this post’s featured image is by Dusty Ray (@sloppjockey on Twitter)
CONTENT WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF BODY HORROR & GORE
Your body is on loan let me remind you. This time last year you were in the hospital too. Better circumstances. Better view. You went under one way and came out different. Everyone said you had a glow. New beauty unearthed. Flat chest tall posture. The threads you weave your future out of turned from silver to gold to copper. Electric. Where are you now? Who’s that in the mirror?
Last night you stood up on your strong legs and went to daub your eyes. Your flesh came away in sheafs of pulp fiction and you laughed. You laughed. A few days back, your mother said [] and you went quiet. You’re vain, too. Mirror mirror on the wall.
The place where your skin sloughed off shined at you in the barren light of the bathroom. A red lake. You tilted your face from side to side and did not touch. Your face a map of Mars in less than a week. You eroticize the grotesque and it keeps you sane. Remember your first Clive Barker story? Nightbreed? Objectively a bad film but you love it. Same with Tarsem Singh’s the Cell. There’s a handful of bad movies you live and die by. It makes you the kind of person who can survive the terrible split second when you realize you are alone in a room. By your own hand you are.
Anyways, Nightbreed. Boone with his sexual dysfunction and his girlfriend who pinned him to the hetero-nightmare future she thought she needed. How instead of just trying men he let himself be torn apart by his shrink and annihilated by mounties. In the hospital scene he pulls back the curtain on Narcisse, a paranoid dirtbag with lank, greasy curls who seems to oscillate between seduction and repulsion.
“They’re coming for me,” says Narcisse. “I need my true face to be ready.”
Boone and the audience know and fear what Narcisse intends to do. The scene ends with Narcisse tearing his face open along the jawline. He demands Boone look at him, his voice a twisted maze of orgasmic ecstasy and abject terror.
You look at the pitted red mask in the mirror and remember that. When you sleep you dream of the subaltern made literal. Rachel and her daughter in the dark. Baphomet reaches for you and you pull away.
You’re not mine, you say.
Nor are you mine, it says, and reaches for you again.
The original plan had been to drive down from Cranberry Lake Biological Station and make an appointment with an auto shop in Saratoga Springs. Your car’s been crying around lately and you’re worried about its capacity for yet another long haul cross-country odyssey.
When you got to Skidmore College, you hung up your closing night outfit, the one you couldn’t wait to show Samara and the others at the Flaherty. The one that preceded all saints. You imagined iridescent whorls across your eyelids and meridian points highlighted in white ink down your body. You imagined your crush would be there by some miracle. You hadn’t imagined prom or homecoming as a teenager so this was your adolescent gift to yourself. A golden petticoat. A gossamer body. When you first got sick, you paced back and forth in front of the outfit like a villain, your thumb and forefinger in your inflamed, bloody mouth.
People keep asking you what happened and you don’t know. You cast a wide net of blame but nothing catches. Just like the lake you’re on leave from. You plumb the depths of the past six days and find nothing.
Instead they ask what you do for a living.
I’m an independent researcher, you say.
Oh, so you’re like, legit, said one of the E.R. doctors when you told them this.
You didn’t say anything, which was fine, because at that moment, another bit of rot slipped off and they called an ambulance to transfer you here.
En route to Albany your paramedic asked better questions than anyone had or has since. You rattled off your answers in a cheerful monotone and he looked down at you in your stretcher all cocooned with magnanimous detachment.
Maybe you’re Patient Zero, he said. Maybe when all this is over you can write your next book about it.
Your nurse this morning asks you to call her the Asshole. She’s middle-aged with an adorable lisp so it comes out “ash-ole.” She says the infectious disease expert will come in. The crazy doctor, she says. You try to say you prefer crazy doctors but your lips crack open and you just smile.
In your private moments you think about Hell Followed With Us. How strange it is to have finished that book only to embody Benji mere hours later. You can’t decide whether or not it’s a good book, but on more than one occasion, you want to reach out to Andrew Joseph White and thank him for killing Kalvin Garrah–sorry, “Calvin”–in the funniest possible way. Non-climactic and self-fulfilled. Maybe the hospital has you on enough substances to make you message him. Maybe they don’t. Either way your dreams are desolate and terrible and when people ask you how you’re feeling you keep saying “grateful.”
There’s a few passages in Hell Followed With Us where Benji wonders about the distance between himself and other trans men. It was a prayer answered. You’d texted your aunt about a week before you bought that book: I need another trans masculine person who isn’t a total sycophant to talk to about why I regard most other “tboys” with either distance or derision. Benji isn’t real but he’s enough for now. And when your face falls off you hear his little voice saying it’s nice that people need a moment to categorize him as human before they decide “boy” or “girl.”
Your grown-up brain knows better than to think there’s an angel under your hardened shell. The child within isn’t so sure. Your dreams give no affirmative. You’ve been in what you call “problem-solving mode” all week and every quiet moment shows you the thoroughfare of the not-quite-there. At one point you prop yourself up in bed and see a hollow creature drag itself across your room’s speckled floor. It looks like a desiccated monkey wearing a hazmat suit shellacked to its pruny skin. You’ve seen something like it before. September of 2018. Toronto.
You blink at it and it hisses at you through the hole in its throat. You bring your hand to your own neck and squeeze. A few lesions here but not enough to panic over. When you’re between waking and sleep it feels like there are teeth in your throat. Or a lightbulb in your soft palate. The truest is when you’re roused by a nurse with an insistent “Francis! FRANCIS!” and the silhouette of your body becomes a tangle of roots for some great tree.
Partway through your second day at the hospital, you throw runes on your situation. One of the oldest nurses comes in and asks what you’re doing. You tell her. Everyone wears full PPE around you so her expression is totally unreadable.
Very good sir, she finally says.
You cannot stop thinking about this.
The infectious disease expert gets into a childish spat with the Asshole in front of you.
I’m not the Crazy Doctor, he says. That’s the psychiatrist. I am the infectious disease specialist. Don’t listen to her.
I’m just giving him shit, says the Asshole. He’s still crazy though.
You look at the infectious disease expert and decide he’s probably very normal. The realization disappoints you.
I have to take all her twisted words, says the infectious disease expert, I have to take all her twisted words and spin them back around on her. Anyways, let’s have a look at you.
You ask him about the cultures the ophthalmologists took from your lesions and swollen-shut eyes yesterday. Did they say anything? He shakes his head. We must wait.
Are you sexually active? asks the infectious disease expert.
You nod.
Males or females?
You nod.
But you have normal sex with males? he asks. Because you are biologically female?
You try not to bust out laughing as your brain gives you a quick montage of your deviant behavior to the soundtrack of Samia’s “Limbo.” You nod because it’s easier than explaining anything and he needs all the leads he can get. He asks about the abnormal, non-productive world of lesbian sex and you do try to enlighten him until he clenches his fists in demure discomfort and backs off.
You have had surgery on your breasts? he asks. He points at one of your white-haloed nipples. I thought this was another lesion. A big one.
I had top surgery last year exactly, you say. Nothing bothers you anymore.
He asks you if you’ve been tested for HIV yet. You tell him they gave you a full panel at Urgent Care two days ago and he tells you to call them to fax the results over. When you call them, they tell you to tell him to call them, or otherwise they probably already have the results. You roll your eyes and fall asleep.
You wake up in Midian. Boone-as-Cabal sits across from you with his hands on a decanter of ambrosia. Your father is on a plane to you on the longest day of the year and your brain is ruthless with love for everyone who ever had a hand in creating you. You try to imagine what you’ll become next and your brain turns to television static. Cabal opens the decanter and offers it to you. You hear the steady drip of water from stalactites and see the vast shape of the elder god he’s supplicant to behind him. You take the decanter in your hands. What the Asshole called “those perfect hands.”
They never gave you a sequel, you say to Cabal. Rachel stares into the camera at the end of your movie and says tomorrow or the next and then the credits roll.
Cabal does his little non-smile and tilts his head.
What happens to you? you ask. What comes next?
Live your life and die your death, says Cabal. You’ll get your answer when you resurrect.
Hostile architecture, rosary flotillas, and alien invasions in Saratoga Springs
When I lived with my grandparents in Meskwaki Nation, I used to practice losing access to various faculties. Most often it was my voice. I’d go nonverbal and practice communication in other ways. Body language, written word, rudimentary signing. Sometimes I had a limp. Other times, I blindfolded myself, trying to stretch out my senses to fill in the blanks.
Two days ago, I was at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, on the island I’ve been privately calling “the Island of the Buried Stone Giants.” I packed my shit (overpacking as usual) and made for the shoreline to catch the boat that’d bring me to my car on the mainland. An ashen rain fell gently and the air smelled of brine and rot.
Remi carried two of my bags while I handled the rest. We swapped stories of horror and joy until Larry the boat-man greeted us. I loved Larry on sight. I love old, handsome men with gentle masculinities who take their time to talk and always seem to smile in a surprised, genuine way. I want to look like them when I’m old. I want that energy.
We took the aluminum boat, the one Larry said was “Good in bad weather but not very comfortable.” It bucked like a stallion and split the lake in two. I tried to keep my eyes open, tried to take in as much of our misty surroundings as possible, but the rain stabbed me everywhere in tiny smoky-quartz athamé knives. Marked me deep. I closed my eyes and stretched out my Real Body, the one that filled my hollow body whenever I practiced my aerials, the one that felt pleasure in all things. I remembered a meditation one of the new age people my mother had taken me to shared, back when things first started to be Wrong with me in a more disruptive way. St. Germain, master of the violet flame. I could almost see my Real Body glimmering with that. Heatless fire. And that Kaveh Akbar quote about God. “A bladeless knife with no handle.”
Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air. There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.
In my mind’s eye I saw Larry with his baseball cap and sunglasses. He was short and compact and weathered. There are many moments in my life I tend to bookmark as “dying dreams.” Things for my old body to return to one day when I take my final breaths. This was one of them. Ashen rain and the fury of someone else’s god beating into me on all sides. The brine the rot the men the deep. Tree trunks and brand-new rosaries of eggs thickening in the saturated never-driftwood, those drowned old growth forests bound to the no-nutrient floor.
I laughed. I smiled. I tarried at the threshold between the Island and my next destination and I wondered: what’s in store?
“It’s never what you’d expect,” Smokii Sumac had said to me. We were in Toronto and the clouds looked possessed. Seconds prior to this declaration, we’d been taking bets on what’s next. Aliens, Smokii claimed. It’s gotta be aliens, right?
