consummation

This piece was debuted last night at the National Queer Arts Festival show, Girl Talk, in San Francisco. Thank you so much to Gina and Julia for putting the show together, to everyone who came together for an incredible set of performances, and to everyone who came out to support us. It was a pleasure and an honor.

The day they took the silver spoon out of my mouth and replaced it with a gun barrel, I learned a lot about hunger. And hunger taught me far too well.
I came out at nineteen and lost my family when I began transition, lost my way home, my plans, my everything. No small-town hometown, any more, no talking Family Business shop with Mom in the kitchen. In an instant an entire childhood with full cupboards changed, and I was a nineteen-year-old girl whose parents cut off her food supply, who couldn’t even get a job washing dishes, and at the same time as they started refusing to tell me they loved me without qualifiers and started with “you can never have a family,” I learned that the garbage is a pretty decent place to get a bite to eat.

Sometimes we are ghosts in orbit, too afraid of burning up on re-entry to ever go home, unwilling to abandon the sight of it for the cold vastness to which we turn our nervous backs. Circling around each other, stately, flash-frozen at the moment of grief, we wait for gravity to make the choices for us; we pretend we don’t know what else to do.
Bitterness is a waltz.
It’s easy to end up lost in the upper reaches of the air when the ground goes out from under you, you know? When the road you planned crumbles away and, brave Fool, you just walk off into the airy emptiness instead.
Sometimes that bridge you bought is under your feet after all. Sometimes you just join the wind-skating dusty dead, out at the edge of the atmosphere.
We’re all up here, the ghosts and strays, needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until we have mouths enough again for a meal. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss.

Family was where the food came from. It was where the love came from. And I lost both, and had to learn, in only the way someone who hasn’t already had to grow up without these things must, where to get nourishment on the fly. The poor little rich girl got an abrupt education in what she thought she was entitled to before, and what could be substituted when all that plenty went away.
In all the things I didn’t used to think were food, or love, that I could take because I suddenly discovered I needed them.

It is no mistake that I learned to eat the scraps from other people’s plates and make ugly compromises for handouts in the same season I entered a relationship where I lost count of the times I was raped. I learned what I was good enough for. I learned to settle for what I could get. What I could digest. What I could endure, in order to have someone touch me and say they wanted me, in order to get a full belly. Food poisoning and abusers both reach a fist into your guts and pull out what they want, after all, but you don’t see either one coming when you’re so hungry you can’t think.
The things we learn to survive are just that: survival. They keep us surviving, for better and for worse.

The thing is, if you go long enough scrounging, snapping and snarling at the edge of the lamplight, it becomes part of everything you do. You learn to hoard every little bit you can get right now, even if you don’t want it, because you don’t know where your next meal will come from. Better to gorge yourself on way too much discarded bread, half of a stranger’s sandwich, or enough abandoned bacon to make you sick, and store it up in case there’s nothing but a carrot, an egg, and hot water tomorrow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you like it, or whether or not it’s any good; it’s something, and the just-in-case justifies everything. Discriminating by quality or desire is a luxury, and when the emotional Dumpstering starts—when you start believing that solidarity’s scraps are enough to make it on, and give up on thriving—you start to packrat every touch you get, even the violent ones, you beg even the friends who degrade you to stay.

I have a steady paycheck now, enough to put food on the table without worry, with no kids to feed and tastes made simple by the school of make-do. I have a ring on my finger from the person I love most in all the world, and we have made a warm safe home where I sleep every night.
But I still eat every scrap in front of me and wipe the dish, even if I’m feeling sick, because part of me can’t look away from the shaky precipice of my life as a queer trans woman of color who’s making it. I’m the monster of the story, lurking at the margin, and it can all be taken away in a heartbeat: that’s what I learned. That it might be safer to be someone’s dog, and at least get the scrapings from the table, but I’d better beg. The ground is unsteady under my feet, and the job, the pantry, the door that locks, I can get pulled off it just as fast as I can be locked up for soliciting for walking down the street for groceries. My mismatched ID is only a sign of how quickly anyone can figure out that I’m a nonperson, a mismatched thing on the edges, the kind of thing that takes scraps or blood to survive. And no matter how steady things get, no matter what I build, I learned that lesson well and it’s just as hard to shake as any lesson about how you can’t eat dignity, about conditional love. Do you see? I’m still gorging on every abandoned plate I pass, just in case the next paycheck doesn’t come. I’m still begging for leftovers of closeness I can stitch into my monster heart. And somewhere, way past that fresh gorgeous produce and piping-hot pie in my kitchen, I still retain the terror that, like Lamia, all that I am will be seen through, and the real people will tear unacceptable me from the feast and my love, that even the woman who knows me all the way to the bottom will somehow someday discover the discarded skin of her selkie bride, and I will lose everything on my way back to the sea.
When I went off the map and up into the ionosphere, I stopped trusting anything good was real, was any more lasting than my breath, and a litany of loss taught me too well to heal right. When I went from scholar to scavenger, the precariousness of my position was a reasonable lesson to learn, but I’m not there any more, not still cobbling together a life from the bits I could sneak off everyone else’s plates.
My mistress with a monster is in love, and I am still learning to trust that she knows what she’s getting into with a fierce conviction and devotion I never thought possible, still learning that leaning on her, the first real family I ever had, is less shaky than I first supposed. When I didn’t know I could be taken care of, she insisted on reaching for my needs. When I was shivering sick she spoon-fed me medicine. At half my size she stood up for me against the whole world without hesitation, and loving her is the truest thing I could possibly know. We have done the work to be family—solid ground—for each other. So why is part of me still waiting for the other reality to drop? Why am I so unable to let go of the hunger, so ready to allow a starving status quo to dictate my life when I am filled daily with love and strength and hope? Where is the trust in a world that can change? In the possibility of feasts, so long as I let them spread out before me, and in a future that is more than a threat? What day will be the day I stop waiting to lose this miracle?
I am planning a wedding, planning motherhood, even as I hold tight to someone who finally told me that I don’t have to accept the leftovers, that I can ask for a brimful cup and watch it sometimes arrive, that I can be not just sated, but satisfied if I let go of believing I don’t deserve it. And at the end of the day, I still fight to remember that it’s not that she’s real and I’m in tenuous human guise, but that she’s cis and I’m trans and that love can be realer than any of those divides, that we can be back-to-back against a whole world full of loss and deprivation and feed each other every day and in the home we are for each other, there is nobody who can stop us now. I’ve come in from the cold and there’s soup waiting.
It is no mistake that when I learned I couldn’t have love, I learned that I couldn’t have a warm meal, either. It is no mistake that in our home, I cook as often as possible.

I’ve been up here in the cold upper air for a long time, with the ghosts and the strays. Needlethroated, thirsty, waiting until I had a mouth enough for a meal again. It’s easy to get lost in that moment of loss. But sometimes one of us can look down and see a soft place, a warm kitchen. And then, all alight in that hopeful embrace, we are shooting stars, rushing home, consumed.

like a hungry runaway*

This morning my partner sent me down the street to pick up some things for breakfast, because neither of us was thinking about what would happen on the way.

