nonetheless, I achieve nothing.

Next, the crab-claw method. Impossible. A finger and a thumb together, added to the diameter of the vibrator—I cannot stretch to that width. For a short while I try clasping the device with just the pointed tips of my nails, but I can’t get enough grip. I slump then onto the wet, slimy towel with my hands flat to the floor beside me and my legs sprawled, and I turn my eyes to the ceiling, and I sob. There’s nothing else to do. My destiny is this. I am a hole who derives no pleasure from being fucked. I am a male never meant to fulfill h—its designated purpose. I always saw the signs, and I never misunderstood them, and I followed them wherever they’d take me, and still I always thought life would turn out differently. But no. If I had wanted happiness, I should have told someone and been persistent; I should have had them—all my teachers and mentors in the arts of maledom—I should have had them send me away, to wherever useless things go to learn, prior to their adulthood, how to cope with their imminent failure thereof. But it had just been me, who had known what I was, deep-down. What were they doing—all my teachers and mentors in the arts of maledom—teaching me science and finance and history? Of what use is that knowledge to my role? My role is to be used. I wish I had been taught that. I wish I had been taught to be content with this. All I had ever actually been taught was pride and narcissism and self-importance, and all that I had thereby ever learned was how embarrassing I’d be, if—instead of doing science or money or history—I hatched into something resembling a woman, and sucked dick, and let real men put things inside me so as to vindicate their own narcissisms. And after school I’d come home to an empty house and scamper upstairs to try on women’s clothes and imagine that I was the property of some wealthy fat guy in a mansion who’d let me stay with him free forever as long as I let him abuse my body in a plethora of ways befitting of my place in the world as a joyless fuck-hole. Why didn’t that scare me? Why didn’t I trust my mind? These vile visions had been the only future I ever saw for myself. I never daydreamed of earning a doctorate, of marrying a woman, of driving a car, of wearing money, of traveling the world. When I daydreamed, I daydreamed of fantasy monsters and sucking penis (though never simultaneously), and when the penis-sucking daydreams would climax and dissipate, I’d lock myself away and bury the next ones in food and noise. Just dreams. Dreams don’t mean anything, I had convinced myself. Well they do. What the fuck did I think they (my teachers and mentors etc.) were trying to tell me, over and over, smiling as they bludgeoned my child body half to death with all that “follow your dreams!” bullshit? Whose dreams did I think I was supposed to be following? Your dreams, goddammit. Yours. Wake up and tell someone. Tell them you’re unwell. Tell them you have no dreams worth following. That you’re lost. You will not be found, not unless you can say the words. Talk to another human being, damn you!

A knock on the door startles my brain-mouth to a momentary halt. As I then attempt to regather myself, he opens the door. “Get up,” he says, not harshly. “Don’t sit like that. I don’t want it to get stuck any deeper.” I obey.

“It’s fine I was just taking a break. It’s—”

“Did you get it out?”

“No. It’s right there. It’s so close, but I can’t quite—”

“Oh you actually touched it? You got your fingers in there?”

“Well yeah, mine are slender and softer than yours, so, I don’t know I think I just needed some time to calm down, but yeah I—”

“Do you want help? I can try again.”

I hesitate. It’s going to hurt. But, then again, the emergency room and the doctor and my genitalia. “Y-yeah. You can give it another shot.”

“Turn around.”

“You’re gonna do it here? Just, like, while I’m standing?”

“Where else?”

“The bed?” Like maybe I can direct my screaming into the mattress, I’m thinking.

He looks at me like there’s a thousand words crammed in his mouth, that if he let them out, I’d only misunderstand. It’s a look he usually reserves for my mom’s cat. “You’re so dumb sometimes, baby.”

I actually laugh. “W-what’s wrong with the bed?”

His expression only solidifies. “Gravity, dummy. I just told you I don’t want it to get stuck any deeper.” He puts a hand on my shoulder, spins me around. Instinctively, I begin bending over, but he grabs me harder, holds me in place. “Do you need any more lube?”

“W-we used so much already. I’ll be fine.”

“True, true. Hold still.” He jams his finger through my hole. As I’m whimpering, he keeps talking: “Oh my god, it really is right there! Wait, has this thing been turned-on the whole time?” His finger swirls all the way around the vibrator a few times, stretching my tube every which way.

“I-I-I h-hadn’t tried t-to turn it off—”

“I’m gonna try and turn it off for you. Should come out easier.” I’m not sure that’s true, that it’ll come out easier, but I say nothing. He impales me with his finger. Just as suddenly, the rod scurries into my insides. I don’t even know what motions happen in which order after that; his fist plants against the surface of my hole, I’m thrust into the bathroom wall, and I’m all-but lifted off the ground as he penetrates deeper still. He corners the rod at a bend in my intestines, and as I’m crying, and he’s shushing me, and I’m thinking that I’ll rupture, the buzzing inside me stops. I unstick my face from the wall. “I got it,” he says.

I’m shaking. If I offer him a reply, I don’t recall.

My boyfriend begins fidgeting with the rod inside me. He says something about not being able to get a grip of the thing, but he does anyway, and he attempts to pull it out in one swift motion, slamming the thing into the rim of my sphincter with such force that I can’t help but to scream. I hate screaming, I should mention, in advance of all the screaming I’ll be doing from here on: in all circumstances except in the act of screaming, my voice is delicate and high and softly nasal, I think; in the act of screaming, however, my pitch hits its peak at a far lower resonance than what I think a cisgendered woman possessing a similar resting vocal range might have been able to achieve. I can’t imagine I sound male. If I did, I don’t think people would treat me as they do: like a girl, generally. I scream frequently. I have no control. No; rather, I believe my screaming must sound alien, uncanny, the kind of noise that in the quiet hours of the night might be attributed to an imp or a chupacabra. It’s eleven in the evening as this is happening, as I’m screaming, that is, and I have no way of knowing whether my neighbors can hear. “Woo, it really is stuck in there, isn’t it?” My boyfriend’s voice returns. “It’s so close, but that angle—oof.”

“I-I couldn’t quite get my finger around it, when I tried. So it wouldn’t stay centered.”

“Maybe I can get another finger in there.”

“Please don’t.”

“Yeah, I’m worried about tearing your asshole. You really got your fingers in there?”

“Just use your fingertips.”

“Oh, word.” He pulls his finger completely out of me, then jabs two back in, though only to the depth of their top digits, I suppose. I jerk when he clasps the rod between his fingertips. It’s like he’s pulling a part of me, like the thing has been integrated into my nervous system the same way that things exposed to the elements become integrated into, like, moss hives or fungal colonies. I think it’s about now that I wish my boyfriend hadn’t’ve turned the thing off. The buzzing had facilitated a sort of internal radar system by reverberating throughout my gastrointestinal tract and allowing me to feel and thereby conceive of every fold. In lieu of that, there is only my body, ambiguously full of stuff. I am in pain but know not where. I am full and cannot empty. “Damn, you really got this thing stuck,” says my boyfriend, as he’s tugging again. “It’s really so close—it’s right there—but I can’t. Get it. It just keeps slipping out of my fingers.” He pulls out, then straightens my body. “Hey,” he says, real soft. I haven’t even turned around yet. “If we can’t get it out, we’re going to have to go to a hospital.”

“I know I know I—”

“I know you’re scared, but hear me out: this kind of thing happens all the time. You’re gonna get in there, the doctor is gonna pull it out, and you’re gonna be outta there in like five minutes. They’ve probably removed a dozen vibrators today alone; this shit really does happen all the time.” Either he then pats my head, or I then imagine that he pats my head—regardless, I cry, and not like I had been crying, but like I really cry. Existential melting. Violet paint leaking from a battered drum. “Hey, hey, hey—no, baby. Don’t cry. It’s gonna be okay.” He’s crying too now. “I’m so sorry. I never should have left you lying like that. I knew the toy was too small.”

“Don’t you start sobbing, too,” I say, trying to laugh. “I-I’ll be alright. I’m just scared. I know I’ll be okay.”

“Will you let me take you to the hospital?”

“I’ll go. Just give me a minute to make myself presentable.”

