Remember when we met? I thought I would die, but you saved me. You told me to run, and I did. And I lived. And I loved you for it.

I was meant to obey you. Tell me to run, to give it my all, I run and I give it my all and you save me. That's the deal we made. You were supposed to save me.

My part i easy. I pump and thump and keep a steady rhythm as life rushes around me. I never sleep, I never stop. I keep my steady beats until you are here. Then, without your telling me a word, I start going faster. Then faster. Then faster yet. I show off. For you. It's all for you. I can't keep up.

Then, you look my way and tell me to go. And I race off. Faster and faster. I race and beat and rumba and salsa and tango and pump and dab. A look from you and I rest. You tell me when it's calm. And you leave me beating my relentless drum, missing you.

I lived for the times you looked at me. Now, I'll stop for them.

The machines they attached keep me beating regular. I can't control my own rhythm, my own life. I can't see your face, I can't feel anymore. I'm getting tired. And one day...

I'll give up.

It'd be so easy... I just drift...

But I think I hear you. I think that's you! It is! If only!

Last chance. I race and race and race until there's no more life to rush around. I'll see you once more.

There!... You!...

You are a human thief named Babs. You have left home with a pack of basic supplies (bed roll, flint, fishing line, various fish hooks, spices, a beat-up metal bowl, a spoon, some rope, several knives, a lockpick set, and a makeup set). Your plan is to make your way in the world, but if anyone presses and you're in your cups, you might admit you were sent from home for stealing a neighbor's heirloom brooch (your fifth such theft, first capture). You've been on your own for two weeks following a river when it becomes clear that you've grown bored and want to put your brilliant mind to use in your next great caper.

You know that there are two large towns where you can find fools, jewels, and tools. Capricus is the closer of the two, approximately fifty miles due north-northeast. You know that there is a festival to happen soon. Strangers and chaos are the perfect covers for vice. Steren is a few miles further but to the south. Here, you know, is a thieve's guild headquarters where you could get formal training and improve your skills, but not much opportunity for brilliant capers because cities with a thieve's guild tend to pay for theft protection. Crossing the guild isn't worth even the prettiest of baubles.

Do you head north, south, or stay where you are?

Three sets of dark blue eyes under untidy blond hair, filled with intelligence and an active imagination. Different personalities, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes- all encapsulated in brilliant minds with great potential.

One has a tendency to doubt herself and to avoid failure by never trying. Another feels so passionately that she throws furniture and cries desperately and believes and says the worst things. The youngest is belligerent and has a perverse sense of humor.

Children of divorce, they are familiar with the disappointment and disruption of having two lives. The cognitive dissonance of hearing such negative things about someone you love and who is kind and loving to you causes confusion and distress in young, developing minds, but their childlike wonder of the world and selfish enjoyment of love given heal most wounds.

The next generation is the future. And after them, the next and the next and the next. Each generation gives something new- each child is a product of their circumstances and the world they inhabit. In each generation, there is progress and a desire to do better than their parents.

That's why, for these three children, I give them all the love, all the guidance, and all the hope that I can. I'm the future for my parents, the present to my siblings, and the aunt to the future.

Your eyes drown me,

Suffocate slowly.

Your arms hold me

Kaa holding Mowgli.

Your voice whispers

Shouts violently.

Your hair in bed

Traps me to you.

Your ring binding

Promising a life.

Your words love me

Sharply- Et tu, Brute?

Your fingers caress

Bruise and squeeze.

Your legs waltzing

In, out, away and back.

Your lips weave words,

Thin, hard, demanding.

Your smile greeting,

Ask “why so serious?”

Your chest strong safe

Impossible to crack.

Your love- my best

yet my worst place.

People have started to think I’m strange. They look at me funny and avoid me in the streets. I can hardly blame them. I spend all my time with their dying loved ones writing notes to you, trying to express everything I can’t say to any of them. You are my solace. I find comfort in your letters that I have not found anywhere else.