I rounded the corner past the church, its bells pealing for Mass, kids running about, and promptly stumbled into a gauntlet of a solid dozen cafes and restaurants and lunch carts all packed kitchen to door, all their signs cheerfully chalked to announce their specials for Mothers' Day Brunch. It seemed like every storefront had something to say on the matter, or was closed so they could be home to say something else more personal.

I've been trying to avoid noticing today, to skip past all the greeting cards and helpful internet reminders and e-mail from Planned Parenthood telling me via cute video about how much I should appreciate my mother, the best in the world. Last night's crying jag made it clear that this was not a workable strategy. This is not a fun day for me. This is not about picturesque brunch.

When you're barren and motherless, Mothers' Day is a calendar mark to dread.

I will never carry a baby under my heart and above my hips. And the person who carried me, we don't talk any more. There's too much hurt. There's too much poison. Here we are at the day where I'm supposed to idealize that, where I used to call every year and pretend things were other than what they were. This time, it's different. This time I'm not pretending. The rest of my family probably had a lovely spread on the table this morning, but I wasn't there. I may never be again.

I've been trying to hide from this day as best I could, but, as when I was a child, there's nowhere to hide, is there? There's nowhere I can go that the people who made me aren't with me, in the end, nowhere that who they are and what they did isn't encoded in my bones and carved into my corneas. I already knew when I was little that even hidden in a closet or up a tree, nowhere was safe for long, if nothing else because I was there, and I brought it all with me. When it's in you, when it is you, when it's where you come from, you bring it everywhere, stinking in your hair like rancid cigarette smoke, like a red-eyed thing hanging behind your neck and reading everything over your shoulder. I don't know who I am without it. There has never been a version of me without it.

Last year in March I climbed a mountain alone, and sat at the peak trying to put away the whole human world for a while so I could see further, but I brought it with me. My veins and shoes and food wrappers and eardrums were all human, and all came into that place. When I tried to strip away everything and get to the bottom of myself, near the bottom was a terrible, paralyzing fear, infecting all my decisions. That fear spoke in a voice I recognized all too well. Sometimes it wore a face that I recognized, too. Always there. I couldn't get away from where I came from. I brought it with me.

You can't run from where you start. You can't hide from it. You can stop picking up the phone, change your address, change your name, but you'll find it chalked onto the sandwich boards of every cafe in your neighborhood, find it in your inbox as a reward for your volunteer service, and you will find yourself looking over your shoulder every minute, afraid to see in person the people who are always there anyway, but no longer made of smoke and mirrors and hurt but flesh and blood and audible voice, ready to dismantle every shrine you've built in yourself.

I am trying to come to terms with this day. Trying to find a way to make it positive for myself instead of a stab-wound. I think, well, I will never carry a child inside, but I may be a mother someday. I think, well, what about metaphors, about cultivation and vegetable gardens and art, about making new things and nurturing them? I think about the wonderful mothers in my life, who aren't my mothers but who surely count. I think about all the people who helped mother me even if we never shared blood, all the people who gave me somewhere to run to, who showed me a different way to be. I think about elders in my community worth honoring. I think about spiritual mothers, universal mothers even, trying to reach further out into something sacred and more wholesome.
I think of someone dear to me who reminded me that, as Audre Lorde said, we have to learn to mother ourselves. But it's hard to know the best way to mother yourself when your only model is so full of hurt, and is so full of hurt because her only model in turn hurt her. Learning to mother yourself in a new way, when you don't know what the safe and healthy way to do it even looks like, is a tall order.

Mothers' Day is no picnic when you're barren and you're motherless. But I'm not really either of these things. I am fertile, though I cannot give birth, as soil in which to grow things. And I have a mother. If I didn't, this would be a very different kind of hurt, but I do have a mother, one who shaped me, one who is integral to who I am and have become, who is never not looking over my shoulder whether I like it or not. The key is not in the fiction of being motherless. It's in learning to deal with the mother I have, or had, and what she is, now, in me. It's in healing the mother in me so I can mother myself, and so someday when there are children in my care I can do right by them. I don't know how to do these things, but maybe Mothers' Day is a good place to start. My Independence Day, or Dependence Day, or something, something about saying right here and now that even when you ran away, even when you changed your name and address and phone number, you cannot hide from what is written in your ribcage and seeping to fill your muddy footprints, sketched on your palms and wrapped around your throat. If you cannot hide, you have to figure out something better to do.

For all of us learning to mother ourselves, if not a happy Mothers' Day, a hopeful one, one where we give ourselves more chances. A day to remember the good days, the moments of respite. A day to learn to grow something new in ourselves, and start to be brave enough to loose its seeds on the wind. A day to support the mothers around us who are, as our own did, doing the best they can. A day to believe that they, and we, can do it differently.

Where we come from is always in us, and we take it everywhere. Maybe we can learn something from it better than what it wanted to teach us. Maybe someday we can go home.


*props to my friends Coyote Joe and Miss Grace, who you should know better

no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)

fly away home

"To whom shall I speak today?
One lacks an intimate,
One resorts to an unknown to complain.

To whom shall I speak today?
I am burdened with grief
For lack of an intimate."

When I was little, my Aunt Liz lived with us, and she represented a mode of kindness and open intimacy that I could not learn from anyone else involved in my upbringing. There was a sort of standing welcome with her, a ready smile, a basic and whimsical sweetness.
Aunt Liz taught me about how things can smell purple or green, about fish and rivers, about laughter, and about believing in your own kind of beauty. She had red hair and an interesting nose and wore a lot of purple. She loved fishing and art and wondering about things, and she was my favorite, I think, of all my extended family, because I think she was one of very few who got me, and I never forgot that. She was a good woman, and brave, and nurtured and protected beauty in this world.
We haven't spoken in years, because of this circumstance or that, and I haven't seen her in even more.

She died yesterday of a broken heart.

Aunt Liz, I'm sorry I didn't know how much you were hurting, and I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry you had to know so much pain. I'm sorry things never worked out like you planned. I never met anyone who knew you and didn't adore you. Whatever distance happened, you were always family to me, and I was looking forward to seeing you at my wedding, and catching up someday.
I hope it's okay now. I hope you make it where you're going and it's better than anything you ever had here.
You will be missed by a lot of people, and one of them is a loving niece who will always be grateful she had you in her life, even just for a little while. Rest well.

"Death is before me today,
Like a sick one's recovery,
Like going outdoors after confinement.

...

Death is before me today,
Like the clearing of the sky,
As when a person discovers what she ignored.

Death is before me today,
Like someone's longing to see her home
When she has spent many years in captivity."
--The Dispute of the Man With His Ba, unknown Middle Kingdom Egyptian author, tr. Lichtheim with a couple of pronoun edits.

things people do

NOTE: After a whole lot of busy, lately, I find myself having a profoundly rough week. It's likely going be another little while before I can bring myself to produce new stuff, or even finish what I've got in the works. So I've decided to bring in a handful of casserole posts (thanks, piny, I love the term) to cover up the shortfall so none of you think I've up and quit. This one is from November 2006, and I meant to import it over here then, but forgot in December's uproar since it was more preachy than topical. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --ll.


Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.

And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.

It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.

It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.

It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.

phone booths, ii: the green room.

Authenticity.

It's a messy word. Here's another: organic.