“Nobody’s gonna judge what you look like; they’re doctors; this is routine for them.”

“I know I know I just mean that I need to get shoes on and such. I’m naked.”

“Oh, I gotchu baby. I thought you meant like makeup.”

“Nah, nah, I mean my makeup is probably smudged and it’s obvious I’ve been crying but I’ve resigned myself to looking a mess.” I steal this opportunity to glance at the mirror over the bathroom sink. As it apparently happens, my mascara had been, this whole time, collecting in my tears and dripping down my face, boring rivulets through my foundation contoured by tongues of faded black ink. I hadn’t noticed. A mirror hanging from a spoke in the bathroom door had been across from me the entire time I was sat on the towel, and I hadn’t been looking. This is unusual for me, I note.

“Get your shoes on, cutie. This will all be over-with soon.” I try to give him a smile and a nod before waddling into the bedroom with my legs spread. I find my leggings and a pair of panties on the floor beside the bedroom door. After scrambling into my undergarments, I dive painfully across the bed and dig—still lying on my stomach—for a pair of matching socks in the pile of laundry I keep between the foot of the bed and that of my shelf whose supposed purpose it is to organize clothing. After successfully uncovering a pair of grubby boy-socks, I ease myself off the bed and find my most expensive garment hanging in the closet: a navy blue hoodie embroidered with poppies all over and whole flower gardens at the cuffs. It’s the only thing I own with sleeves as long as my arms. I throw the hoodie on over a bra and return to the pile to find something to wear over my black leggings such as to conceal my unsightly micropenis and balls. As I’m running through this train of thought, I reach for the bedroom door and push it halfway to closed, allowing me to—once I’ve withdrawn a pair of white, denim-like shorts from the pile—check my reflection in the mirror hanging from the inward side of the door. As I’m standing across from myself, my attention is immediately drawn to the amorphous bulge clinging to my crotch. It’s not like I think it (this bulge) must look male. It looks trans, is what it looks like: a rotten apple, round and sloughing—which is almost worse. I don the shorts and pull them high enough to pulpify the apple.

I leave the bedroom. My pairs of heels are by the door, and I elect to wear one of those instead of anything with laces, for the sake of ease. I sit down on the couch we (my boyfriend and I) keep beside the bar. It is several moments before he calls for me: “You ready, cutie?” His voice echoes from the bathroom.

“Y-yeah,” I return. “Let’s get this over with.”

It’s midnight in Portland. Hundreds of cars are parked along either side of every road, but as we leave our apartment, nobody is driving. Nobody is walking. It’s just us. And yet they’re watching me, whomever is out here. They can’t pull their eyes away from the giant lady crossing the street like she’s got a stick up her ass. I hide my face. I’m so high. My boyfriend opens the passenger-side door and holds me by my arm as I settle into my seat. I can only see his face in the furthest corner of my vision. He’s scared, I think. I’m not used to this expression. His lips, which normally are twice or thrice what I have, are thin and pursed. He’s looking off into the night, his eyes magnetically repulsed from my body. I keep my head down until he appears beside me in the driver’s seat. It’s cold. Suddenly I’m shivering. My whole body.

“Oh, I’m sorry baby,” he coos. His door shuts. The car starts. He cranks the heater. “You’ll be warm soon.” His hand clutches mine. It occurs to me that he could break it, if he wanted. Regardless of my racing mind. Regardless of my ego. My life is small enough that he’s holding my hand, and he’s taking me to the hospital, and he’s going to give me to a doctor, and that doctor’s going to hold me down upon a stretcher, and I’m going to be broken into, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m still shaking. My body is not my own. My boyfriend pets me all over: my hair, an arm, and then my thighs. “Alright. Sit tight. I gotta drive,” he says, and then the car is moving, and the world is quickly expanding all around me. I’m entering a labyrinth whose endless corridors belong to everyone except myself, that if I were to enter alone, would subsume me. My boyfriend lends me his right arm, lying it across my lap. I cling for my life. 

The first thing I remember about the emergency room side of our local hospital when it comes into view, is a roundabout clogged with parked ambulances shadowed beneath a grand vaulted ceiling. Pillars of brutalist concrete hold up the ceiling, each outfitted with a single large lamp projecting its own Pac-Man upon the otherwise void-like asphalt below. We park beside one such pillar, and we’re out of the car before I have a chance to protest. We enter the hospital through a brightly lit door floating in darkness, into a room the color of sunlight. A young guy commands the counter immediately to our left, and there’s a blue nylon barrier to the right, blocking view into the waiting room around the next corner. My boyfriend approaches the guy. Inexplicably, the guy’s got like a half dozen unmarked cardboard boxes behind him arranged in a line leading into a dark hallway past his desk. I’m not sure what this means, but it strikes me as unusual. Liminal. Like I’m not supposed to be here. It’s under construction. It’s just my boyfriend and I and this acne-faced intern standing here all confused, and he’s gonna tell us that we’ve come past closing time, and that we should just go home, into the infinite dark.

“Hey,” my boyfriend says to the acne-faced intern of this strange dream.

“How can I help you,” the guy replies, with his hands behind his back.

My boyfriend is, for the first time I recall since having met him, suddenly shy. After a pause, he walks up close to the counter and says, in almost a whisper, “We, uh, we got a toy stuck.”

“Oh..!” says the guy. I’m surprised to hereby find out that this guy knows about sex toys and holes—not because of his apparent age or attractiveness or anything; it just seems odd. I don’t know; I guess I had it in my head that I had been uniquely degenerate to allow a man to do this to me. The intern plants his elbows on the counter and gestures at me with the head of a pen as he says, “Which of the two of you~?”

My boyfriend, without turning away from the guy, nods his head at me.

“Name of the patient?”

“Gwen, Navarro.” That’s my boyfriend’s last name. I’m sure I blush; this is the first time he’s ever lent it to me.

“Gwen Navarro,” the guy repeats. “You guys take a seat—” He gestures past the wall of blue. “One of the docs will call you momentarily.” He smiles at us, and then retreats into the dark, box-filled hall.

My boyfriend looks at me now as he walks my way, then passes me, cueing me to follow with a soft, “Let’s go, cutie.” I turn my gaze to the floor and follow beside him in the sort of bouncy, awkward manner of a child trying to hide, only I’m not one, and I must seem seven feet tall to all the people in the waiting room, on account of that I manage to see them from up high even with my eyes downturned. These people are, thankfully, sparsely spread. The waiting room opens up and there’re like thirty chairs in there, and like maybe six or seven or ten of them are occupied. It’s mostly people in their twenties or sixties—a cute young couple to my boyfriend’s left as he turns and sits down by the wall across from all the doctors’ offices; a cheery—albeit sweaty—young couple across from him, whom I infer must have a young kid somewhere in the building; and three elderly men scattered some distance to my boyfriend’s right, sitting perpendicularly to everyone else. There may have been others. My boyfriend pats the adjacent seat to his right. “You okay, cutie?” he asks as I sit.

I nod, and make an affirmative humming noise. I clasp my hands between my bobbing thighs and hunch myself forward. This way, if anybody looks my way, I’m thinking, they’ll see my disheveled hair, withdrawn demeanor, and restless legs, and they’ll stop at pitying me, rather than progressing to checking my hands, feet, shoulders, or brow for signs of transness. 

The wall flap separating our side of the waiting room from the blue nylon chamber, parts. A curly-haired, blonde woman in blue scrubs appears. “Gwen Navarro?” she says. I stand, and waddle over. There’s a lab in that blue chamber—a standing scale, a blood pressure thingy, a stretcher beside an IV, and a large round pod I can only assume must be an X-ray machine, all present. The woman must notice something on my face, because her next words are, “First time this has happened?”

“First time in an emergency room,” I reply.