A few nights ago, Remi and I had been under the stars, talking about the boys we love who are breaking our hearts, when a flotilla of lights broke across the sky in a perfectly straight line. We freaked out until we found out it was Elon Musk’s “Starlink,” and the magic died. I stood in the darkness of my cabin for a long time and wondered where this feeling of mad hope had come from. Prompted by the threat of invasion. Prompted by the unknown. Tim’s insane lines in I Think You Should Leave’s most recent season: “My life is nothing I hoped it would be and all I feared it would become because for fifty seconds of my life I thought there was monsters on the world.”
My first evening at the Flaherty: Queer World Mending Seminar, Pablo de Ocampo gave a speech about the Flaherty’s philosophy of “non preconception.” Secrecy, in other words. The programmers know what’s in store. Who’s being featured. But we, the audience, know nothing until the program unfolds. I smiled to myself. There was no big reason Samara had brought me here, as I say. No transaction, no deeper intention, no… preconception. She had brought me here to share something she found lovely with someone she cares about. But in this moment, I found my Big Reason. I had grown weary of Knowing What’s Next. This would be a good disruption to my usual laissez-faire involvement in the Narrative, my “okay I know, I know, but I’m not allowed to say.” Here I didn’t know, but I was being told, whatever it takes, I must Say.
The first screening of the seminar opened with a question.
What is the difference between desire and pleasure?
After a spell, and an opening short film that I fell asleep to, I woke up with my answer.
Pleasure is when I take what is consensually given to me. Desire is when I make the offering.
Around the second Madsen Minax piece, which I adored and obsessed over and Needed, deeply, for my research, my left eyelid began to flake and itch and burn. I rubbed a little bit of chapstick on it and immediately thought: big mistake. But there were more films, more stories to live, more moments, and my friend Merrill was sitting next to me being the coolest person alive as usual, and I wanted to be here.
I hung around longer than I wanted to, getting sleepier and sleepier, because there was so much to see and do and talk about. I pulled cards for a PhD student called Jacob in a room called “Barbie’s Butthole,” where I’d buried my two hands in a bucket of rich soil and played until someone sat by me who reminded me a little too much of someone else, someone who I’d categorize as “dastardly.” I felt so much hope well up in me, so much hope and fear and yes, lust, in that room. Lust for life, for touch, for strangers and old friends and old friends made new with time and space. Then it was bedtime and I fell asleep in my dorm. Alone and happy.
The next morning I immediately knew something was wrong. My left eye wouldn’t open all the way, and the itch had gotten worse. It burned. My brain played and replayed a scene from Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, when she shows up at work and Allison Janney’s character yells, “Well I’m allergic to disgusting childhood illnesses!” I prayed it wasn’t pink eye, flipped a coin, and went back to sleep.
The dream I had I shared with Samara and a handful of my friends. I will not share it here, only that it was vivid and terrible, like everything you’ve ever felt as a child distilled into adulthood and garnished with an unmet need for intimacy so deep, your want outweighs your fear.
I woke up to a fire alarm at 9pm and my eye was completely swollen shut. I got in a Lyft, rode to the nearest Urgent Care that was still open, twenty minutes away in Malta, and calmly explained to my attending what was going on while the staff got into a shouting match in the hallway over my biological sex. The shouting match carried on for ten long minutes and my nurse and I pretended not to hear it. At one point, she slammed the thin plastic partition between Triage and the hall, as if that’d do anything, and I snorted.
When I got out of Triage, one of the nurses who’d been trying to argue for my bodily autonomy, Justin, looked like he was about to cry and yelled, “I can’t believe we’ve been talking about this. We should not have been talking about this. We’re better than this, I swear.”
I gave no indication that I knew what he meant and followed my attending to my room.
The young, hot doctor was built like a linebacker and was kind to me.
“Do you have a uterus?” he asked, point blank, gesturing to my belly.
I sighed in relief at his blunt tone and nodded.
“When was your last period?” he asked.
“Now,” I said. As if on cue, another cramp wracked my body, and I winced. “Started yesterday.”
“So no chance of pregnancy, then,” said the doctor. “We have to ask. Gotta know how many patients we’re treating. You know how it is.”
I smiled and nodded. “I know.”
He apologized before he dug his fingers into my eye and I apologized for cursing.
They diagnosed me with contact dermatitis, tested my vision, and put me on 30mg of Prednisone for the next week or so.
My head was all soap opera synthesizers and a desperate wish to be touched. Disgust at my appearance outweighed my desperation, and at every turn, I found myself shrinking away from smiling back at anyone who grinned at me. Mitski’s voice in my head, “If I gave up on being pretty, I wouldn’t know how to be alive.”
Samara picked me up from the ER at around 12:15am. I went to the CVS. Everyone was exceedingly nice to me. I got what I needed and sat in Samara’s car, being grateful. Hoping everyone in the world could tell how grateful I was, I am.
When we got back to the campus, Samara wrinkled her nose at how impossible it was to navigate.
“Everything is so twisty and turny here,” she said. “It feels like they did it on purpose. It’s like they want you disoriented.”
“Hostile architecture,” I said, wildly aware of how little help I was being. Depth perception is real, apparently.
She dropped me off outside my dorm and we parted ways. Even with the pain and the plans falling apart I was glad to be here, glad to have seen her.
Plus, at least I don’t have pink eye. I take solace in that.
I’m very tired now. Last night I dreamt about aliens. Aliens and dogs trying to save us from them, just like they’d done eons ago, before a single white person had even imagined a New World. Laying down their four-legged lives for their people. Saying “I love you” with their last words. I thought I’d go to the 2pm screening today but I don’t think I can. I think I’ll focus on finishing my commission from Karen Goulet. But first, sleep. Sleep and dream and awaken on the other side of another threshold, guarded and barred by non-preconception, fuzzy as an uncharted map in a survival game, haunted as this land of healing waters and old, old spirits.
Tragedy struck in Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, but it was June in the magical realist 90s as it was (and is) June here on the island, and Paul and I were navigating Pride in tandem, our genders Gordian knots we both wanted to take a sword to, but feared the frayed ends that might ensue.
The biggest difference between us was that Paul had San Francisco, and I’d once again sacrificed all cities on the altar of apocalypse, the Supreme Court my punctuation every June in varying degrees. Last summer, it had been Roe v. Wade overturned, the fresh scars on my chest a visceral reminder of the girlhood I’d abandoned in favor of what my high school dyke best friend had sneeringly called my “addiction to power and control.” In the upscale hospital cafes of NYU-Langone, I cried and smiled in stark intervals, thinking all the while how kin I was to the grimy, hollowed-out cafe patrons in the opening scene of Children of Men, yet unbound to any revolutionary plot. I had my mother and that was all that mattered.
This June, still in New York State but an unimaginable distance away, I’d perched right in the middle of the Forest Headquarters here at the Station to finish my readings (Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, by Andrea Lawlor, for my fictional enrichment, and “A Theory of Vibe” by Peli Grietzer, “Indigenous Collectives” by Carol Edelman Warrior, and Monster Theory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for my ideological framework, the bones of my project) and was at the part in Paul where the only thing to do with my other hand was to shove it in my mouth like a child and hold the hell on. I’m annoyed at myself for developing this unsanitary nervous tic, something I swore I’d never do, but I am my father’s daughter. We both drive cross-country with our teeth on our cuticles and our eyes on the horizon.
So there I was, all my insecurities about wasted time and resources falling away. Abundance always comes in the wake of fictional death, for me, other people’s heartache a safe territory for me to store my own so I can focus on how mythic scarcity really is.
Looking up, I caught Terrance’s eyes in a flash. He tilted his phone towards me and said, in that quiet way of his, “Supreme Court voted to uphold the Indian Child Welfare Act, seven to two.”
I hummed in noncommittal acknowledgement, and then the tears started.
It’s been a trip riddled with babies and themes of parenthood. My arms still remember the sleep-heavy weight of Cass’s toddler, who’d scrambled out of the bedroom while Cass and I watched the Ultimatum: Queer Love in anxious, companionable silence. I never picked up the kids without their express permission, but the three-year-old was sobbing and sweaty and frightened. When I scooped him up, he wiped his little auburn curls from his still-closed eyes and said, “Fwankie? How’d you get here so fast?”
There were other moments in other homes I won’t share, but a day or two ago, here on the Island, I stopped in my tracks as my instincts bade me go no further. Right where my next step would have fallen, there was a newborn snapping turtle, all alone and angry as anything.
I crouched and cooed at him, aware of how ridiculous I looked and sounded but uncaring. He was no bigger than my middle finger.
“Where’s your mama?” I asked, and shivered away the sense-memory of my least favorite scene from Dear Georgina, the one that made me feel sick and protective of the elder but unable to fix it.
I did manage something, though, that day. It was pre-pandemic. We were in Camden, Maine. Georgina herself was at the screening. I was a girl back then, and my voice was deep and my legs were hairy because fuck you, but being near this pre-ICWA survivor cowed me. I used up as much of my magic as I could to make myself small for her, small enough to be trustworthy, and I held her hand until I couldn’t. That’s all I’ll say about it.
“Where’s your siblings?” I asked the turtle, images of sea turtles in exodus documentaries flashing across my mind, though I knew better than that.
He didn’t answer, of course.
“Can I take a picture of you?” I asked.
Begrudgingly, he stuck out his tiny head and blinked at me. I held him tenderly between my thumb and index finger, right in front of his little back legs, and felt the life of him thrum across my skin in rolling waves of electricity.
The Bird Guy, who was trying to catch a robin to study its role as a vector for Lyme disease, suggested I put the baby turtle next to the horseshoe ring.
“It’ll hear the water,” said the Bird Guy. “It’ll know where to go from there.”
I nodded and stood. The fall from the horseshoe ring was steep, but the baby was small and his claws were already so sharp.
I set him down in the soft fallen pine needles and sat with him awhile.
“I want you to do me a favor,” I said.
He looked up at me. He really was so small.
“I want you to grow up,” I said. “No, don’t just grow up. Grow old. Grow old and as big as you can. Grow like Godzilla. Can you do that for me?”
The little turtle gazed resolutely out toward the lake. I took that as an affirmation and let him be.
Sometimes I feel like I’ll be a bad writer because of how much information I withhold. Really, though, is it anyone’s business? I already told a journalist for the Imprint that I’m the child of an adoptee. What more is there to say? To flatten my family into a pancake of trauma porn is to invite your ceramic breakfast plate, and while you can eat what you want of what I feed you, you’re not allowed to even salivate over my family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met that cloying smile, that question of “and your father…” with my own brick wall. Yeah, he’s a musician. Yeah, he’s way cooler than me. Yeah, he’s a good dad, a good grandparent. Yeah, he’s back home. Get fucked.