Here's something I don't admit much, because it undercuts my claims at both authenticity and organic-ness: I am the only trans person I know (and I know, this is improbable) who is an actor. The skillset automatically marks me as someone good at faking, and this is a problem when your claims about your identity strike many people as either a delusion or a lie. Now, I grant you, I haven't been onstage in two years--that was for the Vagina Monologues--and before that, it had been another two, for a small show in workshop. I don't really do theater any more, other than occasionally helping a friend with tech work. People ask me, pretty frequently, why I quit theater mostly cold-turkey, since it used to be my primary hobby and mean a great deal to me.
It was taking up too much of my life, I usually say. Sometimes I continue, I was spending too much time being other people.

Theater's a funny thing, because you're supposed to lie your way into truth; by faking and faking being someone and something other than what you are, in good stage work--by flooding illusions all over a bunch of people who have paid to have a real experience--you're supposed to uncover something new, something true.

You spend hours, in a theater, pointing shakily-wired electric lights and shining them through different-colored sheets of plastic until the tints and angles combine to make something that looks like natural light--and you make sure not a scrap of actual natural light comes in to mess up your illusion. It has to look realer than real. You exaggerate the makeup, play up the marks and flaws, expand the features so they can be seen from a ways off, because "natural" doesn't look natural on a stage. When everyone's watching, the real thing doesn't look real enough.
You have to blur things in order to put the focus in the right place. You have to spend hours memorizing lines that, when you say them, have to come out as though they're fresh and new and spontaneous and you've never heard them before. You practice motions over and over until they look unpracticed, natural, organic. Genuine. Nothing matters more than the truth you're exhibiting, including the facts. The real experience of your performance matters more, is the measure of success, is paramount.

The word of the day is authenticity. It's just that, in order to create an authenticity that's satisfying for the audience, you have to construct it. You have to bring in the artificial, paint the pocks on your brick walls with a sponge, carefully form tree bark from papier-mache, portray. It's like the Parthenon--the angles and proportions are just barely off, so that the building will look perfectly square from the perspective of someone looking at it, because if they were actually trued, the size of the thing shown would distort its image, and the truth of its perfection would be obscured by the fact that actual perfection looks off when you're standing on the ground. ("True" angles. "True" arrow-paths. It's funny, isn't it.)

I got into acting right around the same time I developed a masculinity habit. (Bad one. Couple of packs a day, for a while. Nasty withdrawal symptoms.) This is not a coincidence.

I was an obsessive character actor, beginning in my mid-early teens, and people would comment now and then on the singleminded, self-obliterating drive with which I threw myself into my chosen art. I was addicted to the moment at the beginning of opening night, when the self vanished, when there was no thought, no worrying, no past or future, only the moment--where words and actions tumbled out of me with exact and studied naturalness, and all there was was to be keyed into the movements and reactions of everyone else. There was no me. There was only the character, the role, the action. My push for that feeling became increasingly ritualized.
I would spend hours listening to tapes of an accent, or carefully listening to a friend with a cadence I wanted, and mimic until I had it just right--rewind, play, rewind, play, one word or phrase over and over until the tilt of the vowel was spot-on. For a role, I would alter the positions of my hands, the shape of my cheeks, my gait and carriage, the octave I spoke, the rate, the inflection, the customary facial expressions, everything. I began to develop a sort of self-hypnosis between curtain and curtain, and wouldn't break character backstage--I began to write extra scenes I could do, by myself, until I went back on. I would develop childhoods for walk-on parts. In one show, I had to play a character playing another actor's portrayal of another character, and people kept getting creeped out by the precise mimicry of his nostril-flares and eyebrow quirks--which had taken a whole lot of following him around to achieve. I developed a set of movements for a non-human character that were only slightly off, as though the joints worked not quite right, just enough to be unsettling in a way that was hard to place. I would recite a litany of the loves and hates of who I was playing in free moments, until I was nearly in tears. I had to shed my skin and become that person. I had to be unable to tell us apart until the show was over, to lose even my own thought patterns and footfalls.

I couldn't see the desperation of it, at the time. The naked, bleeding-gums need in it--for truth, under the lying. To fabricate and construct my way to real experiences, not just for the audiences, but for myself. To be enough other people that maybe, next time I broke character, I'd end up being someone I recognized. To study people hard enough, to mimic enough ways of being, that I'd find one that fit--that was natural, that would, if nothing else, allow me to build someone who looked organic.

At that same time, I was learning to apply those skills in daylight. I had never fit in; the foreignness stank on me, I think. I learned to tuck in my full lips when they drew shouts and derision and nicknames on the bus. I learned to cut off my thick, curly hair and comb it like the people around me. I learned how to approximate, from what I had, a silhouette that was familiar, by re-angling my pelvis and shoulders, planting my feet differently, sitting with my knees so instead of so. When more people began talking to me, when some of the violence trickled to a stop, when I found that being a chameleon worked, I took it further.
I stopped jutting my hips; I stopped smiling the way I had as a child, and studied pictures of attractive men smiling, and mimicked in the mirror. (You can still find family photos with me, over on the left, doing Prince William's smile, with eerie precision. I still don't know how I managed to make my mouth do that, and make it look natural and spontaneous. You know the one--slightly triangular, head tilted down and to the left, a little bit shy? Keep an eye out. I did. When I stopped doing it, people wondered where "my" smile had gone.) I had joined the cross-country and track teams, and I swallowed my terror of the boys' locker room and played Jane Goodall instead of hiding out and doing my best to only be present for the actual running.
I took notes. What was that gesture he just did? How did they respond to it? I mimicked the response, and faded into background, normal, not a target. I mimicked the gesture, and showed up--a wasp painted like a honeybee, a sheep in wolf's clothing. A brightly-colored lizard hoping nobody would notice it's not really poisonous.
I worked out harder, trying desperately to build muscle, to anchor the illusion. I pretended not to feel awkward with my shirt off. I cracked my knuckles. I deepened my speaking voice and started cursing more and pruning my vocabulary. I would only spend ten minutes at a time in a given social group at lunch or on break, and my acquaintances and friends from each never met--which was good, because in each place I stood differently, walked differently, laughed differently, used different slang, before skimming over to the next.

Once it anchored well, I allowed myself a little leeway: once "boy" was established I could do "artistic boy" or "smart boy" or whatever. I worked on a sort of sensitive-James-Dean masculinity that said "coffee-house poetry and boxing" to ground the offshoots in. Still, I was rarely under actual daylight any more. I was just slipping role to role, altering the relative positions of my fingers, the placement of my cheekbones, the shape of my palate for a given vowel to give the audience a real, authentic-looking experience. Whenever the stilted, studied nature of it was called out, I learned and adapted.

I learned, for one, that perfect portrayal doesn't read right. Like a rug-weaver, you have to leave in flaws. You hit the Uncanny Valley if you don't put cracks in it--scuffs on your shoes, stains on your wallpaper, hairs out of place. Perfectly-put-together looks artificial; muss your collar a little here, wrinkle your jeans a little there, and "studied" gives way to "organic." Real people have scars and stumbles printed on them, and it you want to look real, you either have to come by them honestly or fake them. I did both.