“Well—” she says, smiling at me sisterly—I specify, sisterly, because it’s a look I’m still excited by. It’s only been about two years, probably, by this point, since the first time anyone had ever met me with this same expression in my entire life: toothy and at-ease, head tilted, face forward, eyes and brows uplifted. I return the expression, or my best estimation, anyhow; I don’t know; I’ve never been good at smiling, I think. “You’re in good hands. We’ll getcha outta here quick. I’ll just need to do a few tests first—would you mind standing on the scale there?” I doff my shoes and obey. The scale counts up to 135. Three pounds over my lowest adult weight recorded by a doctor, vibrator notwithstanding. As I’m watching this number for changes, she slides a metal bar from the top of an adjacently upright ruler onto my head, then jots my height onto a clipboard. Five-foot-eight. Two inches shorter than prior records. It’s probably just my posture, but I’m excited anyhow. “And would you sit for a second so I can take your blood pressure?” I obey. She wraps the squeezy pad around my arm, and in a few moments, unwraps it again. “You’re all set. Why don’t you go ahead and wait out here,” she says, gesturing back to the waiting room, “while I go and let them know you’re ready. Should be just another few minutes.” She and I both leave the blue chamber. She’s off down the box-filled hall while I retake my old seat.

Some thirty seconds later, a man calls my name from behind an opening door: “Gwen Navarro?” He’s tall and lean and brawny, with an asphalt beard and a bowl-head of black curls. He’s wearing scrubs and—I mean I presume—a nametag, but I’m gazing at his black Sketchers as I approach. His office, or at least the office he takes me to, is directly across from the waiting room, literally the first door perpendicular to the emergency room foyer. Inside, it’s a doctor’s office like any other, only there’s an exit doorway opposite the entrance which leads into an extremely brightly lit white room whose contents I don’t have time to make out before the doctor speaks: “Unless you’d prefer to have a female practitioner, I’m J— and I’ll be your doctor this evening.” A pause. “Do you have a preference for either male or female?”

“Nah, nah,” I say, shaking my head and smiling. My hands are in my sweatshirt pockets, squirming.

“And what about if there are two practitioners in the room? Would you be okay with that?”

There’s apparently all-along been a straight-haired blonde woman in like-garb standing in the corner, because she’s there to chime in, “It’s totally fine to say no—” she’s waving her hands in front of herself “—Gimme the word and I’ll leave you with J—.”

“Nah, you’re fine,” I say, “I don’t mind.”

“And you’d be alright if either one of us touches you?” asks the man.

I fumble my affirmative, managing only to deliver a divorced “yh” sound.

“Alright, Gwen, go ahead and have a seat on the bed. I’m just going to ask a few questions.” The woman leaves the room as he’s talking. The exit closes behind her, leaving the office suddenly very dimly blue. I sit on the edge of the hospital gurney and bury my hands between my thighs. After the man withdraws a clipboard from the nearest countertop, he looms over me and rests his gaze at the median between the edge of the board in hand and my forehead. “Are you in any pain?,” he starts.

I shake my head. “I-it only hurts to pull.”

“You’ve made your own attempts to remove the device?”

“Me and my boyfriend both. We were close to getting it out, I thought. My boyfriend even managed to turn the thing off.”

“The device was on?”

“At first, yeah.”

“Are you bleeding at all? I noticed as you came in that you’ve got some—what looks like—blood, on your shorts.”

I am overcome with—is that?—elation? “I-I-I d-don’t think s-so?! If I’m bleeding I hadn’t noticed, at least.” I’m gasping as I’m speaking, is what it feels like.

“You didn’t notice any blood as you had tried to remove the device?”

“No, none at all.” Am I smiling?

“Did you start your cycle without realizing, maybe~?”

I actually laugh. “Nah, nah,” I say between giggles. The look he gives me is illegible.

“Do you have any allergies to certain medication,” he asks. His tone has remained remarkably constant.

“None that I know of.”

“And are you taking any medication currently?”

I hesitate. “I am—aheh—I’m trans, s-so I have to take spironolactone and estrogen and progesterone daily, but those are the only things.” Sneaking an upward glance, I catch his expression falter so subtly that I’m not at all sure what about it changes, just that it certainly does.

“Well,” he says, “looks like everything is fine. You don’t seem to be having any trouble breathing or anything. I’m gonna go take this outside—” He gestures with the clipboard. “—In the meantime, go ahead and undress yourself. Switch into that gown there, on the bed, and we’ll knock when we’re coming in.” There is a flash of white light as he makes his exit, and then I’m alone and quiet. I doff my clothes and find that, sure enough, there is a splotch of blood on the asscrack of my shorts—yet none on my panties. Was there blood on my seat in the waiting room? Were there people suffering worse than I am in there whom I just hadn’t noticed, leaking blood over surfaces upon which other people such as myself might have unwittingly sat? Isn’t that a health hazard? I scramble to cover myself in the bespoken hospital gown before I’m stuck staring at my own crumpled pile of (apparently) blood-stained clothing long enough that I’m caught naked. And as I sit back down on the gurney and pull a sheet over my legs, there comes a knock, and then the door reopens, and both the man doctor and the woman doctor enter the room like a pair of moons performing an eclipse. The man returns to the foot-side of the bed, beside the counter. The woman shuts the door once more and stands bedside. 

At the same time as he snaps on a pair of latex gloves like a cartoon villain, the man speaks at the wall to my right: “If you’re ready, let me know by lying on your side.” I assume a half-furled fetal position, facing the bed railing on the woman’s side. My eyes squeeze shut autonomously. A chill swallows my ass as my bedsheet is nonchalantly tossed aside and my underside is fully and inexorably exposed. A pair of gloved man hands lifts my calves and drops them a few inches nearer to the rail, then does so again. He’s not going to use anesthetic, I’m realizing, just as a fan of silk fingers clutches my right hand. I honestly thought they’d knock me out. I thought I’d be asleep for this. Or maybe I thought they’d have some sort of special vibrator-removing technology. This happens all the time, right? These doors are soundproofed, right? You’re not going to try fingers again, right? ‘I am the smallest here,’ I want to tell them; ‘if I couldn’t do it, you can’t. Please don’t.’ “Try to relax,” he says. I obey, or try to, that is. A woman’s hand pets my head, then glides onto my shoulder.

All at once, two fingers stab through my hole and propel the vibrator somewhere into my insides, and the woman’s hand clenches, locking me in place as I squirm and sputter and scream. I can’t hear my own cries until my face is pressed up against the gurney’s highest partition and there are tears puddled under my cheeks. In fact, the first sound I realize is the woman’s voice, not my own: she’s cooing me—at first wordlessly, I think, but when the man gets his fingers around the vibrator some six-feet-deep into amalgamated viscera and yanks, pulling more flesh-tube and pelvis than plastic, words coalesce, disembodied, so close to my brain that they blot out all other sound. “You’re doing so good,” says the ephemeral spirit…

I have to interrupt myself here, because here is where I had briefly stopped writing before my ego death, and now that I’ve come back, post-death, I’ve had to make an important decision regarding this memoir: either A, I could have revised everything I’d written hitherto this point to reflect my now liberated mindstate, or B, I could have left everything as-is, and continued from “ephemeral spirit” regardless—although I suppose this paragraph must be evidence of some regard after all. Anyway, this is still twenty-three-year-old Gwen. January ends tomorrow. I’ve been using “My Boyfriend” in place of Yohann’s name up until this point. I’m a different person now. I’ll elaborate on what that means in probably a section or two, but for now what’s relevant is that I’m going to start using his name from here on: Yohann, Yohann, Yohann. And if you (referring to you, the reader, in this case; I know sometimes I say you and actually mean me, Gwen, but no; this time I mean you. So if you—) happen to notice a fundamental change in my demeanor from here on, trust that I cannot help it. I will never be the same again, I hope.

“You’re doing so good,” she repeats. Beneath her voice is mine: a continuous, destabilized whining that ricochets off the gurney and into wall after wall and back, such that what I hear is not myself, but rather, several myselves from several impossibly distant points all around the room. There’s a trick you learn—bear with me—if you want to have a woman’s voice but weren’t innately so fortunate: if you practice speaking with your palms held in front of and parallel to your ears, your voice will have to bounce around before it can get into your ear holes; this way, you’ll sound to yourself the way you sound to other people, instead of sounding like however you usually do; this way, you can tune your voice respective to others rather than to yourself. And so anyway I realize, as I’m lying there on my side with one ear haunted and the other squished underneath my head, that all those people outside in the waiting room, they’re hearing a girl’s screaming. I’m floundering cheek-deep in tears. I’m squeezing this woman’s hand like if I let go I’ll drown. I’m going to die here. And yet I’m thanking the powers that be—my trillions of stray atoms, maybe—thanking them for the fact that nobody has to see my face right now, because between yelps, they’d catch me smiling.