Still. I want to write about us, in a way, at least with this project. All my family’s stubborn devotion to each other. All the choices we make and have had made on our behalf.
Once upon a time, my great-grandmother’s mother died and the social worker found her and her siblings in a tableau so horrific, she cried writing the report for the agency. A childhood was lived. An adolescence survived. My great-grandmother made her way back home to be with her siblings, and that was that.
My great-grandmother’s eldest son helped raise his siblings and then he had a daughter with his wife and then they fell in love with my dad, a baby in foster care, who was loved so deeply already, and that was that.
A social worker was involved in this exchange as well, but she wasn’t crying. She placed my Ojibwe father with an Ojibwe father because “I just thought it’d be neat.” And that was that.
I was a little girl in an auditorium when another adoptee was up on stage screaming and screaming and screaming.
She told all of us in the unseen audience that she knew she was different but that her white parents had told her she’d better forget about it or else. In her story and in her pain and in my little girl brain, her father was a mirrored blade and her mother was an apron.
That was that.
Once upon a time, my mother was the daughter of a soldier and a nurse and the soldier would never let anything happen to me. He was cleaning my room and found one of my notes where I threatened to run away. I was hiding in a closet and he knew it but he talked about me as if I were dead already, grief caught in his throat. “I don’t know what I’d do if my sunshine ever ran away,” he said. “I’d probably die of a broken heart. I don’t know what I’d do.”
In the closet, I cried until I fell asleep, and tore apart every note until only fiction remained.
My dad and his dad both make weird noises. Stimming, I guess. One time my dad was making a weird noise and his oldest granddaughter started to beatbox over it.
One time my grandpa was making weird noises and his white wife said, “Good God, you’re weird. I could have sworn you weren’t this weird when we got married.”
My grandpa glanced at me conspiratorially with eyes I didn’t realize were green until this year. “We should have gotten you tested,” my nana said.
My grandpa finished putting on his shoes and shrugged. “Well, too late now.”
That was that.
When the idea of having a baby became less of a threat and more of a hope, I fled the Midwest again. All hope remained and I gazed out at the manmade, low-nutrient body of water that is Cranberry Lake and seethed.
“S-seven-two?” I repeated.
I stood up. The clouds parted outside. I got a text from my little sibling: “7-2 for icwa shoutout auntie Mary” and I remembered how I was in Mary’s house just a week ago, so close to the Court and so afraid of its gravitational pull. How she listed off Pride events happening in D.C. for me and I realized she wanted to keep me there and I wanted to be kept, but had to be here, on this island with its gargantuan boulders and a palpable sense of—not just safety, but a complete lack of any danger.
I ran out of the office. June made new in the sunlight. Butterflies flanked me as I ran to my cabin and pulled kinnikinnick off of my altar and ran back outside. Yesterday, I’d found a spot by the lake I was already calling “My Spot.” Energy built up and subsided and built up again in rhythmic power surges. Yesterday the lake was placid and misty. Today, it danced, cresting copper in the sun. I almost war-hooped, but I was self-conscious, again, about all the unseen white people in the woods. The thought made me laugh. What a turn. What a twist.
7-2. 7-2. A stay of execution. A band-aid. Breaching the surface of the water after so long under. Gulping in air. I’d just been talking this morning about the ICWA protest, that one in DC back in November. I’d missed breakfast, my first missed breakfast since getting to the Station, so I pounded two cold brews and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The students are already settling into their new lives, and so am I, though upheaval is always around the corner, and I’m there for that, too, life made and unmade and remade.
Thoughts of the little baby I’d met whose parents couldn’t take care of him come to me unbidden, and I hold them in my purview alongside memories of the Doorstop Baby, the little turtle, Georgina, that stage. White people in the woods and bears falling into traps meant for birds. A blackfly lands on my temple and drinks. When I reach to scratch my head, my fingers come away bloody.
Out on the water I am untraceable-sad. Or, I suppose I could trace it if I wanted to, but the leylines that bleed from my eyes to my teeth to the unmapped chambers of my heart glimmer a new color. Cobalt, maybe? But they shed bioluminescence, like those delicate flies laden with wet, glowing, bright-blue goop, which I don’t know the proper name of and am incapable of Googling. I am struck by how much I don’t know. I’ve been struck. Every few steps I take these days, I look down and see something old-new and think, “What is that?” And my answer: “I don’t know.”
Anyways. I’m writing you from Cranberry Lake Biological Station. Well, the lake itself. Two person canoe but it’s just me. To weigh down the other side I’ve put my camera bag, which actually holds three or four cameras right now, plus the shotgun mic, a smudge bowl I got from a man named John out in Maine, who himself got it from the Diné, thirty-five years ago, and my backpack. There’s a poem here somewhere but I’m too tired and uncomfortable to unearth it. Something about a work/life balance. Something about being married to the Job, whatever the Job means. Something about wanting a divorce because I need a real human being on the other end with a paddle because I look dumb as hell trying to keep course by myself.
A couple years back, I was sitting across a fire from a professor who’d done a lot of work in food sovereignty. She was charming and introduced herself as one of my close friends’ aunties. We talked in hushed tones about something I will not share with you, but her familiarity with the issue, her strong opinion, her care, it all endeared me to her and gained my trust.
“You’re Meskwaki,” she said.
I nodded. Then shook my head. Then shrugged.
“Yeah, you are. Your people… you bring the weather.”
I sat up. When I was a little girl, I’d watched Men in Black 2 on loop. I think I was in love with Rosario Dawson. Her character could bring the weather. If she cried, the sky cried. If she was happy, the sun came out. The same had been happening for me. There’s that line she says, when Agent K tells her what she is, where she screws her face up and yells, “I’m a Libra!” I, being a Libra, nodded intensely. Then I went outside and stared at the clouds until they parted and I thought: I could be an alien, too, just like her. Her, Gonzo, and me, all abandoned by our ships, always out of place. Waiting for someone to come back to earth. Waiting for something to make sense.
This, this thing the professor shared, this made sense. This drove a stake through me. This bound me to the ground. I was rooted, suddenly, even if my mother’s nation would not or could not claim me as one of theirs. This was something no amount of greed or vengeance could take away.
“Do we?” I asked, trying not to seem too invested.
She nodded, and shared with me a story that will always be true, even if she turned out to be a lie.
I have always been afraid of big things. When my father was getting his degree in anthropology at the University of Iowa, we would walk by their taxidermies to get to his office. I was three years old and the giant sloth was nothing like Sid from Ice Age. The giant sloth was a god to me, and like any good heathen child, I was absolutely horrified by gods.
This carries over well into my adulthood. I think if I saw a whale near me I would throw up. I’ve seen herds of bison return to the Great Plains and trembled. I’ve seen massive seagulls swallow smaller birds like it’s nothing. I’ve seen bears in the road and huge bucks in the woods and I’ve been cut down time after time because something in me minds my manners. Manners older than church. Older than man. Older than anything on my body except maybe the silicon on my wrist and the obsidian on my forearm.
So it goes I fear dark water most of all. When I was small and we’d go ricing, my dad and I, I either saw or imagined I saw a great serpent beneath us, buoying us forward. Keeping the protocols.
Now I float between two islands, an island unto myself with all this stubborn sadness. I know if I had a stone I could push it all into him. I’m normally stone (butch) but today I woke up a girl and I feel raw about it. Like when you’re little and you skin your knee down to the bone but you can’t stop playing no matter how much sand your body swallows. The sun on your skin and the dirt in your hair and the heat in your mouth. All the blood. I can do this, I say. I can be a girl on the water.
Unbidden, one of the “rules” an Anishinaabekwe threw at me comes back up like bile. How when you’re on your moon you can’t do this, that, or the other thing. No eating berries. No cooking. No standing in water. All bullshit, of course, but far be it from me to say that to a woman’s face when I look like this. Even as a little girl, I was always incorrectly female. But enough bellyaching about that. I’m not on my moon. The rules don’t apply, whatever they truly are. I’m in my own canoe and I can still see clear through the tides. A comfort. Look at all those underwater trees! Look at the stones, the silt, the mud, the mulch and the weeds. How many little beings sleep in the wet fields below? Who will I see riding my undertow?
All day I’ve been wondering why I stopped going outside or when. My friends are all farmers, mycologists, entomologists, witches and fairies. They are of the land even if they aren’t of my land. The earth knows them each by name and footprint and cradles them. People ask me what my favorite plants are. What medicines to use. What is that tree over there. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Canoeing is something innate, though. Even if I wasn’t Ojibwe I’m sure I’d be fine out here, having grown up in Wisconsin. Going to the Lake is the only thing we do. Summertime? You’re going to the lake. Winter? Polar plunge. Spring? Get fucked, you’re going to the lake. Fall? Ooh, sorry, I have homework, I can’t.
Bored of the sadness and blaming my own stagnation, I set out for where the lake darkens indigo. The deep. I won’t see any little creatures out there, sure, but it could be peaceful. I imagine myself laying back in the tentative sunlight, far from the dragonfly orgies and the swarms of biting bugs that attack harder when you smack one. Not that I’m a prude, I just don’t like paddling through all that sex and feeling like the asshole who turns the lights on at the club, you know? They only live for like, forty-eight hours. Let them get their rocks off while they can.
Clouds move in the closer I get to the deep. No big deal, I just take off my douchebag sunglasses and let my eyes wander the skyline. There’s so much green out here. I love the different shades of green. How they change from place to place. The Pacific Northwest is an emerald, obviously, but it’s also got a blueish-grey tint to it, like Puget Sound wants to rise up and reclaim it, but can’t, and so settles for a light dusting of salt and brine. Hayward, Wisconsin, my hometown, is the green of a folk horror forest. Amber and gold and red veins to hide the hunger. Ithaca is similar, but there’s a trapped, frenetic energy to every leaf and root. I once saw an Ithaca root push itself out of the earth and scream. It looked like a spongy bone.