I did all this because it worked. It kept me safe in public; it preserved me from violence in the corners. I could date a couple of the girls I swooned over. My grades improved. I lettered in a couple of things.
I was making it. It's just that I wasn't getting at the truth, and it itched, and I thought I was losing my mind, because just when my life was coming together--life as a reasonably attractive, well-read, successful young man winning community service awards and being put on TV spots as an ideal teenager, who was finally not disappointing his parents so much, who finally had a prom date and a life--I was hating it. I was wanting something nobody I knew wanted, something that I had only heard whispers of on late-night TV, seeing as I wasn't savvy with the Internet and was edgy about staying up late. (I know. I'm a wholesome little thing.) In the end, I did the thing I always did onstage--I lost track of the difference between me and the character, lost myself in the role--it's just that the curtain wouldn't go down so I could scrub off the greasepaint and go home. It was my best acting ever: so seamless that, yes, my own mother couldn't recognize me, so much that when I finally hung up the costume everyone thought that was when I started acting. So well-prepared and brought forward that even I forgot I had put it together on purpose, and started to see it for what it counterfeited: authenticity. Naturalness.

And yet I kept waking up in a cold sweat and panicking, hands frantically searching my body: how in God's name had I woken up looking like a seventeen-year-old boy? How had this happened? I would dream, and there were nights I was who I had been before I put on the smoke and mirrors, and I would forget, and I would make it all the way into the shower before I woke up, under the hot water, and gaped in horror: someone had clearly switched me up somewhere, some peculiar Twilight-Zone thing, some massive practical joke everyone was in on. Where the hell were my breasts? And--oh. my. God. And then I'd wake up a little more, and remember that every day began this way, and get dressed for school, smiling like a prince, doing pushups, getting on with it.

What you want is impossible, I insisted to myself. It cannot be. So you need to suck it up, and get tough, and just learn more tricks, drown yourself in more details, do the same thing over again and learn what's a man, now that you've got everyone going that you're a boy.
I was having panic attacks nearly every day, constantly doing divinations to try and figure out what was wrong. The I Ching handed me the doubled glyph of the Middle Son: there is danger on all sides, it said. This will hurt. Watch for the pitfalls. The runes said the same thing, mostly. So did the cards. I kept looking for something brighter, something that didn't say that what I was doing could only end in disaster. I was digging for the truth, and it kept refusing to look like what I wanted it to:

The good son. The ideal big brother. The embarrassing, but ultimately redeemed younger brother. The boyfriend to bring home to Mom. The loving father. The winner of races, the adopter of the family mantle, the responsible one who kept to the law and made everyone proud. The cipher.

At two in the morning, at six in the morning, it was still wrong, no matter how much I bruised myself trying to exorcise it.

And the falsehoods crumbled, eventually, and I took a bow, for no applause, really, to no audience. And I walked offstage, looking for something like natural light.

As it turns out, it's hard to untangle what's you, and what you've made yourself to appeal to others. It's hard to tell a gorgeously crafted illusion from the reality you don't want to see underneath. It's hard to unlearn little things like gestures and cadences and subtle posturings. Especially--especially--when everyone near you thinks that you're not uncovering, you're affecting. I overcompensated, some; I have to admit I did the femininity theater for a little while, same as I had with masculinity. And then I said, screw it--I can't do this any more, either way, anyhow. I filed down the nails. I got a few pairs of jeans. There was just no more time for masks, even if they looked more like what I wanted. I couldn't trust anything like that.

And yet, even after having reached a kind of equilibrium, even after settling into a self I can finally feel is real, it's hard to trust myself, because I was, for so long, a liar. And a liar who can con you for a matter of years, who you'd have been willing to die for before you found out the lie, is not someone you want to take advice from, any more. What do you do when the liar was you, too? When the truth isn't as convincing as the con-job? How do you know you're not just walking off the set and onto a soundstage?

Especially when--well, there's still theater in it, you see. I won't tell an untruth; I swore some years back not to lie any more, ever, which is what got me into this coming-out mess in the first place. But I have to live a life with privacy in it. If nothing else, my physical safety and that of my loved ones depends, at times, on my ability to make the stage look naturally-lit, to make the papier-mache look natural. I have a skillset and a toolkit and I won't pretend they're not useful.
This life has to look like it grew organically. You can't just give yourself a nickname, for instance, but you can set yourself up with a name you could have honestly come by, a family name, one that lends itself to nicknames for other people to come up with. You can't have gotten all your possessions, and all your clothing, at the same time. The house has to look lived-in. The shoes need scuffs. There has to be a hair out of place or it immediately triggers that something-is-wrong-here response. How to make your history plausible, without making any of it up? How do you talk about your childhood? How do you explain being a woman if it's obvious you never much got to be a girl? They're good questions; they're hard questions. But in the end, you have to let some of the bits not match. Perfect isn't plausible. Flawless doesn't look authentic.

You have to make the show realer than real, when everyone's watching. Nobody's satisfied by an experience of watching actors walk around on a raised bit of floor: they want to see truth, conveyed carefully in a beautiful filigree of misdirection and rehearsal, but truth nonetheless. The real, to look real, can benefit a lot from illusion's toolkit. Paying attention to all those details, something I learned to prop up bottomless lies, has served me well.

It's hard to explain how it can still be authentic, not just look the part, when I have to study up and do a bit of performing, now and then, to get that truth across. I did grow here. It was just more complicated, for a while.
Now I know what sunlight looks like. Now I know what my own smile looks like. See?

It's a hell of a lot brighter than a spotlight.
I don't act any more because I can't imagine going back.

de profundis

Four years ago, the political got very personal.

I was a good little radical then; that night, if anything, is what galvanized me. I had wandered down into the streets ready to spend a few hours protesting the oncoming war and then go home and on a date and to my homework. I can't really claim much in the way of nobility: I cared, I cared until my little heart was worn out, but I wasn't a grownup about these things, not yet. I still wanted Bad Guys to line up against. I still wanted to Win and Go Home, because I still thought there was a chance things worked that way.

So I wandered into the eye of the storm, and into a protest that shut down Portland highway by highway and bridge by bridge. The notion was to get everyone to stop and think: this is an inconvenience, but bombs are about to start dropping, tonight, on a nation of real people. Stop. Stop and look around. Feel this moment. Know that it matters. We knew everything would change, we knew it would be a disaster, no matter how much we could never have predicted about the four years to come.

I have written about this before: the peaceful protest I sat in, the places elsewhere in town where it got ugly, where demonstrators fought with riot police, where a police chief shipped in from LAPD and a mayor who wanted to make political examples got brutal and militaristic, where anarchists and would-be revolutionaries got stupid, or naive, or nasty. The squad car driven at me and my friends, engine gunning. The flashbang grenades thrown in our faces. The scared preteen who wanted to make a stand, choking on vinegar-soaked cloth in case of tear gas, that I helped smuggle out of the worst of it. The firehose, the rain, the choppers, the friends with black bruises a foot square that lasted weeks, the people dragged off of sidewalks and then arrested for jaywalking, the children called terrorists. The cops who told me, as they cuffed and searched me, that they'd like to torture me for opposing this President, that they wished they could treat me as Saddam would. The bones that stayed intact because of news cameras. The sadistic prison guards who forced me to watch footage, over and over again, of the first bombs dropping, complete with mocking commentary on how I hadn't been able to stop the deaths of my "little I-racky friends." I've written about the violences that gave me shaking, terrified flashbacks for months after, and I've exorcised those, mostly. I've told the funny bits, gestures wide, trying to make light of a night that changed who I was and my trust in the world forever, trying to make a good story out of the scared kid I was. I've tried the heroic angle, the confessional angle, the big-picture, the find-the-themes tale. I keep wanting this to be the opener for a piece about my discovery of street medicine and a new politics of triage, or part of a larger account of demonstrations, or about the conversation I had shortly afterward with a South African dissident that midwifed my perspective on matters of justice.