The man’s fingers eject. I let out one last distended moan. He says, then, “Yeah, it’s really stuck in there. I’m going to briefly leave you in the room with [woman doctor’s name]. Try not to move from that position, if you can help it.” I open my eyes in time to see the woman turn to face her partner. “I’m going to see if I can’t find a [foreboding tool’s name],” he says to her. I presume the man trashes his soiled gloves before leaving the room, but I only track his Sketchers as he slips into the bright beyond.

The woman has relinquished her grip of both my hand and of my shoulder. She pets my head again. “It’s gonna be alright,” she says. “You’re almost done.” I don’t retort that the vibrator probably isn’t any closer to being freed than it was when I entered the building half an hour ago, but that’s what I imagine I’d tell her, if I weren’t so docile. God my heart is pounding. My every instinct’s commanding me to run, to release my electric charge.

Sometime later the man comes back. I’m not sure I actually see the tool in his hands or, elsewise, that I ship the image of an imaginatively contrived nightmare weapon directly to memory, but, in either case, what I recall is that he enters the room brandishing like twelve inches of coiled wire appended to the end of a wand. Like, hypothetically, if I ever accidentally sit on a jumbo cork and am allowed any tool in the world to assist in plucking it, this thing he’s got will be my first contingency. I’m coming up empty trying to imagine any angle at which he could safely get the point of this thing inside me without rupturing my guts. But he’s coming, and I don’t make a sound; I don’t reach out to stop him. He escapes into my blindspot, and then I’m hearing him approach from behind. The woman rests a hand on my shoulder again. Her palm is tense and rigid, a mousetrap.

“Ice” is the first word to manifest in the void of my closed eyes as I am re-penetrated. The man gives no warning before driving an oversized snowflake (referring to the very point of his corkscrew, which is the only portion my body immediately detects) into my colon, but it enters nonetheless like a shooting star (the simile works, I think, ‘cause shooting stars ought to be called ‘shooting ice’ or ‘icy flying rocks’, as far as I’m aware, and I’m visualizing my own viscera as like an empty black cosmos in and of itself). And then come “knife” and “stabbing” and “blood”, and now I’m imagining the full length of this device as like a scalpel, and it’s poking and tearing at so much pink meat. I’m back to wailing and writhing, yet I don’t feel pain; I’m so far recessed into the rear-most corner of my cranium so quickly that my body’s basically no longer tangible. I’m gone. Peace.

I don’t know how long the doctor goes on prodding before getting to this next part, but it’s at least a few minutes if my internal clock can be believed, which I understand it probably can’t. Anyway, when he gets here, he raises his voice to tell me to “Hold still! Don’t move an inch!” And if I could laugh in his face, I would. My whole body’s quaking and it’s not my fault. But alas, I’m facing a wall and can only whimper. Without waiting for me to comply with his order, the man tugs on his corkscrew. Sure enough, the plastic cork buried inside me promptly reverses course and slams into my sphincter—stopping dead. He tugs. He tugs. He tugs. Meanwhile, I’m jerking and jiggling like flan on a platter. The woman can’t keep me still even as she’s shoving aggressively into my shoulder. The man tugs. He tugs. He tugs, one last time, and my hole bursts. My ass regurgitates the vibrator as well as maybe a few tablespoons’ worth of some other fluid, all at once. For a moment I’m paralyzed. My fists are clenched; my right leg is bent and upraised; my spine makes an arch between my skull and pelvis, projecting my chest forward and my ass backward. The man doctor shouts, “Got it!” and steps back from the gurney. The woman doctor abandons my body and follows him out of my field of view.

“I’ll go get this washed off,” says the woman—to me, I think. She leaves the room.

“I’m going to leave you alone for a minute to put your clothes back on. When you sit up, be careful. There is some blood on the sheets.” A moment passes. Then, I cling to the rail beside me and attempt to stand by leveraging myself such that my right leg and the attached cheek never touch the bed as my lower, left leg reaches over the side of the gurney’s lowest partition for the floor. I touch the floor with my toes, then lift off the rail of the bed using only my arms, and drop myself onto my left foot—standing—before maneuvering my right leg likewise. This takes me several more moments, during which time the man says nothing.

I have to turn a full hundred-eighty degrees to finally check the bed. Blood. Pure, red, unsullied bloodstains—like four of them, like the size of quarters, arranged spatter-like—lie now where I had just been. My inner self is speechless for a long while, long respectively to the usual amount of time it spends speechless, which is none. At length, it says simply, “I bleed?” A multitudinous brain-babbling follows: “This man just hurt me.” “And now I’m just getting dressed.” “I’m just going to leave and he’s just going to keep working and he hurt me.” My insides throb. “We’re having so much fun~”

“Are you in any pain?” says the man.

I shake my head, flailing hair.

At the edge of my vision, I see him nod. “You may feel soreness for a few days, but it should go away without any further action being necessary. If the pain does get worse, though, feel free to come back in.” There’s no irony in his tone, but it occurs to me now, in hindsight, that maybe he’s joking. My healthcare provider will go on to charge me nine-hundred dollars out-of-pocket for this visit, divided into two different sums: “Emergency Room Services”, accounting for six-hundred dollars of my debt, and “Professional Services”, accounting for the last third. I’m unemployed as the guy makes his comment, and I will still be unemployed by the time I learn about my new monetary burden. I haven’t had a job in almost a year. I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t have a credit card. The man doesn’t know this, I presume, but he’s betraying me—him and his masters. Behind all my unkempt hair, I’m thinking that I’ve just had a life-altering experience free-of-charge. I’m thinking maybe I will come in later, that maybe I hope the pain gets worse. But no. I can’t even have this one small thing.

I’m still standing there staring at my own blood when the man leaves the room. The clap of the door behind his shoes shocks me back into motion. I dive for the pile of my belongings by the bed and hurriedly reclothe myself. A white light blinds me mere moments later, as I’m still slipping my shorts back on. The woman doctor enters. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry—” I’m already waving defusing patterns at her. “—Should I—?”

“You’re fine,” I say, zipping my shorts. “Sorry.”

She gives me a pitious look before I can avert my eyes. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, sweetie.” She’s got a plastic bag in her hand, like a Ziploc, with the vibrator inside. She raises it; she opens her mouth to tell me that she’s rescued it; but.

 Before the exit can shut again, the man doctor shoves his way in. He walks all the way over to me, and pauses. There’s a chair beside me, by the counter. I sit down, in lieu of knowing how else to respond. “You, uh, you ought to only use the ones with the bases—” He begins miming the contours of a blatant butt plug as he goes. “—the bases, like this. You—you’re not actually supposed to use, y’know, that kind of toy—” He throws a hand back, toward the woman and her plastic bag. “—in the anus. You’re supposed to use the ones with bases.”

I take care not to meet his gaze as I upturn my head. I’m blinking several times; I’m staring past him; but I glimpse his expression nonetheless: he’s avoiding me, too, I see, and he’s stiffly blank-faced. I giggle, and, giggling, say, “Believe me, this was a one-time thing. Probably never using that toy again, definitely not there.”

“Those ones are actually for.” He gestures like a diving submarine. “Vaginal. Use.”

“I know I know. I own a plug.” Using the wrist and spidery fingers of one hand, I fan dismissal at him.

“Oh. Ah, okay. So you know. Alright.”

“Yeah yeah. This was a first for me. Usually my partner, he—”

“Yeah, just, tell your boyfriend—partner. He—they—tell ‘em not to—”

I stand. “Yeah, I got it; don’t worry; as I said: got a plug.”

The other doctor steps out from behind the man doctor. “I’ve cleaned this off for you.” Another step forward and she drops the bagged toy into my half-closed hands. A beat passes.

I’m first to break the silence, saying, “So, is that it? Am I done?”

“Yep,” says the woman, “you’re all set.”

“You’re free to go,” says the man.