I’m not sure what to call the green here, but it makes me sleepy. Although, whether that’s the green or my travels catching up with me is anyone’s guess. They get up early here at the Station. Breakfast is at 7:15, and everyone has a breakneck schedule, so that’s when you make your lunch for the day, too. I feel like a visiting princess with how much laying about I’m allowed to do. I guess that’s what propelled me to get in this canoe in the first place. Hands too idle, mind too full of nonsense with no real drive to write. Did I tell you? I’m the writer-in-residence here for the next three weeks. I couldn’t sleep last night because I realized how short a timespan that truly is. Also, I still have phone service, even out on the lake. My wrist buzzes with an Outlook notification and I sigh, paddling farther and farther. I keep glancing back to make sure the shore is out of sight. For some reason, I don’t want them to see me. I don’t like being watched, even by accident.
Now the wind’s kicked up, which is a blessing. It’s almost like having another person. Almost. I don’t have to keep tossing the paddle back and forth like a baton, at least.
then it grabs me
or. no. there’s an impact
a thud. my stomach lurches with that fear again but even older still and a sense of urgency because this is not a taxidermy
or a far away buffalo
or a song
or an eagle
this is something i catch a glimpse of for a split second and my breath stops in my throat and i realize how small i am
and there’s a tiny sliver of hope for another split second because it kind of looks like a lilypad and a cluster of weeds so maybe?
then the hand. the weeds vanish or coalesce into something else or get pulled down or maybe they’re that thing maybe it’s alive in a sentient way. not sentience but animal
please be weeds. please let me be silly. please let me laugh this off and shake my head at myself with my eyebrows raised because there’s not another person in this canoe to do it for me. please let me laugh at myself and love myself anyways fondness growing in my chest because that’s what i’ve had to do to survive this nigh-endless loneliness, loneliness i don’t can’t have disrupted right now. flashes of lore of sirens and selkies and sailors ripped away from their boats but i’m a girl please see that
i’m a girl
i’m just a girl
I want it to be weeds. I want to have run aground on an impossibly long knot of weeds in the middle of the lake. I want my “I don’t knows” to be here, too, like didn’t you know there’s a species of lake flora that grows in huge, girl-shaped masses of tangled, shiny skin? Didn’t you know that? Here, check the guidebook. You’ll see right here. Don’t be scared. Everything’s okay.
Then it—she?—knocks against the bottom of the boat as if to say, “Look up.” And I do.
The wind’s really at it now. My stomach drops the moment I notice. When I idle, when I don’t paddle, even without the wind, I drift. I am stock still now. Impossibly still.
I look down again.
There’s nothing visible but endless water dark as pitch. That tangle of green from earlier is gone. I can’t see what, if anything, has me steady. My heart hammers in my chest and I say “don’t panic don’t panic don’t panic” like they do in the movies and I wish I could feel stupid for it but I don’t. I’m panicking. Something immense holds me down. Images of me being pulled under or inhaled come in shaky flashes. Gone just like that. Would I scream? I’m not screaming now, so probably not. No. That can’t happen.
She taps against the bottom of the canoe. Three little taps with sharp fingernails. Four. The canoe doesn’t shake. Just how strong is she? And where?
I’ve decided I don’t want to see her. As if she can tell, she doesn’t show me again. Probably caught a glimpse of my face when she hit me the first time.
I cling to that. There’s honor there. Care. Or maybe I just look fuck-ugly when I’m terrified, but I doubt it.
I lick my lips and in a voice so small and cowed I scarcely recognize it as my own, I begin to introduce myself in my language. Then I trail off. I know nothing else. I don’t know the word for “lake” or “mermaid” or “kill” or “live.” Maybe if I were calmer I would. I know there’s a mermaid clan and I hope that means something. She doesn’t let me go, though. She drums her fingers along the sides of the canoe. Little waves. Caressing it. I give her an offering. I open my mouth to sing her a song. When Lakota words and my frightened off-key tremolo come out, I almost laugh. Almost. She does, though. I hear it. Not to sound like HP Lovecraft, but it’s… indescribable. I’ll try anyway.
Bike wheels on gravel. TV static. Throat singing. The purr of a cat. Stainless steel on fine china, that scrape you can feel in your teeth. All of this at once.
Certain words in Lakota are gendered. As in, if you’re a boy you say this, if a girl, that. I get to the part of the song where your gender comes through and the girl part cuts loose on my tongue easy as anything. There’s a thump and a smack and suddenly I’m free. She’s letting me go.
I sing in Mohawk all the way back to shore until I’m within earshot of the white people. Then I stop. I don’t want to be anyone’s magical Indian, even if I am both magic and also an Indian. That brings me back to my project, actually. Thoughts of merpeople and drowning subside in a foamy wash of half-remembered lies.
Something happened yesterday. I will not tell you what. Perhaps you will dream about it or it’ll visit you, too, and you’ll know because some part of you still has extrasensory perception or delusion or disillusion or whatever else fuels the things that make us See.
In the absence of the telling, though, I wonder if that’s what happened? More than violence. More than “trauma,” that god-awful mainstream word that seems to be the mainline for grifters like “truth” in the 1970s. Or not “more than,” but in addition to. Yes we lost so much. And also we stopped talking.
It’s still none of your business. When I see Native or “Indigenous” influencers posting themselves doing ceremony, my whole body goes tense. Me, I keep my mouth shut about real things until I get consent.
Also yesterday, though, I went in the woods for the first time in a very long time. I walked with purpose until I stopped and let myself wander. I asked myself, not for the first time, when I stopped going outside and why. I’ve always held onto that rule, “live first, write later.” Maybe it hurt you, too, the moment you realized Life was being taken from us in newer, more insidious ways than ever before, and fast. We claim to be frogs, boiling. We’re more like lobsters. Alive and dead in a flash. Our pain is brief and salient and then they chew us up. I was a child when I could wander. I was a teenager and an adult and I could still wander directionless. Then that became suspicious, that directionless wandering. You had to go somewhere. You had to go somewhere and buy something, too, or else leaving the house was pointless.
When I left Bemidji for this residency, I set the intention to take it slow. I’ve been back and forth across the country so many times. I’ve folded it up wholesale. Everything less than ten hours is “just a short drive.” Part of it’s to do with my lovely Prius, which, after our little freakout, got a brand new air filter and can breathe again, but the lights are still a problem and if I engage cruise control, the whole computer shuts down. Not great. But before all that, I was in Minneapolis. Then Chicago. Then I cut north to Madison to spend time at Kim’s place, which felt like a microdose of the ease I feel here at the Station, her garden around us and the lake just so. We walked awhile in a vast dog park and I imagined bringing my children there. Then from Madison back to Chicago, where I got a tattoo over my top surgery scars that cost more than my top surgery and went viral on Twitter (Lord help me) and met with Jacqui Shine, who met my mother while on a roadtrip by way of the New York Times, a couple years ago. Their task was to define patriotism. From snacks with Jacqui I headed to Grand Rapids, MI, a city that would have been a flyover if not for Ishkwaazhe McSauby casting me in Mino Bimaadiziwin back in 2017 and my own insistence on having as many friends as possible before I die. I stayed there for awhile with my friend Cass and her two kids, aged six and three, plus Cass’s sister Aleigha. Then Hamilton, ON, where I crashed with my friend Daimhin and headed to Toronto to intercept Smokii Sumac before he hosted some big book discussion because he’s all famous now.
Then Ithaca. My siblings. My mother was there.
Then Baltimore.
Just… Baltimore.
After Baltimore, I took a breather with my auntie Mary. You know the rest.
I stopped in York, PA, because I have a friend there named Sunshine who’s heavy in the black metal scene. They described it as a “diamond in the rough,” and I’d have to agree. The band I caught the last few songs of—they were amazing. They’re called the Constituents. I glanced around the room: I don’t think I’ve seen this many people of color at a hardcore venue… ever. We all sprawled out into the bar while I tried to strategize (remember, my car was still going sicko mode and I needed to get up to the Adirondacks in time for my boat in… seventeen hours) and I got to sit with Sunshine’s hilarious friend group as they commiserated about bad jobs, bad pay, good life and the Amish.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’m getting hungry and it’s dark and I still have a three hour drive. Or more.”
“If you’re looking for some good eats,” said Sunshine, “the Round the Clock Diner’s right on the highway there. You gotta go that way anyway.”
“Hey, thanks.”
At the Round the Clock Diner, the waitstaff was all gathered around watching a video of a police officer in town doing some kind of atrocity and incredulously discussing it. It was surreal to see. I guess I expected the 24 hour diner to be relatively empty this late, but the place was hopping, and everybody knew each other. Behind me there were two men dressed kinda small town nice. One of them had the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard in my life. I couldn’t figure out if they were on a date or just friends or maybe related. The younger one, with the younger, less sexy voice, said, “I stopped watching the news. Had me too keyed up.”
“That Fox News is some…” started the older man.
“Exactly,” said the younger man, cutting him off.
“You know, I liked them well enough. Back when they first started.”
The younger man said nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him smirk. “You would,” he finally said.
Date, then. Maybe.
The younger man opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I just… there’s too much. There’s just too much. So and so said this. This couple you don’t give a heck about broke up. This politician got caught doing this crime. This country invaded that country. I can’t. I can’t. And the takes! Everybody’s got a take! Everybody’s got something to say!”
“Like hell they do,” said the other man.
“Exactly! And it’s just… I get… I get wanting to speak out. I get… needing to react. But just… just don’t become so hateful that you end up looking exactly like the thing you claim to hate.”
They leaned in to each other then, and their conversation took on a more personal note. I turned away. A father and daughter came in and the whole waitstaff greeted them both with so much love, I thought, again, as I have this whole trip, about Adrienne Rich’s Lonely poem. I wanted that. I wanted to live somewhere long enough to have banter with the kitchen. Maybe? Maybe that’s what I want.
I guess what I’m getting at is that even in this time of forced lifelessness, we are alive nonetheless. I might not be in the world I occupied when I could walk for hours and not grow tired, but I am in a world where I can go to a diner and people-watch and drink coffee way too late at night. Me and the graveyard shift man by my side.
When I went to get gas, the two cashiers, who were identical, greeted me with “Good morning.” It was 11:45pm. I had two thoughts: it’s morning?? then: I guess I’m one of them now. I mulled over my apparent sudden vampiric nature all the way to the disgusting men’s restroom, at which point I forgot everything and wished desperately that the new stand-to-pee prosthetic dick I ordered from Gramma’s Sausages was already in my pants so I didn’t have to look at whatever bomb went off in there. Good god.
On my way out I thought, I’m fucked. They get up mad early at the Station. I’m so fucked. I’m doing okay though (I say, despite this being my first full day) with the schedule. I anticipate sleeping early tonight, but that’s what I said yesterday. We’ll see. Like I told Sunshine, I’m gonna try to use this residency to reroll all my stats. I came here a night owl fighting tooth and talon for a crumb of productive energy and I’m leaving here a full-throttle morning person. Mark my words.