Not everyone is upset with the time I spend with the dying. The families are unnerved, but the dying are grateful. The woman I am seated with now smiled when I spoke of you. She said that my stories helped her embrace the unknowable. Everyone thinks you are unknowable. We tell our children to write letters to the tooth fairy, to Santa, to the Easter Bunny, but no one has thought to write to you. You’re just too real, I guess. So you’re unknowable.

I certainly didn’t expect a response the first time I wrote you. Most people would’ve written to Heaven, I think. But I don’t know if such a place exists, and if it does, it certainly doesn’t touch this place, nor did it touch my mother. And I certainly wasn’t going to write to Hell. You remember how I asked you how my mom felt there in the end? If she died in peace and if she loved me? I feel so young just thinking about it. I was so naive then.

Then again, if I hadn’t been naive, I wouldn’t have written to you, so I’m grateful. I remember you said I was special. Most people don’t write to Death, you wrote, and those that do are angry, vengeful. I remember the stories you shared about the people who complained, who complained and railed against fate and life and fairness. I remember that you were impressed with the maturity with which I accepted your part in all of this.

In fact, I am more comfortable with you than with Life. You have said that you are just a part of Life. You told me to keep holding on, that my time wasn’t there yet, that I need to live. I thought you would understand. But perhaps, I do understand. You know everyone in the end except perhaps yourself. You will never die. You will never know what it’s like for your existence to end. Perhaps that is why you encourage me to continue.

Still, I took your advice and I asked the woman at whose bedside I’m writing you. She said that the one thing that she loved most about death was that it meant that she didn’t have to struggle with her body any more. She believes that after death, she’ll go to Heaven, where she’ll see her husband, her parents, and her stillborn son. You know that struck a familiar chord.

It was harder to ask the other question. She told me that the thing she loved most about life were the connections she made between people: just that day, she said, a young man here in the care facility who was having a terrible day. She told him to sit down, that she needed him to listen to her. She felt like that day, she had made someone else’s day better. That’s what she loved about life, she said: having those moments where you can help someone or have them help you.

She said that she wouldn’t have rather she died sooner or with her husband. She said that every day since her husband died, she had made a difference in someone’s life or had someone make a difference in hers, and sometimes both. She wouldn’t trade that for another day with a loved one, she said, even with the pain of the cancer slowly eating up her body.

I know why you wanted me to ask those questions. I know you want me to prolong this conversation as long as possible. But I want that moment to come when you take me to whatever follows this life. I fantasized taking this woman’s place. If she were to have another chance, another body to live in, she would make a difference in the world. That’s what she does, who she is. I fantasized that we could switch bodies, that I could give her more years.

Dark thoughts pop into my head when I’m not looking. When I’m on high places, I feel my body pulling me over the edge. I’m not afraid of heights like I tell my coworkers; I’m trying to stop my body from pulling me over the edge. Other times, I let my body get so close. I can almost feel the fall.

My knives help concentrate that feeling. It helps me control it; I can feel the desire to fall drain out of me with the beautiful red. I know now how to control the fall. That time you left the first note, you almost took me, you said. I’ve gotten better since then. Not because of the psychiatrist they made me see, but because of your note. And the ones we have exchanged since.

If we were to find each other in a bathroom again, would you take me now? Would you accept that it was my time? Haven’t I lived enough? Haven’t I lost enough? The only thing I look forward to are your notes. I wish that someone would fall ill and die so you can visit and leave another envelope with my name written in the fanciest cursive. I hate myself for wishing that on others.

I hate myself for wishing and wondering and fantasizing. I hate myself for not dying when I should have, for not leaving this world when my babies did. I hate myself for all the times I wished I could be different, move on, be okay and I hate myself for the days that I am okay. How can I ever be okay? My babies died. My love kills people. My mother, my father, my boyfriend, my husbands, and then my babies.

No one survives me except me.

But you understand that, don’t you?

You know everyone eventually. You just knew me longer than most.

Yours,

Ruth

I wake surrounded by sensations. A mild painlike sensation aches in my groin area. I become aware of white and lighting. A pressure in my arm, my finger. I'm not alone. Someone is leaning on my bed, others are close. I hear a muffled conversation. I can't quite understand what they are saying.