I try to smile at them, before turning around, and opening my own door, I guess. I leave. The waiting room is emptier than it was. The elderly people in the corner are still there, but they’re the only ones, barring Yohann, whom I don’t see immediately. He appears between the nearest blue nylon wall and the corner of the first operating room from the foyer, looking off to the front desk. My heels clap along with my approach. Yohann turns his head, then his whole body. He throws his arms around me. I’m slow to hug him back. He’s crying. I tighten my grip. “Are you okay, cutie?” he starts. “Are you ready to go home?”

“I-I’m fine, mostly.”

He stretches himself off my shoulders to look me in the eyes, and sniffles. “They let you go, right? We don’t have to do anything else?”

“Yeah yeah. We’re free to go.” I don’t know who goes first, but we begin toward the foyer. As we’re going, I ask, in a high whisper, “Did you hear any of that?”

“What? Nah, I didn’t hear anything.” He looks away.

“Really? Nobody heard any of my screaming?” I give him a second.

He smiles, but his eyes are dire as he turns to face me again. He hushes his voice to say, “I heard like maybe the last two minutes—muffled. I don’t think anyone else in the room could hear. I was really close to the door.”

“Damn,” I say with a singsong lack of emphasis, “I was scared the room wasn’t soundproofed at all.” I know, actually, that it couldn’t have been soundproofed, even as I say this, and yet believe Yohann. I mean I could see underneath the door; the room had been obviously unsealed the whole time. But I must misunderstand how sound works, I conclude.

“Or you just didn’t make as much noise as you think.” He shoves his way into the night, briefly separating from me as I slam into an invisible wall of cold.

“I don’t know; I was screaming like a dying animal the whole time,” I say.

“What?”

Inferring that he hasn’t heard me, I yell back a “Nevermind!” and then chortle and shiver at once.

I look up from the floor to see Yohann beckon me with a smirk and a pet owner’s hand. “C’mon, cutie~”

Yohann shuts the driver-side door and turns his key. Even colder air blasts from an array of vents all angled toward my face and eyes. He puts a hand on my thigh. My eyes almost meet his. “You’re really okay, cutie? Are you hurt?”

Focused on the car’s gear-shift, I reply, “I mean, it hurt. That’s why I’d asked if you heard me, ‘cause I was screaming the whole time. But I’m fine.” My untouched leg is bouncing, I’ve just noticed. “I’m not gonna lie, I’m like zooted right now. Like I’d forgotten what adrenaline felt like, and I’m sure feeling it now. Woosh.”

I don’t remember certainly that Yohann laughs, but laughing would have been a characteristic response. Either he laughs or he looks at me with grave concern—one of the two—and either way I keep going:

“It’s like I’ve just seen my life flash before my eyes.” I pause, and then I’m cackling. “God, why do I have to be like this?”

“Oh! Hey~, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing. I’m fine. I’m exhilarated, in fact. I hate to admit it, but. Idk, I just. I feel like I’m high—and I know I actually was high—at least earlier, on account of the edible—but this is different.”

“I gotchu.” He pets me over my collar and across my left shoulder blade. A beat passes. “Man, you really are a little masochist.”

“I told you! It’s not just a sex thing; like I really just like being hurt. Makes me feel alive. If it were up to me, I’d have no agency in my life at all, and any responsibilities levied onto me would be painfully enforced. Nothing else works.”

“You know I can’t do that. I wouldn’t respect you.”

“I know. We’ve circled this drain before. I don’t want you to anyway. I love you; I don’t love the guy who just ripped up my asshole.”

Yohann grabs my thigh again and begins to gloom in the face, before abruptly piercing the air with a finger. “Yo, is that the toy?!”

“Oh yeah.” I drop the bagged vibrator into a console cup-holder. Yohann regards it briefly with just his eyes. “They had to use like a huge corkscrew to get it out, but they did eventually succeed, as you can see.” We’re both just eyeing the bag. “They did say they cleaned it, by the way.”

“Probably just gonna throw it out, honestly. Never again.”

“Wait, really? Seems like a waste.”

“Well, yeah. Who else is gonna use it? I got this for you, not me.” “I mean I don’t know. Maybe it has its uses.”

“Little vibrators like these are actually made for, y’know, cis girls.”

“I know I know, but.”

“It was honestly such a dumb idea. But. I’ve learned my lesson. Not gonna sweat over it.” 

By now the vents are cooking me, and I’ve stopped shivering. “If you say so,” I say, aloof.

“I do say so.” His voice is staunch.

I don’t really remember when we stop talking and start going, but eventually we stop talking and start going. Along the way, Yohann asks me a few things about how it was to have a stranger rip a vibrator out of my ass, and I sure answer, but by now I’ve receded into my brain and left the talking to my body. I forget my words as I’m flinging them. 

[bleakviolet]

bathroom biography, circa 2020 (version 1):

Facing the bathroom mirror, I tilt my head and Gwen’s. Her hair slumps over the crest of her nose and curtains all of her face save for one wide eye undercut by the upper corner of a toothy crooked smirk. I mime speech to watch Gwen’s smile animated. I imagine her speaking. Her voice is mine but almost screechy, and she adds a half-syllable exhalation to every terminal vowel sound. Her hands talk along with her in one of two alternating patterns: either the left hand, leaned lazily backward, hovers beside her slant jaw with its fingers curled while the right hand points and flourishes, or both hands dance symmetrically, blooming out from, and in toward, her chin, occasionally clasping like prayer to cover an especially smug expression. I pretend she converses with two or three other people:

“I didn’t really believe that I was ever actually dysphoric, but conveniently I’d shown signs: my childhood crossdressing — which, to be specific, went from ages like five or six, I think, when I’d wear my sister’s princess outfits until I’d advance to trying on her actual clothing which she’d leave in bathroom hampers, and I’d keep doing that until I graduated high school. This wasn’t a sexual thing, I should mention. Or maybe it was, but in a strictly subconscious way? I didn’t get off to it, is what I mean. There was like this primal sense of right-ness to the act. I suspect this feeling, which — I don’t know — I can’t describe it relative to other emotions besides, like, that it was vaguely pleasurable — I suspect this feeling nonetheless had something to do with sexuality or sexual awakening, because for what other reason would my body want to indulge in gender-associated taboo than that it’s a first step on some elaborate plot ending in me achieving sex before death.

“In women’s clothes I could see through my adipose into my bone structure, and my skeleton could don this sort-of transparent apparition of my true self — or what I believed was my true self for as long as I wore a girl’s clothes, anyway — which was (this true self) female. I used to be able to convince myself, when I wore women’s clothing, that I was born a girl, but that my parents had had my gender changed before I left the room of my conception. Long legs for a boy; slender limbs for a boy; wide hips for a boy; narrow shoulders for a boy; beautiful eyelashes for a boy; and when I pulled the sides of my neck backward and suppressed the extra chin I used to have, I even saw a girlish face. I envied matching features in others, usually female (which is the second of the aforementioned signs, after crossdressing), because theirs weren’t buried in boy fat, even if those people I envied were actually a little overweight, though they typically weren’t. I even have this unshakeable memory dating back to preschool, because I guess that’s how early I picked up this envy, or at least, that’s how old the first memory I attribute to this envy is; and it’s not like any substantial event or anything; I just had seen this girl in an oversized fuzzy pink sweatshirt standing alone by one of those dome-shaped hexagonal lattice jungle gyms with her face turned opposite me so that I could just see the back of her hood, and as I looked at her, I asked myself why she and not I was allowed to be so free. I’m not even sure I know how to describe what ‘freedom’ I had suddenly become aware of, or if ‘freedom’ is the right word, though it seems to be. When I picture this girl now, I can still conjure the same sensation I had felt as a child there against a white stucco wall staring at her — and I know old memories are seldom trustworthy, but I’m certain I have the feeling right; you know when, like, significant memories with nostalgic auras about them come back every time you see, smell, taste, or hear something relevantly familiar and reaffirm that whichever one you’re presently feeling is basically identical to something you experienced when you were young? It’s that. It’s longing. When I long to be someone else, I long to be the girl in pink. But, I guess where I’m going with this, if I can put it into words, is that all I knew about this girl was that she was a girl. I don’t envy the color pink I don’t think. I bet I did probably wish I could wear soft clothing like hers without being ostracized by my preschool peers, but that’s itself a gendered prohibition. I also didn’t see her features, nor is there that much anatomical difference between preschoolers of either gender, so what I envied about her must have been, I suppose, her gender. I can point to, now, numerous rational justifications for my male self’s wanting to transition, and I can likewise name my transition’s numerous positive outcomes. Like, I have more than one intense emotion now, on account of the estrogen, and my presence in a room is noticed and valued now, and people aren’t afraid of me taking up space now, and strangers more often want to help me than demean or dismiss me when I fail now, and I no longer get stressed just because I haven’t masturbated in a few weeks now, and not all of my fat conglomerates in one place now; all of these I attribute to me having quit my male body — but I couldn’t have understood what all I had to gain from transition circa preschool, before puberty, before the binary divide involved more than colors and toys and pitch of voice.”