There is one more thing. An image or a sensation I can’t quite get out of my head. It happened when I was driving the rest of that night. I used to like driving at night before Fiadh pointed out how dim my headlights are and I realized yeah, she’s right, I actually do enjoy being able to see where I’m going. I was making my way across Pennsylvania when the car…
…or, no. God, what am I trying to say? The road? It curved. It curved up. No, not just that, I was almost vertical. Parallel with the road, which was less a road and more a steep drop, and I felt that sort of dip and lift you get before you go down a particularly intense rollercoaster, but what was worse was the other side. Two hills. I was going down one. The other was just ahead. In the grey-dark, dimly lit by who-knows-what, all I could see was vastness. Like I wasn’t in a car at all but actually dangling over the earth. Or this curve was the crest of a top lip and the bottom lip was swift approaching me.
Never have I ever held a sanctimonious smile while the doomed youths in the horror movies lined up one by one to die, and even less so now. Never have I ever said “Don’t go in there” and meant it, because I’ve been outside that door and I opened it too. No reason other than it was there and I was there and I needed to see.
Driving from Baltimore to Silver Spring would have been uneventful but for my car’s sudden lurch and all those lights coming on. The haze that had engulfed New York City the day before was all over now. Sickly green plumes of smoke swirled down across the foliage, settled on streets in thin sediment. I noticed a lot more parents and children traveling together than before. A father and his daughter, both masked. A father and son in an eighteen-wheeler. A mother and son and daughter, struggling. A father and son, unhoused. Maybe I was keeping an eye out for parents and children and so actually noticed, maybe there really are more families on the road now.
Anyways, my car creaked and swerved and kicked me like an animal and I had the sudden wild thought that all the apocalypse novels were right in that at some point cars just stop. I would have talked myself out of it, but there were other cars stopping, too, all of us shuffling into the Maryland Welcome Center wayside with our proverbial heads bowed and our tails between our legs. I juddered into a parking spot and turned the car off and just got out.
Another father and son. This father was one of those white men with a headset like a trucker would have, except he wasn’t a trucker at all, and one of the prejudices I’m working on is against white men like that. They look too much like cyborgs and they always look at me like I’m dirty, but then I also need to sit with the idea that maybe that’s just their RBF. Nothing to do with me at all, even if I am all inflamed from allergies and smoke and sleeplessness and all this unsaid whatever. Nothing at all.
When I was twelve or so, my dad had me read Foucault’s chapter on Panopticism in Discipline and Punish. While the reading itself effectively ruined my brain forever, what struck me most was my dad’s preface to the chapter.
“Just so you know,” he said, “Foucault doesn’t trust language for shit, and he writes like it.”
Neither do I, Mr. Foucault. Neither do I. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how many times I’ve tried to use language for something real, only for the real thing to crumble before my eyes, and I’m helpless to stop it. This is usually when I’m speaking and there’s so much out of my control. Is my hair falling right? Are my eyes puffy? Is there a waver in my voice? And you. Are you already predisposed to a different conclusion? Does my “I want” look too much like your ex’s “I want,” and therefore my mouth becomes a wall before it could ever be a bridge?
The future feels impossible when the sun’s gone out. This is a truth universally acknowledged by the West coast, of course, but it’s a bitter new shift in reality for the East, and so soon, too. There had been one day back in May when I woke up in Bemidji to the saline-and-brimstone scent of the Canadian wildfires I’d been reliably informed had eaten someone I love’s home. I ran errands until my head pounded. The cold was a new cold. An aluminum blanket. Something external forcibly wrapped around me. Not the gradual cold of the winter or spring or the cloying warmth of summer. A blanket or a backhand.
As the smoke overtook the East Coast, Apple announced their new VR headset, Apple Vision Pro, a clunky pair of goggles that aim to replace your phone and monitor with an overlay that “seamlessly blends” with your surroundings to help you stay present. While I was reading up on it at my best friend’s behest, one of my other best friends rolled over in bed, pressed a hand against the window and groaned, “Why would they take away Outside? The best part of summer? What’s the point of summer if there’s no Outside?”
This week, I had a little crisis of faith about moving to Baltimore. It started when my friend there said something that made me feel kind of weird and then the smoke came and everything went haywire.
I still managed to tour at least one apartment. The apartment building used to be the Bank of America Headquarters for the entire country back when the entire country was small and improbable. They still have the vault, but there’s midcentury modern couches and fake plants in there and you can sit in the dungeon, presumably, and chill. That was the big sell of the apartment building. How you could just chill. It was like a child’s idea of what a grown-up should live like, with a 24 hour fitness center, a pool, multiple communal game rooms, a free arcade, and a cavernous basement basketball court that doubled as a bicycle hangar. Their leasing agent led me down hall after twisted hall until she stopped in a placeless location that felt both wet and sterile and said, “If you never wanted to leave this building, you could just… not leave. That’s an option. We’ve made that an option.”
You need to understand: this is why I don’t mock the doomed. All this Island of the Lotus Eaters shit has me compelled. I almost want to lease with them just to have something to cry about. Or somewhere to hide, you know, if the cabin pressure changes and the oxygen masks fail to deploy.
Not that I’m really the type for such a building. Like I said, the future feels impossible, but, conversely, in the wise words of Janis Joplin, “Tomorrow never happens. It’s all the same fucking day, man.” And today my skin is sloughing off until it isn’t, and my lungs are stoppered up until they’re not, and I love you in a way that looks like martyrdom until I don’t and that’s that. This crisis of faith isn’t about me. It never was. It’s about this smog and those children and the way my car weeps when it really shouldn’t because it doesn’t breathe.
There’s really not much else to this little blog post. Only that, on the road, I’ve felt the urge to “blog” more. I remember being a kid and hearing “blog” for the first time. That ugly new word every literary writer turned their noses up at until they were dependent on it. Now everything is “content,” pronounced CON-tent, but seems hellbent on the opposite of its twin, content, as in contentment. So, having gotten my displeasure at those two words out of the way, what am I trying to say?
My English professor said we only communicate when we want something. I remember repeating him to someone who I’d classify as “chronically online,” although even that epithet means less and less the more difficult it is for us to go outside, and the person immediately shut me down with “that sounds manipulative.” I calmly explained, you know, it’s not. It’s intent. Am I talking to you because I want you to buy me something? To pay me? To give me a free dinner? To sleep with me? Or do I just want to check in on you? What’s the purpose here? Where do my desires lie?
I finally got my car running for the fifteen minutes it took to get from the rest stop to my auntie’s house. The ABS light, the brake light, and the traction light were all on. My cruise control engaged and disengaged in erratic blinks. Every parking spot in the rest stop was taken and everyone looked afraid. I’d been to the bathroom: a man was crying before he flushed the toilet and I scurried out for fear of him knowing that I knew. The narrow road curved on endless and all the trees seemed an unbroken photograph of what the settlers called “virgin forests,” encased as they were in so much haze. Untouchable. Frigid. My car murmured. My car cried. I made it out. Everyone on the highway passed me by with furrowed brows and deep frowns and I pet the dashboard, saying, “Easy, now. Easy.”
The molten sun bled like a cracked egg dusted with paprika for one shining moment today. I thought “There’s God” and then I thought “That’s fucking stupid” and then I thought “No, I need to savor this.”
Maybe that’s what I want. God, sure. So many of us do. But more than God, I want the next move to be the best move. I want there to be room on the board for me to mark it. I want the sun and the moon and all those innumerable stars. I don’t want to hide away in some upcycled vault when the pale horse arrives and the rivers run red with blood. I want to live. I want to go outside. I want to hold your hand one more time before you tell me you’re serious about someone else and you’re sorry but that someone just isn’t me.
I want a stay of execution.
I want to stay.
loose ends:
I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road just before the wall of smoke hit us. My friend Charles said they avoid McCarthy because they worry his “innate conservatism” will come through, and it did and it does. I still cried. I didn’t expect to. Shortly before reading that, I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I vastly preferred, and has definitely been informing my always-maturing ideas around love and death.
Now I’m midway through Paul takes the form of a mortal girl, by Andrea Lawlor, which my friend Kiizh recommended because Paul apparently reminds her of me and they wanted me to see that. I had a mini freakout about it because 1) Jesus Christ yeah we’re the same person and 2) our road trips (Paul and me) briefly mirrored each other, which reminded me once again of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson. Then again, EVERYTHING reminds me of Wrong Turn these days.
I was trying to decide between “Holy Roller” by Thao and the Get Down Stay Down and “What Then Cried Jo Soap” by David Keenan for the epigraph of this post. I settled on What Then because I’ve been listening to that album on loop lately. I think it’s such a masterpiece. Still, these words have infected me:
I’ve got minds to ease and thoughts to think through, I’ve got words to keep and lies to make true.
Holy Roller, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down
(i don’t have spotify but most of you do so here)
Also, “I want love in the aftermath.” I do. I also misheard those lyrics the first time I listened to that song. I thought she said, “I want love and its aftermath,” and it resonated so deeply because, well:
Oh, and, final note, I keep mixing up “epitaph” and “epigraph.” I suppose they’re one and the same in the end. Books and graves. Books and graves.
Author’s note: the following was written 6/19/22, the day before my top surgery with Dr. Rachel Bluebond-Langner at NYU Langone.
I got lucky.
The trouble with storytelling, I find, is deciding what’s important. I’ve written and re-written my followup to that vague opener so many times, only to cut and paste the paragraphs of maudlin sentiment in my little unseen bin of big emotions. Start fresh, bleed out, lather-rinse-repeat.
Do I tell you about the dread pooling cold in my fingertips? Do I show you all the nights out at the bar with my friends, laughing until we go quiet, how I’m sober and always order the same thing (kettle of herbal tea with a side of crackers) and the bartender always nods and says “self care?” How I kiss my friends over and over and over again and try to push everything I can’t say into them through our skin-to-skin contact? Praying they understand.
Maybe I take you back in time, to the days before my birth. My parents didn’t want to know the sex of the child, not through ultrasound, at least. They were forward thinking and already knew they wanted their children to be somewhat sequestered from the overculture, as much as was reasonable. People said the child would be male because of this or that, so when I came out with the genital configuration I had, I went nameless for four days. That feels relevant. Baby Girl, my papers said. Baby Girl Keahna.
I am over six feet tall now. My shoulders are broader than my father’s. I have a crop top my best friend bought me at Plato’s Closet that says “Babygirl” in iridescent purple-green.