My senses gradually make sense. The white, the lighting, the pressure, the people around me. It's my mom leaning on the bed and the pressure in my arm is the UV, and I have a finger monitor. I hear odd bits of words, "school," "changes," "work," "what do we call," "big change." The bits make more and more sense, but I'm uncomfortable.

That aching in my groin is the only thing I haven't understood. I remember when my dad was in the hospital. It wasn't long ago and I can still remember his waking up complaining. He needed to go to the bathroom. He wanted the tubes out. They hurt, he said. The nurses and my mother told him to just relax and pee in bed. He tried to get out of bed multiple times (unsuccessfully- the drugs really did a number on him). He mumbled over and over how he was uncomfortable and how he needed to go to the bathroom. It was all he said and all he could think of.

"You're awake!" My mom looks funny. She's been crying and looks stretched. The rest of the family surround me. Dad says something I can't quite get. He's dad, so it was funny, and I smile. There's my sister. She's angry at something. I'm too tired to want to know what it is she says. I can't care when I'm like this. My brother's not there. I wonder if he couldn't make it. It must have been an emergency, this procedure. I can't remember there being anything wrong with me.

I try to speak, try to ask them what's going on, but my mouth doesn't cooperate. My lips barely seem to move and I croak instead of talk. Mom looks around her.

"Do you want an ice cube?"

I want water, but I'm not sure if water would choke me. I'm not sure I can control myself enough right now. I hate feeling so weak. I nod. She feeds me the ice cube, dropping freezing cold water on my chin by accident. I shiver. It's so cold. Freezing.

I do my best to ask with my face what's going on. Why am I in a hospital? Why do I feel so strange? My family exchanged glances that only fed the fuel. What was going on here?

My mom clears her throat. "We had to do it to save your life. That's the reason."

Did what? I couldn't understand. Why hadn't she just told me. I hate suspense. In my passion, I forget that I have ice in my throat and it flies out of my mouth as my jaw tightens in anger. I try to shoo the helpful hands away and push the hand away that was trying to give me another piece of ice.

"What?" I croak. "Do what?"

She sighs, but she's the indicated one to tell me. The others support her, but they don't speak up. "You're a boy now."

I shake my head. No! There are plenty of explanations for the ache in my groin. Sure, I suddenly realized that the ache seemed to be outside of my body, or what used to have been the limits of my body. I could feel blood pumping in a place that before nothing had occupied. But that was a catheter. It was a ghost sensation. It wasn't...

I don't want to be a guy. I don't want to be a guy. The thought resounded. In fact, it didn't seem like any thought I'd ever had before. It was like an impulse or instinct. I squeezed my eyes shut as tears continued to flow. I don't want to be a guy.

My eyes open. A light from the window shines warmth onto me and I see, not a hospital like I thought, but my dorm room. I don't want to be a guy. I saw my minion poster, my wardrobe, my desk. No family, no surgery; I was alone and as I always was. I threw the blankets from my body and saw my usual Eeyore pajamas. I don't want to be a guy.

Tears ran down my cheeks and I was startled by the horror and disgust and betrayal I felt from a dream! It was a bizarrely strong sensation that I'd never experienced before. It brought up memories. One of my best friends from elementary to high school disappeared after graduation and next I knew, she was he. He'd communicated with other friends, but not me. I still don't know why, but I don't have his information to talk to him. I've never interacted with him as a man, so he remains a girl to me. It's hard to rewrite memory. I'm still sorry the relationship didn't continue.

My relationship with the trans movement is complicated. My objection to the movement is its part in a larger message that we should define ourselves and our relationships by our sex, (not meaning by being male or female, but by sexy sex). The changes a trans person makes are to sexual organs (asides from breasts, which is a topic for another time). We talk about relationships and persons as if we are all about sex. In media and self-help and pretty much every thing I read and see, suggestions abound about sex lives.