She sways her hips and her shoulders in opposing directions and bounces on her toes in time with the emphases of her speech. Her fingers move in the dainty, coordinated manner of spiders. On each of her hands hovering close to her chest, she points a finger more toward the floor than toward her imagined audience, then assimilates the gesture into a dual rotating fan motion wherein the fingers are successively returned to her palms at the lowest point of their downward arcs. With her elbows bent and her hands hung now curled and upside-down, she leans forward, briefly, then backward. Her smile broadens and her pupils find the upper corners of her eyes as she bobs once on her heels and resumes speaking.

“Anyway, as I said, I was pretty sure I wasn’t dysphoric. Though the narrative I gave my therapist was that I couldn’t stand it, all this envying, the reality is that I’m not sure I couldn’t stand it, or even that I was all that sad. The extent of my malaise was that I had poor work ethic and preferred to spend my weeks playing video games rather than doing anything else, that I felt terrible eating but ate anyway, and that my masculine physical features frustrated me, though not debilitatingly so. In my lifetime, I had not been abused, bullied, or neglected. I did not care that my parents had split. The hardest drug I had ever done was marijuana, and only once. The worst I had ever intentionally hurt myself was that I used to punch my stomach until it bruised, hoping to see my fat recede. None of this was repressed; nothing had to be un-bottled; I was fine. When I had come to them (neutral, singular — my therapist), I came with the exclusive intention of switching genders. I figured this was how people did it: they talked to therapists who would hear their bodily complaints, and if they (the clients and their complaints) seemed genuine enough, the therapists would prescribe them hormones. I knew, on account of having signs of dysphoria and that I was at the time generally demotivated — which I presumed they (my therapist) might categorize as a ‘depressed state’ — and on the upswing of an eternal eating disorder, that I could convince my mental health professional that I deserved to transition. No embellishment necessary; depression and trouble with self-image were both attributable to gender dysphoria, which pertained to me in ways I could describe even if I didn’t believe I had it, really. No way all the people I’d known to have undergone hormone replacement were each and every one of them more miserable than I could lie that I was, and certainly not all of them (and actually, I decided, probably very few of them) could describe their plight with the eloquence and specificity that I could as an adult English major four-point-oh student who was pretty honestly confident she was uncommonly charismatic in person.”

Gwen clasps her hands like a bridge below her chin and returns her eyes to the mirror, seeming suddenly aware that she had been watching her own hands as they made squid-like pulses and rainbow arches in the air. She flips her hair and smiles. Again, her joined lips bend crookedly, as if just one corner were snagged on a hook. She shifts her balance and resumes:

“What I actually had begun to think — and I’ll reiterate that I don’t mean to say I’ve never looked into a mirror and hated my more masculine aspects, because I have, and I did, every time I saw a mirror, just not to an unbearable, ‘I need therapy’ extent — what I actually had begun to think, regarding gender transition, was that I would hate being a mutant female more than I hated being male. I wanted desperately to make a mistake. I lived and always had lived a life free of turmoil, and fuck it’s so boring. Nobody with enough yearning to accomplish something in their lifetime can do so without having encountered some incomprehensibly vast ravine that not only threatens to halt their aspirations but that actually does, for a time, such that the hero either must, after years of booze and pondering, decide to cope with their insufficiency and build a home overlooking the depths or must die trying to surpass impossible and return from death on the fault’s other side. I’d already been fat and lonely, and arduous though escaping that hole was, the bottom’s really no different from just being bored. I tried anorexia, but anorexics eat so much time worrying about eating that they’ve none left for creativity, and besides that, I really don’t think a starving brain can retain memory like a satiated one, so all I’m left with now that the worst is past is a jumble of bathroom collapses and long thoughtless walks memorialized from that period of my life; nothing inspiring. I would have always loved to dig myself into other holes for the sake of new perspective, but I’m surrounded by people who would see me digging and stop me, which is exactly why, I think, my life had been so bland. I’d never done anything to muddle my circumstances that my people wouldn’t have always allowed. However, I doubted they would stop me from switching genders. My people are pretty progressive.

“So, my story would be that I spent all my childhood envying the way girls’ bodies fit their skeletons such that every other day or so I’d conduct this ritual where I’d dress up in girl clothes and stretch pieces of flab away from my bones to summon my female skeleton, and so it goes I’d come to develop an obsession for the ghost beneath my unworthy flesh, and I’d sacrifice myself for her favor; I’d starve unto near death and grow out my hair and shave my limbs and regularly wear androgynous women’s sweaters in public and find I’d still not done enough. So I’d start on hormones, and over the course of however long, I’d close the distance between this ghost and I, and I’d be a woman. Then, I’d regret. My breasts would not prove any less cumbersome and superfluous than the dick I so despised. The voice befitting my new body would neither demand an audience nor sooth a friend. And the feminine freedom I’d sought all these years, I’d never find it, because inside, I’d remain a man. I’d walk around in public weary for all the stares cast my direction, guessing which they thought I was, man or woman? If I’m a man, I’m a freak. If I’m a woman, you’re wrong; that’s not me; I’m only trapped. Trapped by all the friends and family whom I’d come out to and who’d respect the lengths I’d gone to make them see me for this woman I wasn’t. Knowing me, I’d never admit that I’d been wrong; I’d never give up the hormones, never go back to male pronouns and my male name. I’d have condemned myself to flesh jail. It’d have been my fault. I could be a tragic hero.

“I’ll skip reiterating the stuff about anorexia and the part where I start regularly crossdressing in public right to trying to get on hormones. As I said, I’d first need a diagnosis. I got my therapist from a clinic recommended to me by an online friend — actually, I’m gonna backtrack a bit. By “friend” I mean a dude I knew from a few private Discord servers because of his relations to other people with whom I enjoyed talking. This guy was like thirty-something at the time, and he had had what I was pretty confident was an innately sexual interest in trans women, which, I should mention, I knew before he knew that I wanted to transition myself, which I did tell him, and in fact he was the second person I ever told. In these private discords him and I and a few others shared, I had posted a few photos of myself, knowing full-well that I sort-of toed the line between male and female, and when this guy had initially seen the photos, I not only became the subject of his horny adoration but also the recipient of dozens of comments, from him, prodding me toward transition, especially after I had made it very clear in further chat interactions I would never engage in any sex acts with anyone because I viewed my male genitalia as an entirely separate entity within myself whose presence I did not consent to and whom I refused to indulge wherever possible. To this dude it was obvious I belonged in a girl’s body, and he promised me he’d be there whenever I did decide I wanted to make the switch. And so, anyway, what I mean by “recommended” is that we had had an exchange — and y’know, I’ll actually just pull it up. Gimme a second.

“Alright, so, I’m just gonna read it from where it’s relevant. This picks up from us talking D&D, because we had had a campaign together for a while, and as that topic was sorta winding down, this guy asks me,

“ ‘How have you been?’

“To which I respond, ‘I’ve been okay, I guess.’ Then he asks about how I’d been handling Corona, and I say, ‘Spent two weeks with a few Ellensburg friends, one of whom is very close. / But otherwise [I’ve] been locked down. / I had a few extremely bad days after which my productivity spiraled to nothing, so this aforementioned friend really saved me.’

