I
. A scream on the border of consciousness. I feel the desire to vomit. You only talk about yourself, they say. I want to say something tender, but something else comes out (desire, vomit). They hang up on me. That’s the first time they’ve done something like that. The time between us grows unbearable. I wonder how you can go, in a month, from ineffable love to even more ineffable estrangement. You feel an instant and incandescent recognition, and then: a slow heatdeath of the heart. I go to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror, hit myself in the face until the room starts to spin, dry heave into the toilet, reapply my eyeliner. Earlier we were talking about surgeries, who would do my tits, whether I wanted a pussy, how I didn’t want to do anything to my face (I love that you look like a Jewish woman, they say. So much facial feminization surgery is just a grotesque Aryanization procedure. It makes me think of the undercover agent in Man in the High Castle, I say, reaching for my mask). I read a sentence: “When we trace back our wound to its root it becomes unwound.” I go outside to smoke a cigarette. I’ve become impossible, I think. Dysphoria settles into the pit of my stomach for days. Intentions are worthless, they say. What you do every day should be able to be written down and copied by someone else. I go inside and watch porn and think about being the girl with the ahegao face, her tongue sticking out, a supplicant for cum, an acolyte of degraded pleasure. I wonder why I’m so attached to degradation and I decide it has something to do with a species memory, a species desire. To seek pleasure, to counter shame, they say. When we speak, I burst into tears, for no reason. It’s getting on their nerves. You’re self-pitying, they say. I think of a blank page. I think of a future without me, without my memory, even. I think of the hospital ward where the poet without papers is dying, abandoned and alone. Occult conspiracies pass me by: hallucinations of hiveminds, sinister puppeteers, protocols, etc. And yet he keeps on dying, all the same. There’s the memory of snow, of fireflies. Saudade, they say. Duende, I say. Sehnsucht, they say. Yes, I know that one, too. Hiraeth, they say. What’s that? It’s Welsh. The Matrix was about being trans, Thomas Anderson is a deadname that only the cops use (Anderson = androgen), the red pill is spironolactone, etc. American Psycho was anti-capitalist. Fight Club was an anti-fascist manifesto. The entirety of the nineties, of our childhood, cracks up in the entropy of history, is plagiarized and forgotten. Our white blood cell count is elevated. The world is an infection. You went to the river three times to fall in love, once in the summer, twice in the winter: an eerie blue cinematic ice. Why would you not have gone with the one you wanted, they say, the one for whom you felt that primal sexual attraction? Twice you went with the other one, and you left her behind by the river in Cambridge at night. They were best friends, one was blonde and the other had black eyes, and you loved them five years apart. I went with the one with whom I could dream, I say, unhelpfully. Sex is one thing, and a dream is another. A dream, they say, equals codependency. A dream equals not being able to recognize yourself in the mirror. A dream equals anhedonia, anorgasmia, alexithymia. I never had the chance to dream, they say, so I don’t understand what you mean by the word. The chance to dream? Reality took up all my time, they say (even my hallucinations were real). Reality and sickness, reality and cruelty. The problems of the world are not your problems, they say. Fixing them will not help you. We are a product of generations of trauma and a lifetime we don’t even remember most of. What happened in our mother’s belly. The world we’ve always lived in, everyone we’ve loved, lost, everyone who has ever hurt us. It all lives inside us. A war is coming, they say, whether we like it or not. A war is coming, it’s a war birthed from the memory of another war, an older war. What will we do after?, I say. After what?, they say. After the war. We’ll turn over in bed, they say, and reach for the no one beside us. We’ll look out the window. We’ll seek the pale warmth of the sun. We’ll decide to stay in bed a little while longer. I fall asleep with otherworldly tears in my eyes.
II
. You can lose everything, and, even when you think you’re already lost it all, you can lose more.