This should not be those, because I haven't exorcised the most selfish part of how I changed that night. Many, many people died that night, four years ago, far away from where I was. Many have, as a consequence, died since. Perspective tells me these things are the most important, that these things are, if I am decent and an activist and true to my faith, what I ought to write about, on this brutal, tragic anniversary of a war that never should have been.
My politics are concerned with those and daily, but four years ago, the political got personal. That's what I need to exorcise.

Feel this moment. Stop and look around. Somewhere, there's a bridge blockaded in my head. Somewhere, I'm still cuffed and working on an escape plan, but the daily routine gets hit, diverted, stymied, bottlenecked. Feel this moment.
I keep wanting to put it in continuity, in context, because that's what I do: stories. I keep wanting to move on down the road.
Feel this moment. Stop.

Okay:
I didn't go to jail that night at the protests for the war. Was I on the street to protest this invasion? Yes. Did I stay there because I felt that the law of morality and humanity came first, before my concern for the convenience of my neighbors, that this was a great enough wound in the world's order to merit disruption and risk-taking? Yes, of course, yes. Was I motivated by a dead grandfather whose world was turned upside-down by a US occupation that pulled out and left his homeland free of their prior oppressors, but still full of bloody, awful chaos, who I wanted to honor by trying to prevent any other children like him being forced into guerrilla war? Yes, yes, yes, peace be upon him. That was why I sat in the street. That was why I linked arms. But it was the arm-linking that made me stare down shotguns and sing at truncheons. It was the people I was with in the streets that night that made me bold enough to resist for more than eight straight hours in the cold rain, and it was eventually those same people who made me turn into another sort of activist entirely, the kind with a medical kit.
But it wasn't why I went to jail that night. I could have run away, even at the end, when we were surrounded by armored police and vehicles in phalanges two and three ranks deep. I like to think that I went behind bars for the cause, like Bonhoeffer and Berrigan and Esack and Tutu. Part of me did.

Let's get personal: I went to jail that night for a girl. Not one I particularly liked, while we're in the confessional.
One of the people at the core of the protest with me that night was a transgendered girl, a transient who was staying with some of my friends. She was deeply unbalanced, not a particularly healthy person to be around, but well-meaning. She had a lot of wild stories about a past escaping a cruel family, falling in with a cult, breaking free, moving on, finding herself on the streets, leaving behind a name she never told us. That night, over her more practical gear, under her satchel, she wore a tutu. She never did have much sense.
Let's confess: I was only a few steps out of the closet then, with anyone other than family and close friends. I had shoulder-length hair and looked fairly androgynous and didn't pass so very well even when I tried. That night, raw and haggard in a turtleneck and jeans, I looked male, and I had allowed that on purpose for protection, for privilege, to cover my ass. I still have survivor's guilt over it--but I'm getting ahead too far.

We were surrounded, two and three ranks deep, by masked men with covered names in black armor, with shotguns, with hands on canisters of pepper spray, with armored cars. I cannot tell you, if you have never looked on all borders of a space the size of a street intersection and seen this all around you, what it feels like. If you have not been there, I cannot really get across the feeling of looking at people next to you and trying to predict who will get hit first, who you might have to take a truncheon for, a bullet for, not knowing the intentions or the limits of whatever faces are behind all of that implacable, reflective plastic. I shed a lot of skin that night.

They announced, over a loudspeaker, the order to disperse. None of our guards moved; a small gap had been left on the southeast end of the box, as an escape route. The girl in the tutu got up, moved toward it, shrugged at the rest of us; it wasn't worth it to go behind bars, for her, I think. I was ready to get up and follow. She approached an officer, to ask him if that southeast gap was the way to exit, and could she disperse, as asked--I was near enough to overhear. He began to point, nod, confirm, when two more armored officers came up behind her, threw her to the ground, cut her satchel-strap and cuffed her. She was ground into the pavement as they hogtied her and carried her into a van belly-down.

I could not let her be the only one in there. Do you understand? We were the only two out trans women there, that night, in that place. She was not my friend, really, but I could not let her be the only one in there, alone. I linked arms and went nowhere; when they came for me, I stood up, I was polite, I announced the contents of my pockets and went civilly--but I went.
They split us up, as it turned out. I missed some parts that were related to me later. They put her in a cage--a cage!--first, apart from other people, poked at her, mocked her while she was under restraint. She was held out in the rain under a bridge, as I was, but for longer, and under a different bridge. Eventually, later that night, we were brought to the same precinct, where it got worse for both of us.

I keep wanting to move past the nausea and tell the bit about getting the other prisoners to sing "I Feel Pretty," the moment of queer solidarity I had in the holding cells, the way I small-town-charmed the detective who first processed me, before I was relocated. I want to tell the good bits. I want to keep my city lit up and lively.
Stop. Feel this moment.

She and I were processed one after the other. They read me as male; they read me as queer.
The sherriffs didn't stop at taking my shoelaces and my name. They cuffed me, surrounded me, and told me they would strip me down and lock me up with a rapist they had just arrested, who they described in graphic detail. They told me I would have no contact with a lawyer or the outside for at least three days, and that they could arrange this in the processing, that I would be alone in an isolated cell and they would ignore any cries for help. They told me in no uncertain terms that they would have me raped, even while I was cooperating, and they laughed. There were a lot of them, and I was alone, and they laughed. I was cold, and damp, and naive. I was very young. They did it because they could.

She was brought in after me, stripped down to her long underwear, and as they were throwing her to the ground and removing her piercings, she tried to bring up the local statutes preventing discrimination against the transgendered, the right to self-identification, hell, the right to remain silent. As they had told me, they told her these were "TV rights," and they knelt on her back and grabbed at her crotch and triumphantly announced that she was a he, and that he was a freak.

What did I think I was going to do, when I let myself be arrested? Did I think that I would be able to protect her? That my bearing witness would matter? There was that sharp, sick moment, where I tried to move, to intervene, to stop what was happening, as they dragged her in front of a medical examiner, harassed her, mocked her, shoved her around. There was that moment before I realized I was under lock and key, and being shouted at by armed people, and could do nothing to stop it. There was that moment where I contemplated the cowardice of not being beaten senseless and chose it.

There is a dull horror in watching and being able to do nothing. Maybe there's something I could have done, and I didn't. I don't know. I didn't. I froze and I choked on that feeling and did nothing. And I let it get selfish, because--
because--
It could have been me. Any other night, if I had worn a different shirt, if I had been further along, if I had--it could have been me, there. They threatened me; they carried out many of those threats on her, and I watched. I watched knowing that it very well could have been me, that for the rest of my life it could be, with no more option to hide things, soon enough. (I hear someone in my head, going, but there are laws. That kind of discrimination is illegal. Didn't you tell them?) I don't know what I thought I would accomplish, watching what they did to her, feeling it creep into me.