No. None of this matters because everything is of equal importance. There is no one I’m trying to convince of my personhood, and I thank every god there is for what I have and who I love.
There were always more women than there were men in my life. The men who were there were gentle and kind. If there were men who weren’t, men who threatened us, the women would hurt them.
The women were shaped all kinds of shapes and no two were ever alike.
There was my Irish grandmother with a flat chest and big scars where her nipples would have been. She never got a boob job and she dressed like a storybook farmer. Every Sunday, she put on a big hat, said she was going to church, and tucked herself into bed to watch the televangelists harp about God Almighty delivering us from evil in the comfort of our own homes.
I’d cuddle up against her soft body and tune out, my ear pressed against her heartbeat. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. The men on screen gestured wildly, foaming at the mouth. Ba-boom. Her planar chest would cradle me like an ark, swaying. Ba-boom. I’d fall asleep and wake up to the sound of Beethoven or her awful singing voice, breathing in and out until I forced the warmth of these moments into my bones, because I knew if I didn’t, I’d forget it all. When she died, I was eleven, six feet of snow pushing in on our car at all sides, the small, desolate shape of my mother too-far away as she screamed at the sky.
At my grandma’s funeral, all the Indians and the Mennonites sat together and whispered. I don’t remember much else. At that point, too many things had happened to me to make me quiet and bitter. I think I played the fiddle. I think she might have liked it.
Another grandmother, not mine but close, was my first grandmother’s opposite in nearly every way. She was my cousin’s grandma, a short, fat Japanese woman who couldn’t give less of a fuck about whose ego she wounded and when. One day my cousin and I, being small and insane, busted into her and her husband’s bedroom to crawl on top of her for snuggles. She was wearing a full set of black lace and leather lingerie, complete with garters. I’d never seen a woman dressed like that before, and the image burned itself into my retinas as something erotic, aspirational. She turned to holler at us, but we were already gone, giggling, embarrassed, a little inspired.
My second grandmother, the Lakota-Ojibwe woman my papa remarried after his divorce from my first, was my world for a brief period of time. I write about her often, too often to go into detail here. I will say, when I came out to her and my Papa as trans, he immediately accepted me, while she had the funniest rebuttal I think I’ve ever heard: “I don’t know about all that.”
Sometimes I look back on that moment and laugh until I cry. Now she calls me her sweetie pie, her big guy, her handsome girl, her Tweety. When my Papa was still alive, another Native veteran came up to him at a powwow and asked, “You still married to that ole battle-axe?” Grandma finished her pop and said, “Yeah, she’s right here.”
Growing up, my siblings and I were told by our elders that everything we do, we do for women. Women are the life givers. They are sacred. Sometimes people, particularly white trans people, crush this statement like an aluminum can and throw it in with everything else they call “Terfy.” I rebuke this. TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, do not believe women are the life givers. They do not believe women are sacred. Their belief system is rooted in the idea that there are two kinds of humans: predator and prey.
TERFs trap women in a time-loop of violence at the hands of men and each other. Women must correctly perform femininity in order to fulfill their role as prey. If a predator, as defined by TERFs, wears the skin of the prey, then all narrowly defined prey must repeat their oaths to remain victims to the predator, and must do everything they can to kill the wolf in girl’s clothing, to prove their loyalty to the Cisterhood. Never once do they question why this girl is so easily torn apart, or why they themselves seem so content with their repetitive declarations of white female victimhood, their calls for culling.
No, it’s not “terfy” to say women are sacred. In fact, if you find yourself lured by the reactionary headlines claiming these hysterical transsexuals are trying to make “woman” a dirty word, I want you to take a moment and pour yourself a really big glass of water. Take a swig every time I say woman or some variation thereupon. It’s important to stay hydrated. Now swallow, and swallow careful, because I’m planning to say something that’s been said before by people far smarter and cooler than me, but in my opinion, hasn’t been said enough.
Women are everything. Women are the givers of life. Women are god and devil and earth and sky. Women should have all the power. The power to choose everything, from their occasional wombs to their one-day tombs, their breasts or chests, their dicks, pussies, strapless or strap-on. Who they lay with. Who they don’t. Where they go. What they wear. They––we––ought to have the power to choose it all, right down to whether or not we remain women.
When people ask questions about transition––with particular focus on HRT and surgery––there’s a lot of concern about regret. When I say concern, I mean genuine, heartfelt, loving concern, from parents, grandparents, elders, aunties, men and women who don’t yet understand the immensity of gender transformation, and are often getting their information from conflicting sources. I don’t mean the people who feign concern, who hide their knives under gossamer and coy little non-questions meant to trap those they interrogate in a feedback loop.
I won’t invoke or name the opposition beyond this sentence and the one above. There, they’ve been spoken of. We can move on.
No, I want to focus on the moments of gentleness that led me here.
See, I got lucky. I wasn’t the first in my family to transition.
There was another cousin of mine, a few years my senior, who, like me, kept her birth name. She’d known since she was three years old that she was a girl. That she’d always be a girl. Her father supported her, too. My mother remembers asking about her, way back when she was a teenager. Her father, in his gruff, brusque way, gently said, “oh, well, she’s a she now.” And that was that.
My we’enh Renee, yet another woman who raised me, is passionate about all her kids, whatever our genders. She altered her parenting style to fit whoever she took care of. When I was a little girl, she’d come out with a bare face and have me perch on the other side of the table. I’d watch her put her face on, as she called it, and she’d tell me what every tool meant. I was enraptured, and for a time, followed her example. I was gorgeous. She always said so. “My gorgeous girl.”
For most of the women in my life, my switch to boyhood seemed sudden. Even more sudden was my rabid insistence on surgery. It was all I could think about. I went from wearing short skirts and low-cut cleavage baring tops to binding and layering until I was basically shapeless. I’d always had a deep voice, so all my blame for my dysphoria fell to my breasts, which one of my high school best friends described as “porn star titties.”
Depending on what mood I’m in, I tell the story of what caused the switch differently. Sometimes it’s the fact that I briefly attended a predominantly LGBT high school in Minneapolis, where we were encouraged to clearly state our pronouns before every club meeting. I choked when I had to say my birth name followed by “she/her/hers.”
Or I blame the amnesia, how being cored by oral steroids killed the girl I was and conceived the boy I became. When I tell that story, it turns into a defiant tale of pragmatism and wit, rather than chance and circumstance. It’s my favorite for those reasons.
There was another time, summer of 2015, when Red Eagle Soaring hired a child psychologist named Paul to watch out for all us fucked up kids. At the time, I dressed like a rummage sale puked on me while I was trying out for the cabaret. Somehow, Paul picked up on a trans masc vibe from me. “Somehow––” I was a little freak; I’m honestly surprised nobody else picked up on my tboy swag. He asked if he could mess around with my pronouns, and I said yeah, sure, go ahead.
We were playing a game called Hunter/Hunted, where two kids are brought into the middle of a circle of kids, blindfolded, and spun in circles until they lose their sense of place. I was the Hunted. My spinner kept spinning me until Paul yelled out, “Don’t make him sick, now.” Joy exploded from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. I laughed, bright, loud, uncontrollable, and with my eyes shut tight, I saw golds, purples, pinks, and blues filling me up, sudden solar storms remaking my core in their own ecstatic image.
Sometimes I take it all the way back to the Sett, when my grandma spoiled toddler-me with so many girly things, it turned me permanently ill. That version of events is frequently corroborated by my dad, who says I was “the bitterest three-year-old” he’s ever met in his life. That story’s funny, too, because I remember throwing the world’s biggest tantrum about getting the “girl toy” in my McDonald’s kids’ meal. My grandma stood above me, a bemused smile on her face. After I finished my soliloquy, which was no doubt incomprehensible, she said, “Well, now, who bit you in the butt?”
I’m an unreliable narrator, I know. Funny thing, though: every single story is true. That’s the trouble with storytelling. I can’t quite find the throughline. Maybe I’ll leave it up to you.
In any case, I found myself once more perched across from my we’enh. This time her face was on, her ruby red lips slightly pursed, her smoky eyes steady and searching.
“Your cousin,” she said, “she knew she was a girl since she was three.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, and I know it’s sudden, and I know, but…”
“I just want you to be sure,” she said. “Please. Just be sure. Your mama and I both want you to be happy, you know?”
I bit my lip and nodded. My hair was short. I’d stopped wearing makeup. People read me as a boy over fifty percent of the time and I wasn’t even on T yet. Perks of being tall and androgynous, I guess.
“Wait awhile,” she finished. “Wait. For me.”
I nodded again. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
So I did. I waited through the summer of 2016, living in Albuquerque with a queer person who’d become a lifelong friend, and a gay man who became an enigma to me. I waited through one sexual assault, then another, one at the hands of a cishet man nearly a decade my senior, one at the hands of a peer. I moved to Seattle and experienced such beautiful things, things I’ll keep to myself. I ran away to Standing Rock (no point in lying about that, it happened, whatever) and found myself consistently gendered male for the first time in my life, held by lovers who called me their man. I ran all the way to Ithaca like a reverse-Odysseus, gods ripping out my hair and burnishing my skin, until I ran to the local Planned Parenthood and breathlessly recounted every moment of euphoria, pain, loss, resentment, and pleasure that led me there.
God bless informed consent.
I went home that day with a shot of testosterone in my thigh and a head full of butterflies.
In those days, I lived with my mom and dad. Now, my mom is different than my mom.
There’s my mom who bore and raised me, the mom who was my dad’s first wife, the mom who had the Irish mother, the mom who messed up bad from time to time and was always called in by her sisters. The mom who apologized. The mom who told me I’d go through a phase in my twenties where I hated her. When I couldn’t forgive her. The mom who forgave me in advance for it. That’s the mom who’s on her way here, now, to New York City. That’s the mom who booked us a hotel so she can take care of me once I get that major surgery she and all those other women worried about for all these years.
Then there’s my mom. My mom who my dad remarried. My mom who assembled my family out of blood and covenant. My mom who fought to reconnect with her Gros Ventre relatives. My mom who gave me my older brother, Smokii, and gave him his name.
You wanna talk about regret?
When I started transitioning, I was living with my mom and dad in Ithaca. They both taught at Cornell University. My mom was tenure track. More importantly, she saved her students’ lives. In a university famous for its suicide rate, she carved out a space for imperfection, messy feelings, being Seen.