. You can lose your health, a vision of a utopian past, safety with another (the paradoxical safety of the paleozoic sea), a friendship of ten years, the entire memory of childhood, the entire romance of youth. You can become a scapegoat, a schizoid tranny, an epiphanic orphan, a writer who disappears (not just your body but your archive, as if disappearance had been the cognitive structure of your language all along). You can die, painfully and alone, and be forgotten.
. Anything is possible when it comes to loss, when it comes to entropy, when it comes to leaving…
. Oxygen, Em said, is a poison, like everything else we need to live. Ten minutes without oxygen and you’ll die, but one hundred years with oxygen and you’ll die, too. Oxygen gets you high, as if organic life itself were a kind of intoxication. Oxygen’s a weird molecule, it bonds to everything, it’s led to a mass extinction event, which some call the Oxygen Revolution and others call the Oxygen Catastrophe, as if revolution and catastrophe were inseparable, even on the planetary level, as if revolution and catastrophe were matters of perspective, which they are, I suppose.
. You tell a story in which trauma becomes the story-teller, the bard of your broken nervous system. It’s a story about a cat, about waking up one morning to your girlfriend telling you there’s something wrong with your cat, and you walk into the living room and you see your cat’s back legs are paralyzed, and you break down weeping, because you know he’s going to die, but your girlfriend, who’s insensate to pain and for whom pain is inadmissible (because it would be a mirror of a disavowed inner world, a world like a snowglobe, a world under water), thinks it’s not a big deal, and you end up in at the emergency animal hospital, where you have to put your cat down, you have to watch your cat die, and there are tears, tears in the lobby and the street, tears in a swimming pool, tears over a bottle of pisco that you share while talking to your friends in Chile, and then the story itself becomes drunk, becomes a traumatic brain injury, and your girlfriend leaves in the middle of the night, you don’t think to ask why, and she doesn’t come home, the next day you’re trying to find her, calling her family, friends you’ve never met, and it turns out she’s in jail, she’d taken your childhood friend’s SUV to pick him up at the airport, which makes no sense to you, but nothing is making sense anymore, and she’d flipped that SUV off an exit ramp, and there are injured bodies and serious legal charges, but she’s delirious on the phone, saying she’s helping all the inmates get lawyers, it’s a good thing she’s in there because they need her legal counsel, it’s like entryism, it’s like the only way to be a revolutionary is to go to prison, and you don’t realize until six months later, even though all the signs were obvious, that your girlfriend had been cheating on you for years with your childhood friend, you see them biking down the street one night when you’re coming home from a bar, and that’s when it hits you, because that’s how the two of you would bike around Oakland, with a sad and aimless hedonism, and you go home and start the process of drinking yourself into the hospital and you buy a knife and some makeup, you paint your nails, you make death threats, and that’s the beginning of your transition, though you don’t know it at the time.
. I don’t understand, Em says, why you forgive your ex, and you hate your friend, who’s always been a kind of abusive solipsistic dick, just another white man, when for me it would be the opposite, the person who was supposed to love you, to be your ally in a world that hates you, to protect you in the extremes of your anguish, protect your heart no matter what, who abandons you for the enemy, that’s the person who’s a monster to me, that’s the person I would hate. I don’t expect better of the enemy, but I do of the person I love, even if it’s been the ones I love who’ve betrayed me over and over again, who’ve hurt me most, who brought me to the brink of death. It’s because when I love someone, I say, when I let them into my heart, I love them forever, they remain there like a cancerous flower, I keep alive like a vestal priestess the paradisiacal image of who they were at their best, it lives within me, the pain they caused me only enhances my devotion to that image, which I know is an image, it doesn’t matter that it’s an image, because all we are is a series of actions, a series of events, a confused cornucopia of appearances, one thing after another, one season after another, an eternal summer, a secret winter inside that summer, certain words you can never forget, even if you tried, but you don’t want to try, because the past is nothing but a regret and an angelic hallucination, it’s one or the other, and both at the same time.