They locked her in a solitary cell and covered the window to isolate her completely. I was made to watch the foreign deaths that began that night on television, on repeat. Eight hours later, they let me out. Ten after that, they let her out.

There was supposed to be a suit against the bureau. She skipped town, moved on, scared, before her chance to testify. Records were, shockingly, lost, of who was on duty that night, of who was involved. The city moved on. The traffic was unblocked. Larger stories unfolded and the flurry of outrage was forgotten for a homeless, unbalanced young transsexual done wrong by people in uniform.

We never heard from her again. But let's be honest: this is a selfish exorcism. I don't know how she is, if she's even alive, but I know I'm stained, and that that night just won't wash out. No matter what stories, what themes, what global events were more important, no matter how many times I tell myself the context, no matter how many times I try to process it and get the traffic moving and get over the bridge we blocked together.

Stop.

It is spring, and the cherry blossoms are appearing, tree by tree.

Feel this moment.

not blind, but bone-deep

Bear with me here.

I am a religious person. A lot of the things about me--my words, my values, my politics--that many of you appreciate about me come out of this, even if I don't bring it up much. The answer to "what religion, then?" is extremely complicated, and that answer has changed, drastically, more than once, though it is reasonable, as far as reasonability goes, to roughly call me an ancestor venerator. I was brought up essentially as an Abrahamic agnostic, and, following a conversion experience in my early teens, wandered far, far astray.
For right now, though, there is a safe thing to say:

I am a particular devotee of the Goddess Kapo, to whom I do far too little honor, all blessings to Her.


Religious language spooks a lot of you, doesn't it?


That's okay. Part of what I want to talk about is the inherent spookiness. A lot of us scrub our Gods clean of worry and danger and terror and awe, of weirdness. A lot of us want omnibenevolence and omniscience and omnipotence from our deities, all at once, even though these things contradict, we want someone perfect who's always there and always wants for us what we think is good for us. I disagree with the notion, but I respect it, when it comes to others' faiths; I get edgy around perfection, around the absence of the uncanny.

My Kapo, Whose I am, is not scrubbed clean of danger. In Hawai'i She is called sister to the poison Gods, Red Eel-Woman, She Who Paints the Color of the Night Sky. She is invoked by dancers and by curse-flingers, and connected to uncanniness and lightning-storms and magic and often death. Her sister is the fury of a volcano and the kind of creation that burns all it touches. And when it comes down to it, it is Red Kapo Who protects that sister Pele.
Pele was nearly sexually assaulted by one of the Gods, you see, as the story goes. The volcano, She ran, the pig-God in hot pursuit. Uncanniness saves the day; as the story goes, see, Kapo detached Her vagina and sent it flying through the air to lure and distract the offending deity, drawing Him over the ocean and sending him on a wild goose chase after a humming, speeding vulva that finally hit a mountainside with such force it left a dent in the rock and a cave locals still name after Her. So She is also called Kapo-kohe-lele, Kapo of the Flying Vagina.


This is true.
It also means, by many accounts, that if an islander dreams of a woman without a vulva, it is a portent of Kapo. It means that priestesses to Kapo must either have nonstandard genitals or a blessing of protection cast over their vulvas so She will not tear at them.
This is a thing I only learned after nearly a decade of religious devotion to Red Kapo the Eel-Woman of the Storm. I made loud noises of shock, and there was a lot of laughter. After all, I didn't go looking for Her in a book; I stumbled into an initiatory ritual in a holy grotto behind a waterfall, was bowled over and awed and overwhelmed by an experience I still have trouble describing, and then did some looking to make sure that what I had seen and felt, in those moments, matched up to what I could be told about the shrine in that spot, and Whose it was, and what She was like.
For all my neglect, She still finds ways to surprise me. And ways to knock me around. And ways to look after me.


And you're probably wondering, "Does she really buy into this? Wasn't this just a rhetorical device, this 'religious devotion to oldschool Goddesses' thing, to win an argument? Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?" And I can only spread my hands and say, look, it wasn't my idea. If I were making it up, I'd come up with something much more plausible. I'd come up with a story that doesn't involve following a ghost fish to an underwater coral chapel. I'd come up with a deity you'd heard of, or claim She made me Her special anointed one, or something, or claim that teenage me, sorely lacking in emotional maturity, was instantly transformed with insight.
We found each other, and we worked something out. Gods are, among other things, ideas, and ideas need people, too.
If you want, you can take this all as metaphorical. If it makes you more comfortable. I don't really care what you call factual; I only know what's true.

And that's where we start getting at the heart of things. People often make the best metaphors about religion--metaphors about lattices of metaphors, meta-meta-metaphors--when they compare it to something else we all know well.
"How do you know what faith feels like?"
"How do you know you're in love?"
(You may have heard this elsewhere, too, with its implicit answer: "How do you know what your identity is? How do you know you're a this instead of a that?" "Well, how do you know you're in love?")
You might or might not talk to Gods who might or might not answer back. It's your business, not mine. I can't know what it's like for you, and you can't know what it's like for me. Why? Well, how do you know whether or not you're having a spiritual experience? What's the difference between doing a mundane thing like cooking or ploughing or hiking, and doing it religiously? What's the difference between a loss and a sacrifice, a poem and a hymn? How do you know you're in love?


For me, love informs my faith, and faith informs my love, see. Because I try to treat a deity with love, and hope for love in return. Not endless blessings, or miracles, or sacrificed oxen, for that matter. Love. I think of parents, and siblings; sometimes loving means not saying "yes." Sometimes loving means moving in a way that makes no sense. Sometimes love sits battered in the face of endless disappointments and confusions, but love doesn't care. Love is stupid. Love is a wonder. It has no idea how to bow to what's good for us, or nutritious, or wise; it sings another language, one full of need and connection and burning. No one can convincingly tell you what it will be like, should be like, and it's every time unique, and it never cancels out other love, different love, love elsewhere.

See?

It goes both ways. Because in love, I speak the language of religion. I say, love has sacrifices in it. I hear, if it doesn't bleed, can you trust it? Most of all, I don't expect it to make sense. Nobody can effectively say, "You can't feel that love, because it's not a good idea, because it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't follow the rules." It stays. The feeling stays, in the face of logic, of evidence to the contrary, to everything. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere made of tendons and arteries and contradictions and needs. It's a connection that doesn't care whether or not it makes sense. It's bigger than that. You're in love, or you're not. Only one way to know for sure.

I prefer a Goddess Who doesn't make sense. I prefer wondering why eels, and why someone as obsessed with getting the world to hug each other was claimed by a Goddess whose jurisdiction involves a lot of terrifying things, a sister to poison, a hisser-in-the-night. And it doesn't matter what I prefer, anyway, after all--can you decide not to be in love? I prefer a religious life that insists that multiple contradictory truths can coexist, and that the facts are another matter for other purposes, that lets the sacred stay weird.
I prefer to remember that love, like faith, is not tidy, is not a well-scrubbed construct of quartz and white light. It's a mess, a seething, toothy mess; it's worthy of awe, and terror, and wonder. It's worth bleeding for. It's something bigger than anything that can be cleaned up or discussed comfortably.
It's spooky. Certainly it's dangerous. It changes what you are by its simple presence, and by the risks and vulnerabilities it demands. It changes everything, but not how anyone expected. It connects things. And if Love conquers all, it frequently does so armed.