“He goes, ‘That’s good. I’m sorry you were having some bad days. I wish I could have helped you. / But that you feel better is really good.’

“I reply, ‘Sorry, I just didn’t wanna get anyone involved. / Most of it is the same old dysmorphia.’ Which it’s good I should mention: this guy knows all about my eating problems, and a little more, as in, like, I’ve embellished my issues to him, which has maybe contributed to how sure he is that I’m dysphoric. An ‘egg’ he frequently called me: a trans person in denial of their desire to transition.

“Anyway, he says — and I’m sorry; this exchange is less concise than I remember it being — ‘Dummy. / That’s literally what I’m for.’

“And I’m just gonna summarize my next bit: I make an excuse for not having brought up my problems to him whom I never talk to unless he initiates the conversation (which is not what I say, by the way, not to his face): basically, my excuse is that we have a mutual friend who gets distraught when he hears that other people in our Discord circle have real-life relationships with real people, because he (this second guy), himself, has none, and so my excuse is that I’d been keeping my problems close to my real-life friend while never mentioning her (or my problems, by proxy), to the server, because guy-I’m-having-a-conversation-with and I both know this second guy would get upset about me hanging with someone real.

“Guy-I’m-having-a-conversation-with doesn’t question my weaseling and says, ‘I guess expecting you to DM me is too much. / I’m glad you got help ego.’ Ego being my online moniker, by the way.

“I lie: ‘We’ve talked about my stuff here, though. / Idk, I feared I was bothering you.’

“ ‘Dummy,’ he says, and he adds a glaring anime moth girl emote.

“I reply, ‘I just go in circles. / I felt if I kept coming here with the same problems I’d be a burden.’

“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I understand, but you shouldn’t feel like you can’t do this to yourself, ego.’ Now that I look back, I’m not really sure what he meant by that at all.

“Anyway, I say, ‘Yeah, sorry. / I’ll keep it in mind. / Will probably have to. I’m sorta still figuring myself out, but, until like three weeks ago, I hadn’t genuinely considered transitioning, and now I have, and until this friend [by whom I meant the girl I had stayed with, platonically], nobody besides you probably had any inkling that I humored the thought. / And I’m sure I’m gonna get an ‘I told you so’ / But I tried to sleep one night and was kept awake by the thought that I was gonna die in this body, and it terrified me. / Again, I’m not sure, but my self-image has been really bad lately.’ This really did happen, the thing about my not being able to sleep, only not exactly as I’d told it, because yes I had thrown myself to bed and failed to sleep as I thought about all my hair falling out and my skin getting rough and tanned and my facial hair coming back after decreasing intervals, but I had only failed to sleep for an hour or so, and it wasn’t a night’s sleep I’d botched but rather a midday nap I had decided to take in place of a meal.

“ ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ the guy says. ‘When you figure out your name, please tell me.’

“My next part’s the last I’ll read verbatim, I promise: I say, ‘Well, hold on. / I haven’t started going by different pronouns or labels or anything. I am generally referred to by he or they pronouns, which is fine, because my stance on those [pronouns, I meant] is that they only really matter externally, so people should call me what they perceive. And ego is still an acceptable name, though if you must know, the only other two people who know have been calling me Gwen.’ This conversation between the dude and I then progressed to where the dude asked where I live, but don’t worry, I had already answered him a few times before, so this was no big deal. So again I told him my city, and he just did some googling for me to find a number of LGBTQ clinics in my town, and he rather quickly — actually like impressively fast — he compiled a list and sent. Our exchange continued, but it’s not really important. Point is, I now had at my disposal dozens of potential therapists picked by a guy who very much wanted to see me transition. And I guess more importantly, I had someone rooting for me to dig myself into this hole.

“I meet my first choice online, by video. I’m dressed in scoop-necked skin-tight black, with a middle-gendered cardigan overtop that makes it look like I care too much about a consultation I’m having from my bedroom, which I do, but definitely my intention was to look that way. My headphones clamp my hair at either ear such that my bangs draw from the left side of my face past my right in a neat, unmoving swoop that just covers one eyebrow without impeding my vision. I angle the camera downward a little, shortening my brow, hiding most of my Adam’s apple, and flaunting extra collarbone. They (my therapist) are simultaneously my opposite in appearance and in birth sex, which I thought bode well for my odds. ‘So when was the earliest you started feeling uncomfortable with your body,’ they ask. I’m skipping our prior get-to-know-each-other session, if that’s fine. This is technically session two for us. Anyway, I’m really not that sad, so I give them everything: I don’t know, sometime in elementary school, I say; I remember first getting told by a school physician that I was overweight and my having fervently denied it to everyone I knew, and like, my whole family was overweight as a minimum, and they always told me it was just genetics, that whatever they’d try to do, they’d be fat, which was okay; just the way things were, was the impression I got. So as their offspring I gave up moderation because genetics would fatten me anyway. As I gained more weight, I became increasingly dissatisfied with myself and it became increasingly difficult to deny that I really was fat, so I started telling people that I’d been born with just a slow metabolism, which I also believed. I’d never be pretty, so why even try? I couldn’t stand it. By freshman year, I’d started wearing a triple-XL sweatshirt — hood pulled up, indoors and out — all day, every day; it was the best I could do to hide forever. Somewhere into my second year, a doc diagnosed me as obese. My weight then peaked. I no longer even walked comfortably; I scrunched my body so that I wouldn’t jiggle and distended my neck to cast a shadow over my breasts. I sucked in my gut until I couldn’t feel I was doing it. I refused to enter other humans’ radii of plausible motion for fear of upsetting them with my presence. I tell my therapist that the way I rationalized it, I made fewest enemies distancing myself from as many people as possible. All my best memories from childhood to the entrance of my adulthood were of me, alone, watching YouTube and playing video games. I look up, because I guess I was staring at my hands, wringing them. I don’t know if this is visible or not on camera. My therapist’s eyes are waiting for mine to stumble right into them. They look red and wet and it’s about now I’m thinking if this is a trick, some strategical therapeutic technique, it’s a pretty convincing one, because they (my therapist) are looking profoundly sympathetic as their pupils linger on me for a second, then dart right and linger there for another, and then return to forward — it’s either a perfect emotional emulation or I’ve actually affected them, and it’s all the more perfect in that either reality gets me seriously questioning my own stoicism toward the story I’d just told, which I suppose must be the objective.”

As Gwen’s smile allays, more a fault of my own exhaustion than of anything else, the circles under my eyes appear on her face. Her cheeks sink without the upward pressure of joviality. I plaster another grin to her visage, but it looks unnatural, too full of teeth. Her arms and hands stiffen, so I hang them by her sides and just let her sway. This, too, feels awkward, so I clasp her hands together and hold still, hunched forward some.

“ ‘That sounds terribly lonely,’ my therapist says. ‘I feel so much for you — ’ they choke on a word. Masterful manipulation, if that is indeed what they’re doing. They decide on a different sentence: ‘It’s not your fault. You’d been taught from a very young age that people treat you very differently based on your appearance and that your own appearance was beyond your control. I. If it were me,’ a pause, ‘I think I’d feel so angry.’ And indeed I was, angry, I tell them. That was my whole life, being angry. They reply, ‘I’m sensing some regret in your tone.’ I affirm. ‘You must hold so much resentment toward everyone else. They’d been free all their lives, whereas you’ve been shunned for reasons you’d believed to be beyond your own control.’

“On ‘control’, I’m not sure if it’s my therapist or it’s me, but one of us hones into that word, and it leads me to going on to say, like, that it was in my senior year when I looked the worst I ever looked that my Econ 101 teacher got sick one weekend, came back, and candidly told the class that he had lost, allegedly, seven pounds. Two days. I came home that afternoon and stretched on a pair of leggings and stared into the mirror. For the first and only time I can conjure — and this is exactly the phrase I use — I think I understood what it was to have an epiphany. The female spirit of my skeleton coalesced in higher definition than my own self upon my reflection, and I knew, then, that I would be her. Post-graduation, I would go to a college five hours away where nobody I knew could watch to make sure I’d eat, and so I just wouldn’t. Following my own instruction, I lost, I don’t know, eighty pounds, leaning toward a hundred? Six months. Just stopped eating. I thought it would make me feel better about myself to lose all that weight, and in some regard it did, but ultimately I’m still just as concerned with the space I occupy as I had been. People may have begun smiling at me and talking to me with sweeter voices, but I felt unworthy all the same. Like, I say to my therapist, I lived in a sphere eight feet in diameter and that I was aware of this sphere at all times and, like, I wouldn’t let myself bump it (the sphere) into anyone. Because I was confused, I propose, about my size.”