. They abandoned a child, they let a child get lead poisoning, Em says, so they could play pretend revolutionaries. They’re miserable alcoholics. Your friend uses leftism on some quixotic quest for pussy and meaning. He spends his days online defending the CCP and concentration camps for Uighurs. He sucks the dick of the state, he sucks the dick of authority, he sucks the dick of Daddy Proletariat, he sucks Xi Jinping’s dick, he sucks Evo Morales’ dick, he sucks the dick of the clerics of Iran, he sucks the canonical dick of all the patriarchal Marxists who’ve ever written a book or had a monopoly on violence. He plays a phantasmagoric board game in his head, one of those board games played by the incels of history where the Nazis never lost or in which the tanks of the Red Army remain forever in an amber of shit and inertia. And your ex is worse, because she’s smarter than he is, and because she should know better, but in reality it doesn’t matter what we should know, we do what we want to do. We hurt the people we hurt because we don’t care about them, because their pain doesn’t matter to us, ultimately, at the end of the day, no matter what stories we tell ourselves, no matter what we believe ourselves to be.
. In transition, you will lose everyone, or almost everyone. Your closest friend will go to Cuba and when he comes back he wants to tell you about how your art is disturbing and how his girlfriend thinks you’re a bad person, and you suspect her of having hated you in the past for reasons that are inscrutable and dumb and have nothing to do with you, and hating you now even more for transitioning, since it allows you to get away from her static and negative image of you, and even gives you some glamor and a higher degree of slave-morality virtue. He’ll say Reinaldo Arenas writes beautiful books, but all it amounts to is Color Revolution propaganda, unfortunately, and you’ll think why can’t you just love art for its own sake, why can’t something be beautiful for its own sake, why can’t something be disturbing for its own sake, why does it matter where it fits into some universal puzzle, as if such a thing existed, when in fact we’re all incommensurate, we’re all too much, all of us would end up like Reinaldo Arenas if we were committed to being inviolably ourselves, enemies of all states, ill and abandoned, the persecuted and defamed faggots of reality. In transition, you will lose all your tankie friends, and you’ll fall back into the arms of the antipsych anarchist weirdos, the queer and sick and neurodivergent freaks, who hate shame, who aren’t afraid of fucking or fighting or dying.
. The people who accompany you at the beginning of your transition will be nightmare figures. A psycho transphobe who claim you stole their cunt, that your transness is a fetish for femme trauma, who prophesy your violent death in the most overwrought language, as if abuse itself were a kind of bad poetry. A chaser Canadian girl, a failed artist with untreated BPD, who uses you for the thrill of being the first one to fuck a trans girl and to get back at her husband, and titillate him, too (her husband’s a semi-famous UFC fighter with incurable cuckold fantasies, he’s over the hill, he was over the hill as soon as his career began, he keeps falling in the rankings, he trashes the house in a rage, he doesn’t understand what’s happening to him: a Kerouac homosexual, a sad and sordid figure out of a macho twentieth-century American novel) (she’s also the last one with whom sex will feel good, good in the way sex was good before transition, when you could still ejaculate, still top, still penetrate in a state of absolute disassociation). A New Age therapist who gives you massive doses of drugs for your “spiritual illnesses” when you’re recently out of a detox hospital, who holds you and tells you she loves you and says it’s okay if you want to masturbate, who inserts herself between you and your own body, your own self-knowledge, your own power. And many others, who wish you were dead or who want to use you in a way that’s sexual but also not about sex at all.
. You will learn to walk with tits, upright (Em will give you a lesson while you’re on your way to the corner store to buy cigarettes). You will learn to look strangers in the eye. You will realize that when everyone wants you dead, nothing they think about you really matters. You will begin to see the continuum between those who want you dead and those who refuse to see you, or who see you in villainizing or reified or fetishy ways. During sex, you will shut down at the slightest intimation of pleasure, as if you were walking alone on the surface of another planet at night, a planet with no sun and no language. You’ll get monkeypox and you’ll read a zine called Fucking Trans Women and you’ll buy some new sex toys and you’ll slowly discover what it is to be a body, and you’ll know that nothing will ever again be the same.