St. Valentine's Day's origins acknowledge this. Its Christian origin-legend is about bucking government control for romance, about risking lives to marry people forbidden their unions, about martyrdom for the sake of connections that exist and throb and grow in spite of the laws and bonds and weapons in their way. The scaffold of Lupercalia it's built on was a Roman fertility-festival involving wolf-howling priests anointing naked young men in sacrificial blood and sending them out to run the city, whipping the women they wanted to be fertile with, restoring the life of the city's foundations with death and bloodstains and outdoor, frantic, ecstatic sex. It wasn't always greeting cards and pink ribbon.



Sacred isn't always pretty, but you always know it when you feel it, the way you know your own skin. You know it the way you know you're home.
How do you know you're in love?

so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow

Well, Sylvia has got a bunch of us digging out our books of poetry to jump on the Neruda bandwagon. If you follow the links, you'll see that it's spread, after the manner of a lot of virulent cliches in a proverbially navigable medium, and so on, but it twigged me.
Pretty much once a year, my mother gives me a book of poetry, usually Latin American poetry. Our relationship was...strained, for a long time, and poetry was one of the few things we could agree on or share. I have one of her old college books from before she dropped out way back when, with her notes in the margins. She never got the degree to "prove" it, but she's got good taste in verse. So Neruda brings me to that--that difficulty, that strain for Home and connection, that you see in a lot of his pastoral stuff, because I miss the relationship I always thought I'd have with my mother, that we still strain for, without letting on to the other how hard it is. He brings me to my pulling for my roots, because if my mother and her parents hadn't worked so hard to assimilate in the U.S., I'd probably have grown up speaking Spanish along with my English, and it's always cut at me how bad my Spanish is, and loving Spanish poetry reminds me of the language's greatness and my inadequacy in the face of it and my pride at coming from the same place it does. It cuts me off from extended family, and from community; ironically, it's a big part of my mestiza identity, that voicelessness, that catch in my throat when I realize I don't know how to say what I want to say, especially when it's I'm yours.

Poetry does this.

Neruda brings me back to a girl I knew in high school, a costarricense exchange student named Andrea who tutored me in Spanish for a while. I was, of course, infatuated, and I use the word "tutored" loosely; Andrea and I would sit together in the library, a meter apart in different chairs most of the time, and read Pablo Neruda to each other, quietly, making eye contact and breaking it, shy teenagers. This was my real education in Spanish; my teachers let me sleep through class so long as I kept acing tests, and I kept acing tests so long as Andrea was willing to gently tell me that my D's were a little too hard, and should have more of a 'th' in them, or that the word I'd just read was not the usual one to use. I began to dream in Spanish. The elaborate code my best friend and I had to talk about people we were crushing on melted away because I only had one person to be breathless about.
After a while, neither of us ever really bringing up what happens between teenagers who spend hours and hours together quietly reading Neruda and making furtive eye contact, I asked her to a dance. It didn't work out. At the very end of the night, we had one dance together, and promised to never forget each other, as teenagers do, and she struggled to translate gentil in order to tell me why I wasn't like anyone else she knew. And then she went back to Costa Rica, and grew up, and I went back to the city limit, and grew up. I still think of this as one of the most fulfilling romantic experiences of my life.

Poetry does this.

As has been pointed out, Neruda has his flaws. His politics are arguable; his love poetry, often solipsistic; his personal life, full of holes; but he was a poet, through and through.
Poetry does something. I was surprised to find writing I had done called "poetry" recently; I hadn't thought of it that way when I wrote it, but as it turns out, it was read as poetry. This is important. How do you know poetry?
You know it because you read it as poetry. Napkin scribblings and fortune cookies are poetry, sometimes. Sometimes poetry comes as sonnets; sometimes it's the perfect haiku written and burned before certain death, and given to the wind; sometimes it's a record in sand. You know it because of what it does to you. You know it because of what it does in you.
It connects you to something. It connects you to your history as sure as the smell of your parents' kitchen or the song you heard once, during a moment of public shame.
Poetry connects me and my mother despite the countless times we've broken each other's hearts, and when I read her reactions to poetry from her twentysomething-age notes in the book I filched, I understand more of why that heartbreak happens. It takes me to my hilarious stint as a would-be Beatnik, reading poetry with gushing sincerity in the only late-night coffeehouse in my hometown, while I came to terms with the sorts of emotions you have to deal with, once you're old enough to read poetry with gushing sincerity. Poetry reminds me of the increasingly elaborate romantic gestures I made, fruitlessly, in my attempts to rescue my first, emotionally abusive, relationship. Poetry does this.
It connects things. You, to your history. Your history, to a great struggle. A great struggle, to a child's picture on a refrigerator. A child's picture to a ragged scar, a scar to a heartbeat, a heartbeat to a death, a death to a simple note, a note to a national breakdown. You know it when you see it. It does something in you. We want to move the planet, we need a lot of things--but we need poets, without a doubt.

With that, here's my contribution to the Neruda meme:

Absence (Ausencia)

I have scarcely left you
when you go in me, crystalline,
or trembling,
or uneasy, wounded by me
or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes
close upon the gift of life
that without cease I give you.

My love,
we have found each other
thirsty and we have
drunk up all the water and the blood,
we found each other
hungry
and we bit each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
a rose.


Apenas te he dejado,
vas en mí, cristalina
o temblorosa,
o inquieta, herida por mí mismo
o colmada de amor, como cuando tus ojos
se cierran sobre el don de la vida
que sin cesar te entrego.

Amor mío,
nos hemos encontrado
sedientos y nos hemos
bebido toda el agua y la sangre,
nos encontramos
con hambre
y nos mordimos
como el fuego muerde,
dejándonos heridas.

Pero espérame,
guárdame tu dulzura.
Yo te daré también
una rosa.

Pablo Neruda, tr. Donald D. Walsh, from "Los versos del Capitán."

e'en

The year is dead. Long live the year.
As we harvest what's left of the daylight and prepare for the dark time ahead, let us put up stores of joy and comradeship and family, of sex and storytelling and just causes, of reunions and friendly partings and every last glowing sunset of this sunset of the year.
Put them up and hold them tight, and remember that while at the year's darkest we open presents, that's just to tide us over for the opening of the brand new spring to come, just a little longer, just a little longer.
Let us remember those gone before us, and let them go kindly and with love, even as we hold close those still with us. And let us not forget that it's just before the leaves fall that they break out in breathtaking color.
It's time for warm ovens and woodsmoke, for shivering and shuddering, for candlelight and moonlight, for sleet and wind and the shaking of the secure. It's time for quaking. It's time to cover some faces and show others brighter. It's time for losses and lessons.
Honor to our ancestors and our beloved deceased. May our holidays be just chill enough to bring us closer together.