It was difficult for her to adjust to my new pronouns. I made it harder for her. At that point in my life, I’d internalized a lot of really violent, volatile attitudes towards my elders from trans people on the internet, particularly teenagers. Whenever I spiral about this, I hear Bobby Singer from Supernatural in my head: “Kids ain’t supposed to be grateful. They’re supposed to eat your food and break your heart.”
Still. I wish I hadn’t. Broken her heart, I mean.
There’s this really unfair level of entitlement proliferated by white trans teens, this idea that your loved ones have to be perfect and never fuck up ever or you oughta cut them off. I know now this comes from the privilege of being able to cut people off. I also know this comes from the cult of stagnation that permeates whiteness. There’s an emphasis on saying the right thing all the time, forever, as opposed to doing the right thing. No room for growth or learning. My mom had trouble saying the right thing. At her funeral, though, I found out she’d been doing the right thing all along.
We were okay near the end. I didn’t say everything I wish I’d said to her. I don’t think we can ever say everything we want to say to people, not without turning into walking memento mori talismans, and as someone who often gives off that vibe, it’s no way to live a good life. Death is sudden and final and everyone, everyone leaves a void, no matter how much this society deludes us into thinking we won’t. We should live anyways. People say the wrong thing all the time. We should love each other anyways.
Lately, I’ve been remembering the rare and precious moments when neither me nor my mom were freaking out. For some reason, these moments were always set the same, her on the leather couch under the window in the living room, me on the spinning pink armchair with my knees drawn up to my chest. I’d been doing research on top surgery again.
Back then, picking at my gender dysphoria would go in cycles. I’d research top surgeons. I’d get overwhelmed. I’d look at top surgery results. I’d fantasize about my own. Before I briefly detransitioned, my titties had shrunk enough to possibly work well with keyhole or peri-areolar top surgery. I brought this up to my mom, and she told me a story about herself that made me want to rip out the jugular of every man she’d ever been with before my dad.
“My operation was keyhole,” Mom finished. “They said it’d let me keep my nipple sensation. It didn’t.”
I stared at the floor, trying to remember what her ex’s face looked like. Trying to imagine him melting into a puddle of wax.
“That’s why I worry about you,” she said. “You know? I love you. I want you to feel good in your body.” She waggled her eyebrows and smiled a mischievous, Cheshire Cat grin. “And I want you to feel good all kinds of ways.”
I stared at her blankly. At the time, I was in a celibate phase. I don’t think I came out of it until about a year and a half after her death.
She died less than three months after that conversation. Fourth of July, 2018. She died, and I became a woman again to fill the void she’d left, and my body softened and curved and filled out in ways bigger than I’d ever imagined, and I waited. I crouched in the sweet fat of my body, my genre of masculinity bristling with frenetic, immense grief, feral eyes darting back and forth as my chest rose and fell. Rage grew in bundles of sage and chrysanthemum. My heart slowed.
What if you regret it?
After all this waiting, I finally have an answer.
So what?
So what if I regret it? I regret so many other, more permanent things than my choice to embody my transness. I regret hurting my parents. All of them. I regret the times I didn’t stick up for a small child. I regret telling Ryan in sophomore year that his art sucked when it didn’t. I regret my choice paralysis and my avoidant personality. God, I regret my commitment issues. All this romantic longing and driving the gifts people give me into the ground. I regret not sticking around after Jasmine’s chair dancing class to tell her I missed her and loved her and I regret the way I couldn’t process her death. How the world got so much worse when she went.
This is being human. I don’t know how much time I have left on this bitter earth. I don’t know if I’ll see you tomorrow. I don’t know if you’re gonna love me back in the way I love you or vice versa. I don’t know if top surgery will bring me closer to some kind of peace, but I do know I’m done waiting. Time to commit to the bit.
And you know? If and when another apocalypse hits. If I fall to my knees and scream at God or gods or the infinite multiverse. If I rip out my hair and pick at my skin. If I stay up until dawn just to cause my body more harm. If I give myself over to madness and spend the rest of my days crying for everything that once was. If everything comes crashing down and I look at myself in the mirror and say, “You know what? I am a woman, after all.”
Even then, I won’t regret the changes I’ve undergone.
Do you know why?
You will never be more or less woman for the way you’re shaped. You will never be less of a woman for your inability to carry a baby, regardless of what gender you were assigned at birth, how you were raised. You are and always will be exactly what you are in this moment, and nobody, no matter how hard they try, can take that away from you.
Mapping my Godforsaken Transsexual Heart After Two Coffees, One Dunkin’ Donuts Mocha, One Small Matcha Vanilla Oat Milk Latte, No Sleep, and 1,110 Miles
audio narration, rough, quick, dirty, unedited
Dread trickles from my head to my heart. Abrasive as it is, the unmapped chambers rend meat from veins until my chest is a raw, bloody, hot mess. Dread builds a thoroughfare out of the massacre and cries peace. It transfigures cleaver to river and convinces me it’s been here this whole time, carving the stone of my bone slow. Canyons. Gorgeous terrain. Dread reaches my hands, my fingers, pools cold and stagnant at my fingertips until the shiver drives me to put my thumb in my mouth and bite.
Lately, I’ve been wondering about the woman I’d be if I’d never gone on T. This is a dangerous thing to wonder for myriad reasons, not least the impending genocide. I feel defeatist typing that. Not defeated, but defeatist. Like calling a spade a spade is me giving consent for you to dig my grave with it.
Anyways. The internet is funny because it’s not real. It is and it isn’t. I go outside. I know how people see me. I know I’m six feet tall. I know my voice is deep and resonant. I know when I’m in bed with someone or I haven’t spoken in awhile it comes out gravelly and sepulchral. I also know I’ll probably always hear a sardonic teenage girl when I talk or read or think. How my voice was already pretty deep for being female, and I soaked it in irony because the boys I so desperately wanted to hang out with would snip and sneer at me if I was as sincere as I am. If I slipped.
I’ve been rereading that last paragraph and remembering what it was like to be fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. That Ruby Rose video. Orange is the New Black. Sleepovers with girls I needed to touch but knew I couldn’t. My heart beating so hard it bled me dry. Trestle bridge. Never making my mark. Knowing the end. The end. The end. Girlhood as crucifixion. Girlhood as gauntlet. Girlhood as something to wear in tatters to the dance.
Girlhood is a place you live until you can’t anymore. There are men and women who go to Girlhood and try to slice you up while you’re there. They want you for their sons. They want you to stop being whole. This is why it’s dangerous for me to ask the world who I would have been if I’d stayed. They take my doubt for proof, my dread for evidence that transness is something unholy, something that must be quashed under their ugly little lace-up shoes or killed by their government.
The Christofascists are at my door, but I don’t live there anymore. So with them fresh on my tongue and their cull on my mind, I ask: who is she?
Imagine a fourteen year old girl who’s really into steampunk. Imagine she falls in love with her body in a very gay way. Imagine she dances with her shadow because she’s so, so lonely, but the sun pushes through her bedroom window just so and her silhouette is alluring to her in a way no other person could ever be. A female Narcissus. An Echo. Imagine she does up her silly little vest with its unmatched buttons. Imagine she cuts her hair short and wears bright red lipstick until one of her dyke friends asks her, “Are you wearing that because you want someone to kiss you?” and the shame of a truth, hitherto unspoken, is so salient, she stops. Who would she become, uninterrupted? Or is that an impossible and useless thought experiment?
I’m in a restaurant in Minneapolis with my mother when I finally admit all of this aloud.
“I am so afraid,” I say. “It’s such a uniting force between the left and the right. They hate us. They hate us.”
My mom pulls a face. She’s always been cartoonish in her expressions, a trait I’ve inherited. This face I call the just ate something gross face, and she does it when she’s getting ready to make her voice shrill, whiny, annoyed and disgruntled.
“I just don’t get it,” she says. There it is. “Who cares?”
She means the fascists, of course. She gets me. She gets my cousins. She gets my siblings. She gets all of us because all there is to “get” is that we loved ourselves enough to make our bodies and the words people use for them feel like home. That we love ourselves every day we wake up how we want to, in the forms we commit to like husbands and wives. Like little household gods with our ritualistic adornments, injections, surgeries, verbiage.
“I know,” I say. “And I know there’s people like you… on both sides. Who love us. Who also don’t understand. But it’s like… your lack of understanding isn’t going to prevent our death. Isn’t going to stop what’s coming. What keeps coming. What I keep…”
I trail off here and stare at my plate. The noodles favor intestines. I have a pressure headache from my flight and I can already tell if I don’t fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow tonight, I’m in for another insomniac episode. All my memories bubble up at once. My head throbs with lifetimes lived and unfulfilled. Just this morning, I was with someone I deeply care for, who cares for me in return. Then I dreamt of houses slipping into mud, mountains full of teeth and bone, women with eyes on every knuckle and mouths shaped like dolphin snouts, screaming at me to figure it out. To connect the disparate vignettes until I’ve completed the whole film. I woke up twenty minutes past my alarm and hissed at myself to please be kind and patient with my body as I careened around the room, a chicken with its head cut off. Then the Lyft. The flight. The cold. The road.
There’s a lot of fear-mongering when it comes to trans healthcare. I don’t have the energy to dispel all of it right now, not least because this entry is about my own fear, staring down the barrel of a bloody, irradiated future. What I can tell you is that on February 7th, my top surgeon, the honorable Dr. Rachel Bluebond-Langner, slammed open the door to my exam room with her trademark brusque attitude, chirped, “Well-would-ya-look-at-that! Perfectly sculpted! Beautiful chest! Beautiful! Yeah, we don’t have to see you again until your one year followup. Oh, but, hey, if you wanna fix that, uh. Those little haloes of white around your nipple grafts… here—” and here she handed me a square, matte business card for a medical tattoo parlor, “—not that you have to, of course. Are you happy?”
Still reeling from her energy, I stammered, “y-yeah!” and meant it.
“Good! Well, uh, spread the word.”
With that, she was gone. I looked down at my scars. They were two flat, pinkish lines of watercolor across my pale, yellowish chest. I traced them, shocked, as usual, at how quickly my sensation seemed to be returning. I’d gotten top surgery in June of 2022. Dr. Bluebond-Langner had taken about an hour and forty-five minutes in total to remove my sweet rack. While she was short, so short I had to crane my neck to meet her eye, her attending team seemed to mostly clock in at 5’11 and above, which gave my recovery a surreal, cinematic vibe.