I turn from the mirror to face the shower curtain. Gwen speaks to her two or three imagined recipients through a fish-pattern veil.

“ ‘How much of the younger Gwen do you still carry?’ they continue. ‘Even when you were still overweight, you were never eight feet across, surely. What were you accounting for?’ I answer: I carried all of that person, I think. Or most of them. Them because I refuse during this whole thing to call my younger self Gwen, implying womanhood, the way my therapist does. Not just, like, physically, I continue, because yeah, though I did maneuver the world as if I were obese even after I wasn’t and I thus awarded myself a lot of space at all times to move my mass around — which I did very carefully, because I had been trained to expect my touch to break things, I didn’t — you’re right — take up a diametrically eight-foot sphere. I say that I also suspect I’d inherited my younger self’s suspicion that I disgusted everyone around me as like a constant matter of fact. That’s what the extra footage was for: served as a buffer zone. People would only interact with me of their own exclusive volition, that way I never imposed on anyone. If they initiated with me, that was my cue that they themselves consented to my presence and couldn’t, therefore, blame me for their being disgusted. Still that wasn’t all, though, as I then tell my therapist as a sort-of tacked-on conclusion that I’m not myself, not this body, I gesture, in my dreams; I’m still huge young me when I sleep.

“ ‘That’s really insightful,’ says my therapist. ‘I think it really tells, you being a younger you in your dreams, how much you’ve repressed — maybe repressed isn’t the right word — suppressed, maybe. How much you’ve suppressed your own desires for fear of rejection.’ That’s how they say it, almost exactly, I’m sure. Certain lines have stuck. Anyway. They continue, ‘How does it look in practice for you to interact with somebody else? How do people react when you do “impose”, as you put it?’ I don’t know my own words as precisely as I do theirs, but I’m pretty sure I start somewhere like that I don’t do it often, “impose”; learned not to from my younger years when I just kinda knew people would hate me from their faces. Like, say I were on a bus, right, in high school, and I went to sit beside someone — this, I elaborate, could only occur if each of the bus’ double seats were occupied by one normally-sized individual, as was often the case: Another stranger — healthy weight, unhooded, female, any combination of those — the expression that stranger would have received trying the same seat would not be the one turned up at me. The looks I’d get were never smiling, never open-eyed; I got squinted glares with dilated ‘are you stupid’ pupils. I’m looking back and it makes sense: I had my own brand. I was the one kid who wore a hood indoors literally always. So of course they all recognized me, and of course they wanted nothing to do with this weirdo. I didn’t have to ask. I wasn’t gonna. Left ’em alone to spare myself their enmity. I don’t start conversations at all, I say. I have no right to other people’s attention. It’s disrespectful and invasive to engage. On the rare occasion when I do, ultimately, have to converse with someone, I guess the way it looks is that I speak in long, rambling sentences with disclaimers for every possible offense and misinterpretation such that my recipient shouldn’t have to respond to me at all if they don’t want to, except perhaps to answer a question if I’ve asked one, which I guess they’re not obligated to do either. I use lots of cushiony(?) words, too — ‘I guess’s and ‘probably’s and ‘maybe’s and etc. A matter of caution. I never wanna seem too sure of myself in case that’s itself a crime.

“ ‘To me it seems you’re very compassionate, always valuing other people’s presumed needs over your own,’ they say. I don’t wait to see whether they’d like to continue: I’m not sure that’s true at all, I say, because younger me especially had a very egoistic perspective on this habit of mine. As I alluded prior, it was more about managing enmity by the cultivation of an innocuous reputation. As long as nobody had a definite reason to hate me, they could go on never talking to me without having to forcibly eject me from their personal spaces and social circles by way of bullying or what-have-you. God, I can’t see my face as I’m saying this, because earlier — which I think I skipped in my recount, sorry — earlier I had mentioned to my therapist, as a means of bolstering the credibility of my dysphoria, that I couldn’t stand looking at my reflection, that just being in the same room as my reflection made me anxious, that I couldn’t stop looking at it to make sure I didn’t always still look gross, whereupon my therapist had observed that my camera fed back to me in the bottom right corner of our video call, and so I remarked that it was probably easy to tell by my eyes constantly darting that direction that I was aware and anxious even as we spoke; my therapist suggested that I might wanna pull up a notepad window and cover the camera, which I then did, but so now I can’t see myself, and god I’m fucking angry, and I want to see my face to make sure I’m not showing and I can’t.

“Young me is standing on an asphalt playground. I’m not saying this to my therapist; I’m not saying anything. To his right, a comfortable ten yards away or thereabouts, people he recognizes are swinging tetherballs in pairs, with audiences; to his left is the sandpit filled with woodchips where dozens of people congregate on and around swings and colored slides, seldom swinging or sliding. Young me paces a straight line, backwards and forwards, toward first the pit, then the tetherballs, then back and so forth, and he maintains enough distance between either side that he’s really only walking probably three or four yards each way. His head is down; his hood is up; he’s wearing cargo shorts so drapey that they don’t even seem to move; his shins oscillate like bell clappers out of pipes. They’re delicate, his legs. He’s a child in a cardboard robot, and these legs are all I can see of him beneath the hull of his faux colossus. He struggles to hold up the robot. It waddles and its head droops, dead-like, bobbing on the kid’s shoulders each time he spins on a foot to reverse his patrol. The robot’s arms dangle at its sides and fidget constantly, malfunctioning, only they aren’t actually. I imagine a chalk ring having been drawn around the robot which all the other students have silently decided never to cross; it’s like a school superstition: the robot’s fidgeting is a language like the way crickets talk to each other, they say, and if you step into the circle you’ll hear it, and you’ll learn why there’s a kid in a robot pacing like that, and it’s like infectious, the robot suit and the pacing and the hood, they say. There’re a couple members of staff talking hushed to each other by the basketball hoops, a busty woman in black leather with a loose-curled ponytail that hangs ’til almost her ass and a cube-shaped security guard with scant white hair. The two keep glancing at the waddling robot like the kid inside doesn’t know they’re there watching. The woman makes an exasperated face at the guy before wandering — her eyes still locked on his as she begins — across the chalk line. She taps the robot on the shoulder, upon which point the whole suit shudders and the kid stops. There’s a second of delay before the hood turns from the floor to the woman. She rolls her eyes. ‘You can’t just do nothing out here,’ she says. ‘Go play. Don’t you have friends? Go play with your friends.’ Young me just stands there. Can’t say anything without breaking character. He turns his whole body to her, angles his dead head up, and steps back once with each foot. ‘C’mon,’ says the woman. Nothing. She scoffs and leaves the circle. Young me remains stood there. His cardboard cranium slumps again. An electronic bell tolls hollow and fuzzy, but nobody’s leaving the playground. Young me returns to his pacing. The sky dims and brightens in repetitious alternating succession. Clouds materialize from every dawn in herds sweeping overhead, vanish every dark. They sometimes rain or snow for minutes, but never over the chalk circle. I get cold with the weather, but I don’t cross the border. I’m looking in, like I’m waiting, like, we can both just go inside if he’d only stop fucking pacing. But I don’t cross the border.”

I can hear Gwen’s absence. The speaker’s voice is mine. I face the mirror and see me. The shadow of my protruded brow falls over my eyes and halfway to the cliff of my nose. The space between my bottom lip and my jaw expands. Acne sprouts on the lump in my neck. Fuzz glimmers between my lips and nose. My jaw is wide. My cheeks are hollow. My eyes are small. My hair is frizzy.

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real shame that i can't ctrl+z irl... but i'm proud of her squish at least

[bleakviolet]

doodles, in real ink this time :)

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