on roses and postscripts

When I was in junior high, I volunteered at a local museum--worked with animals, taught tracking classes, showed kids how to pan for gold and make apple cider, all that. There was a boy there I didn't get along with so well, name of Charlie; we worked together on the newsletter and frequently stepped on each other's toes, because we were both pompous and smart and had something to prove.
Some time later, clean-cut Charlie and I were in high school together. We'd evolved; Charlie was an overweight goth who loved to shock people, and I was just going into my beatnik phase--you know, crying at the end of "The Dharma Bums," black turtlenecks, poetry readings at the local cafe, leather jacket, the works. We traveled in different circles, but for one: Charlie was out to some of us as gay, and I was eventually out to a very few people as bi. And it drove me crazy; Charlie always pushed the limits, one step past far enough, and I always argued that his shock tactics made him and the rest of us look bad. I'd argue quietly with straight friends for queer rights, and share the bed with the gay guy in choir on school trips, to show everyone he was okay. Charlie, meanwhile, would be shaving off his eyebrows, using the women's bathroom, coming to school in a skirt. I stopped being known as the smart kid--I was the poetic kid, now. And Charlie was, proudly, the freak.
We worked together, for a while, founding a student forum. Our principal came weekly; he was a good man, and listened to us when we had ideas about school policy or told him something wasn't working. The popular, elected leadership kids put on assemblies; Charlie and I and a few others were the ones the administration actually listened to. After the Columbine and Springfield shootings, they put us on statewide TV as an example of how a student body should take care of its own--and, in fact, one boy told me once, in private, that he'd been pondering a copycat shooting himself, but felt the forum gave him a voice and a feeling of having earned respect, and he was finding his way in the world. The house that Charlie and I built, albeit uneasily, meant something, and we went to other schools teaching them to do the same, and advised principals from neighboring towns by the end of the year. It was good-cop-bad-cop: Charlie, the Marilyn Manson fan, pushed the envelope, drew in those who wouldn't have listened otherwise; I, the clean-cut distance runner and theater kid, would orate for a while in the middle ground, looking more reasonable; stuff got done. Charlie helped a lot of kids, but I usually got the attention. I was the photogenic one, after all. I tried, with false teenage magnanimity, to be his apologist sometimes.
We were both overcompensating.
Charlie didn't show up at school for a while, senior year, but that wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the content of the card I got from the principal in class, the morning after I'd won the local Rotary's award for community service. In it he congratulated me, and told me I'd do well next year at college, and expressed his confidence in my future. At the end:

"PS-- I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie."

I walked out of class in a daze, spent the day holding people who were crying, arguing with the vice-principal until he was finally browbeaten past his lame excuses into lowering the flag to half-staff for five minutes--it'd been down for a whole day, a few weeks before, for an alumnus of the high school who'd died in a helicopter crash. We began to hear details: Charlie had run away to Portland, had been there for a while, and that's why we hadn't seen him lately. Charlie was a street kid. Charlie was hanging out at a local youth shelter, getting his life together. Charlie was taking estrogen. Charlie had died of a heroin overdose.
First try. Just tried the junk once. Bad batch or something. An OD.
Days later I spoke at the memorial service. His family talked about how he was a good Christian boy, and glossed over who he'd been for the past few years. His friends talked about how they missed him. A piece of a film he'd been making with other street kids was screened.
I spoke about how crazy Charlie drove me. How his constant envelope-pushing got on my nerves and made me uncomfortable. And how we'd all been lucky for it, because Charlie being Charlie made it possible for all the rest of us to fly under the radar, to stay safe, to build bridges for ourselves and live our own lives because he was drawing the fire toward himself. And how I missed him, more than I'd ever expected to.
It was the first memorial service I had ever attended. We all wished we'd been there, in those last few days, in those last few hours. Known how bad it was. PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie.

Charlie was the first transgendered person I ever met, even though I didn't know it at the time, because I'd never heard of such a thing, such a possibility. I wasn't safe enough to tell, anyway; I couldn't be trusted with it. I only use the pronouns I do because those were the ones I knew, and I was informed later that he was using both standard sets interchangeably up till the end. PS. PPS.

Tonight I went down to a local youth center to see a presentation on certain medical procedures relevant to the trans community. I was dressed conservatively--sweater over collared shirt, blue jeans, clean, sensible boots, hair pinned halfway up--in a room full of punks, suits, tattoo queens, physicians. As I was mingling after the question-and-answer session, I saw something pinned to the wall--a piece of paper, with a poem dedicated to Charlie, two dates after his name. I pulled back. Next to the poem, a lock of his hair, pinned to the wall. And a board next to that, with messages dedicated to him. And above that, a big black-and-white photo. And more notes and poems and photos near those. "I miss you" and "we love you" and everything else--a whole wall, interspersed with photos and blessings for another community member, also deceased. They called him "Charlie Rose". Apparently it was a name he'd chosen.
This was where he'd gone. This place had been his new home, and it had been full of new friends. I asked someone in attendance if they'd known him, and they said no, but they knew people who had, and they'd heard "the story"--they spoke in reverent tones, as though it was a sacred legend.
Charlie was known and loved in that place, and missed when he had passed on. He hadn't had to hide.
And yet, inescapably, he had also died alone, at the business end of a desperate needle, and his friends and enemies back home had to hear it over the loudspeaker because none of us had the means to find out personally.

Charlie was--
Charlie was--
PS--Charlie was more brave, then, than a seventeen-year-old me could comprehend being. I was hiding in the bathroom at two in the morning, applying makeup clumsily, scrubbing it off, hating myself, feeling so alone and frightened and freakish that I didn't know what to do but huddle under my covers and shake. I went to school in the day with my buzzed hair and cracking knuckles and photogenic fakery, and I looked down on Charlie-who-would-be-Rose for daring to exhibit a boldness of expression I couldn't even have the courage to dream of. We both lived in fear, but Charlie met it head-on; badly, perhaps, clumsily, ham-handedly. But head-on. I maneuvered. I ran. I shoved it down and prayed and prayed it would go away.
PS--I tried to distance myself from someone I could have known better and who could have known me because I was frightened of guilt by association. I saw that fear and beauty and depth in him and I ran from it because I couldn't take it, and I complained about him aloud in order to make myself seem more normal.
PS--I didn't know Charlie was my friend--I didn't know I was Charlie's friend--until I saw those words. I was sorry to hear about the death of your friend Charlie. I didn't know how much of a damn I gave until I nearly wept, reading at that memorial service, in front of all of Charlie's Sunday-school teachers and every goth in Central Oregon, and I didn't know why because I was that good at lying.
PS--I was sorry to hear about the death of my friend Charlie.

We were sisters, Charlie Rose. We were sisters and we never knew it because we were stupid damn teenagers too busy with ourselves to look at each other and say, you could be someone I could know like myself. We were so busy preventing school shootings and proclaiming on TV that communication was good for young people and so were vitamins and homework, that we never knew.
We could have been there for each other.
Charlie, if I'd been brave enough to be your sister, I could have been there for you.
I can't tell you how much it meant to me to know that, even in that last, lonely moment, you were loved in this town that you and I both ran away to, this city that eats our hometown's freaks and outcasts and sometimes spits them out later knowing themselves better.
You weren't the only one. You weren't the only one and I wasn't the only one and I miss you, you brave, stupid, exhibitionist bastard. You helped me without even meaning to, years after I'd stopped sparing you a thought, years after I, too, had kicked off the pumice dust of the desert that raised us and come here to Portland. And there you were, on a wall.
I miss you.

May you pass peacefully into the distant West, my fallen sister, and rest in loving arms. May you at last know peace.


Goodnight.