I’d carved out the whole summer for my recovery, expecting to be on my ass for at least two months. I walked through Times Square with my drains visibly poking through my shirt just one day post-op. By two weeks, I’d walked two miles from my apartment to a little sushi joint (and two miles back) for a date. I marveled at my body, equal parts terrified and grateful. It took to top surgery like it had taken to testosterone. Immediacy was the name of the game. Not urgent. Immediate. Like flipping a switch.
photo taken 4 days post-op, june ‘22
It is, I’ll admit, a little lonely being what I am. I’m not a transmedicalist by any means. I believe anyone can be trans and be trans any way they’d like. I also know there’s a reality of the body, and that my tall, broad-shouldered frame troubles the mainstream narratives of transsexual manhood, if such a mainstream exists. People have assumed my genitalia so often, my nonexistent natal dick has its own mythos. When I say I’m female—
“You say you’re female?” Mom asks. “For real? You don’t say biologically female or assigned female at birth or female to male? Just ‘female?’”
I shrug. “You remember how I was early in transition.” I put on a mockery of my pre-T voice and sneer. “I’m male! I’m male! I’m a man! Don’t you dare call me trans!” I shrug again and try to take a bite of my sodden noodles. “I guess the moment I realized I’m so unclockable, people actively disbelieve the presence of my vagina, I decided I’d just say ‘female’ all the time to fuck with them. Hell, one time I was… I had to get tested. UTI, again. This was before I went on the estradiol. Anyways. I go in and the nurse, she’s so sweet. Really. She’s telling me all about how I have to do the male… cups. She’s all ‘since you’re male, we do it like this.’ And I have to tell her no, no, I need the girl cups. I need the girl cups because I’m female. And she just looks at me and goes: ‘Are you sure?’”
Testosterone is lovely, though. Also, as luck would have it, I’m allergic to the estrogen my body produces. This vexed my endocrinologist. Not that it had happened—autoimmune estrogen dermatitis, while uncommon, affected 14 out of 23 hormone-sensitive women who were monitored for it in one clinical study—but that it had happened to me. He wasn’t prepared for a patient whose body quite literally medicalized the transition for him, coaxing me into masculinity by jabbing me with spikes all over my body every full moon until I complied. No. I don’t have it in me to dispel the lies about medical transition, but I have it in me to confuse, alarm, and upset. I have it in me to bleed until I can’t bear it any more. I have it in me to transform.
Writing all of this down and putting it out there, in front of God and everybody, shouldn’t make me feel better, but it does. I’m not hubristic enough to believe my little stories can make like my new favorite shirt says and bend the arc of the moral universe, no way. But I do recall putting my fresh scars on my close friends story on Instagram helped some of my acquaintances overcome their fear of trans surgery. I have no intent to cannibalize myself for the panopticon, either. That’s like a fast track to becoming the most annoying person in the room. Some shit should just be for yourself. But this I wanted to share. This I wanted to invite you in for.
Absent of a dimension-hopping time machine, I’ll never know the woman I could have been, and I’ve made my peace with that. In another world, I’m sure she’s having a lovely time with the nerdy butch she’s U-Hauled with, or the two chaotic femmes she’s on-again-off-again with, or the older trans woman she devoted herself to like Artemis and the moon. Right here, right now, I like the man I’m growing up to be. I like his visible veins and his awful dirtbag mustache. I like his singing voice. I like when he gets serious and sounds like a father. Not his father, but a father. I like that he carries Narcan with him. I like that he says “please” and “thank you” and “sir” and “ma’am.” I like how he loves. I like that he’s cool with being wrong. I like that he can apologize. I like that he wants to get better. I’m not a fan of his slacker vibe, but, you know. We’re all just works-in-progress and then we die.
Yeah, I’m still afraid. I’m really, really afraid. Listen, though. Come here. My heart beats faster than most. Like a little rabbit or a trapped bird. Sit here with me for a minute. Tell me: are you scared?
Frances Goodwin Keahna Born: March 25, 1905 Died: February 15, 1998
Frances Keahna was born over 90 years ago on a farm in Heier Township, northwest of Mahnomen on the White Earth Reservation. Her Ojibwa name was Naynakawobequa (“stands before the people”). Noted for her mastery of traditional Chippewa basket making, she demonstrated her art and exhibited her baskets at the Minnesota State Fair, the Minnesota State Historical Society and many other locations, and worked with the Minnesota State Arts Council. Mrs. Keahna, lost her husband of 40 years in 1965, and she was the mother of six daughters and one son. She was well known and respected as an elder with a wonderful sense of humor throughout the reservation.
I’m the last Goodwin. They’re all gone—my mother, my father, my grandmother, my brother and two sisters. I was the second to the youngest, and now I’m the only one left.
We lived on a little farm in Heier Township near Duelm. Everybody had certain jobs. We just all pitched in and did things together, like feeding the chickens, slopping the hogs, and feeding and watering the horses and the cattle.
We had to make a lot of our own food in those days. We had our own gardens and did a lot of canning. We’d go pick berries and can them or make jellies and jams. We raised our own meat right on the farm, and pumped water from a little creek down the hill from our place. My mother made dried sweet corn. She’d buy a whole bunch of it, cut it off the cob, lay it on cheesecloth and put it out on racks. I’ve never made it myself, but I did like to eat it!
We got around with horses and buggies. Every morning we milked the cows and separated the milk with an old-fashioned separator before we walked to school. It was about a quarter-mile away; I remember making our own trails through the deep snow. We had a store, a church, a post office and the school in those days. Now it’s all fields. Everything is gone.
Our first school had one room with all the grades from first through eighth. We brought sandwiches for lunch in a little syrup pail. We studied the ABCs, math and just the everyday language. Of course it was easier in those days, not like it is today. We had a strict old man for a teacher who’d hit you with a ruler. Nowadays that would be abuse!
My mother’s father was a Warren. Her great-grandfather, William W. Warren, wrote the book The History of the Ojibwa Nation. My grandmother was a Chippewa —from Canada, I think.
My father’s father, old George Goodwin, was white. He came from Maine over the Great Lakes with the fur traders and trappers. My grandmother spoke Ojibwa, but she didn’t speak English very well. My father and mother never spoke Ojibwa unless there was something they didn’t want us to know, so I never learned the language outside of a few basic words. I don’t recall them ever discouraging us from using it, though.
We lived on the farm until 1918, when my father ran out of work. He was a logger, and used to drive logs down the Rice River. When work ran out, we moved here to Nay-tah-waush. He became a carpenter and built a lot of these houses around here.
I went to school here, then, through eighth grade. After about half a year of high school, I transferred to the Indian boarding school at Haskell, Kansas. I was there for about three years. I don’t think I came home at all, except for the summers. Of course, I never did stay on the campus. I had a job. I took care of some elders and stayed right in their home.
I met my husband in school. He was a football player—and you know how that goes! They were winning all the games. He was from Iowa, a Sac and Fox Indian. We Chippewa liked to chase the Sac and Fox down!
We were married February 17, 1925, in Toledo, Ohio. He died in 1965. I’ve never remarried, and I haven’t been looking. There’s nobody around who could keep up with me, anyway, even if I am 90 years old. My son-in-law calls me the ringleader.
I have seven children, all living. My daughter Deanna lives in Burnsville. In her house she has every kind of basket I’ve ever made—baskets all over. She and her husband are retired from the BIA. One daughter lives in Oklahoma now. She used to live in Chicago, but she had little tots growing up. They would come home all beat up, so she said, “That’s enough.” She works with records in a hospital there. Nancy is in Idabelle, Oklahoma. Bonnie’s in Dallas. Cookie’s in San Mateo, California. Vincent is in Minneapolis; he’s retired from the BIA, too. And Lauren works here at the school in Nay-tah-waush.
I can’t remember exactly when I started making baskets. It’s so long ago! My mother learned basket making through an Episcopal minister who came here to our church. They were Ottawa Chippewas from way up on the peninsula of Michigan. His mother came here to visit, and she taught my mother basket-making. My mother didn’t stick with it because it was such hard work, but she taught me how to do it.
I’ve often given demonstrations of my basket making at craft shows and exhibits. I’ve been to the Minnesota State Fair three times. I’ve been down at Chanhassen. I’ve been all along the Iron Range. We once went over to a show at Cass Lake with a big bundle of about 25 baskets. We started out at ten in the morning and by two o’ clock we didn’t have one basket left. The others still had their baskets. It wasn’t the price either. I had one basket left, and asked a woman I know who’s a coordinator for the aging if she wanted to buy it. She said, “Sure, I’ll buy it.” And we went home with nothing left.
I’ve worked with the State Arts Board and have been to the Historical Society in St. Paul and all over the city. I went to the tribal college in Cass Lake last April and to Maplewood State Park in May. They wanted me at some other events, but enough is enough. I said, “I’m getting too old for this.” But making baskets does make me feel good.
Up until ’66, I set (fishing) nets through the ice. We went ricing and sugarbushing. Our family would tap hundreds of trees right up the road four or five miles north of the village. It would take three good weeks. We made sugar cake and syrup to keep through the winter. It took a lot of boiling of sap to get the syrup. Nowadays they are really making it easier and better with the evaporators and plastic tubes—but we did it all the hard way.
I learned a lot about using medicinal plants from my mother. We’d go out and pick the plants in fall after they had blossomed. I remember picking pennyroyal; you make a hot tea from it to use for cold or congestion. It would make you sweat and bring the cold right out of you.
For headaches, you can use parts of the birch tree—the little shelves, the fungus things that grow on their white bark. You take off the shell and remove the brown part on the inside, then burn a piece about the size of your fingernail in an ashtray. Cover your head with a towel and inhale the smoke and your headache is gone. I still use that when I get a headache. You just try it! You have to believe in it, though—believe that it’s going to get you well.
Once I talked to a medicine man from Montana. I told him I have tendonitis in my shoulders. I gave him some tobacco, and he sent his helper out to the car to bring back some medicine, a little bottle full of grease-like stuff that came from a female bear. I rubbed just a little of it on my shoulders. Before I saw him, I couldn’t move my arms. Now I can raise them.
I’m satisfied with things just the way they are now. I’m not hard to please. I watch TV, read, work puzzles and make baskets when I feel like it. And I like to play bingo. One Sunday morning I went to play bingo. They feed you a free dinner, then you have all afternoon and night to play, so I stayed all day. That night, when I got home, I saw numbers everywhere I looked. Numbers on the doorknobs. Numbers all over the place. I thought I was going crazy! But I’m still healthy. See, I don’t have arthritis, and I don’t have diabetes—but I do have bingo eyes!