It seems that if a partner isn't into the other partner's kink, that's it for the relationship. If things are "boring in the bedroom," that's the relationship over and done. You have to make sure that the sex is good. Kisses need to be fireworks or you've never been kissed. I could name genres of movies, books, TV shows, and countless other means that the message has been transmitted that love is sex and sex is love. I vehemently disagree. I am not defined by the kind of sex I am or am not having!

Looking specifically at the trans movement, the literature seems to equate their identity with their sexed body. I personally don't see how changing their appearance, their breasts, and/or sexual organs changes anything fundamentally about themselves. I don't always conform to my gender and I certainly didn't growing up. It took many years for me to accept my body as part of who I was. My identity is always in flux as I continue to change, so I don't understand arguments that say that matching the body to one's identity is necessary.

Objections stated, I believe in the right to choose. I believe that if someone wants to change themselves, they have the right to do so despite any objections. I also believe that we do not have a right to be cruel to other people when they disagree or however they identify themselves. Cruelty is never warranted. I am especially disappointed at cruelty in the name of religion, which seems the greatest hypocrisy of them all.

When I woke up in tears, I realized that I do identify myself as a woman. I always thought that I'm me, and I am more than body or gender, although I inhabit my body and "woman" describes me in the way that "polygon" describes several geometric shapes. I had complained about the nuisance of having boobs, a menstrual cycle, no pockets on pants, and all that girl stuff. But now... now I realized that for all the nuisance, I didn't want it to be any other way. I don't want to be a guy. That truth still echoes somewhere in my head and it helps me understand a little bit better.

#trans #transgender #identity #nonfiction #dream #SocialCommentary

I met him on vacation in Dublin. My first impression of him was that he was totally average. When he spoke, however, his voice twisted and twirled and curled in my ears like an expert dancer.

My charms are often resistable, so I was pleasantly surprised when he took notice of me. Apparently, an American in Dublin is exotic enough to warrant attention, especially with my Native American heritage. I avoided his questions about tribes and spoke instead of the oppression if "my people." Being Irish, he found similar experiences in his ancestry.

I loved to hear him talk, and I soon found myself curled around him, my ear pressed to his chest to better hear his voice. 

I kept him from getting thirsty or curious. By then, I was already a master of deflection.

His name was Jamie. I told him my name was Veronica Saint, and that I was travelling to scratch items off my bucket list after a bad breakup. Both half-truths, as you know, but I didn't want him to know about me.

We spent the night together. Try not to be too shocked. Think of what I had been through and try not to think too poorly of me.

The next day, I set out to check off the next item from my list: get drunk from whiskey at an Irish pub.

I believe it's called nursing a drink when you take forever to finish, but I don't know what it's called when, even after an hour, you've not even taken a sip.

I hated myself for the strange line that I had drawn. Somehow, my scruples would not allow my taking a drink of alcohol, despite what had happened the night before. I had sworn to myself never to become like my father, and apparently that oath was worth more than the oath of fidelity and chastity.

I hated myself, and I hated God, and I hated Richard. My loathing was interrupted by a hand on my lower back. I reacted on impulse by jeering my elbow back into a man's gut.

I fell over myself apologizing when I recognized Jamie. And because I was already in the middle of extreme emotions, I started to cry; to sob, in fact. And when he pulled himself back up, I buried my face in his shirt.

He turned to the bartender to ask him how much I'd had, and I could tell he didn't believe the man when he told Jamie that he hadn't seen me take even a sip of my whiskey.

He led me to a table in back, probably to avoid the embarrassment of having a woman sobbing into his shirt. He started talking, trying to soothe me and calm me down. I sobbed out about how dare Richard die and leave me so alone? I sobbed out what was probably my life story up to that point. And, at the end, he told me to breathe, and asked if I was hungry, then ordered food for us.

I don't know what prompted him to stay. I don't know why he didn't run at first chance, but he helped cheer me up, and even told some truly awful jokes that had me smiling again.

I nevery saw him again after I went home, and I never got his last name or an address or anything useful, so I had no way to tell him when I found out about you.

Take comfort knowing he was a good man. Know he was kinder to me than a lot of people would've been.

Please forgive me.

I love you.

Mom