An epistrophe poem: With my boy’s chest

“

Running again, no sports-bra needed anymore, with my boy’s chest

Climbing shirtless, bare rock under my fingers, with my boy’s chest 

Swimming, fresh water flowing over my whole body, with my boy’s chest

Standing in front of the mirror, smiling, recognizing myself at last 

With my boy’s chest

”

It gets more terrifying for trans people every day

[Trigger warning: transphobic measures]

Trans (as well as nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex) people are being stripped of their human rights, daily, one move at a time (& this latest move affects me directly, in a terrifying way, both for my passport and for my CRBA): 

“… 

According to the new memo, passports and Consular Report of Birth Abroad records that have already been issued with an “X” sex marker are valid until replaced or expired. Travelers who were issued passports with “X” markers within the last year can request to replace them at no cost for passports with a binary “F” or “M” sex marker by submitting a correction form. 

The guidance applies to all in-progress passport applications and any future applications received as of last Friday, the memo states.  

Under the new guidance, in-process applications requesting an “X” sex marker will be changed to male or female using a review of all available evidence establishing sex assigned at birth, such as a birth certificate, government-issued ID or prior passport record, according to the memo. 

If the evidence submitted with the application doesn’t sufficiently establish the applicant’s sex assigned at birth — because, for example, their documentation does not show their birth sex, shows conflicting information regarding their birth sex, only lists an “X” marker or includes a designation like intersex — the application must be suspended, the memo states. 

According to the new memo, passports and Consular Report of Birth Abroad records that have already been issued with an “X” sex marker are valid until replaced or expired. Travelers who were issued passports with “X” markers within the last year can request to replace them at no cost for passports with a binary “F” or “M” sex marker by submitting a correction form. 

The guidance applies to all in-progress passport applications and any future applications received as of last Friday, the memo states.  

Under the new guidance, in-process applications requesting an “X” sex marker will be changed to male or female using a review of all available evidence establishing sex assigned at birth, such as a birth certificate, government-issued ID or prior passport record, according to the memo. 

If the evidence submitted with the application doesn’t sufficiently establish the applicant’s sex assigned at birth — because, for example, their documentation does not show their birth sex, shows conflicting information regarding their birth sex, only lists an “X” marker or includes a designation like intersex — the application must be suspended, the memo states. “

[From NBC News: “Passports with ‘X’ sex markers will be valid until they expire or are renewed, State Department says”]

Dark Nights — Unbearable Loneliness

I remember feeling this way back in California. The dark, dark nights when all the darkest thoughts, the most unbearable loneliness, the deepest and most wrenching craving for comforting human touch that I couldn’t have kept me awake for hours or haunted my restless dreams. 

I’m sure I had some moments like that here in Colorado, too, in the past three years that I’ve been living here, but somehow I cannot remember them as well as the dark, lonely nights in California. 

Which seems to confirm that this is, indeed, one of the roughest bouts of loneliness that I’ve been experiencing in a long time. 

Or am I just “more aware” of the loneliness and more clearly aware of what precise needs I have now? 

I need more human touch, more human touch of the friendly and comforting kind.

I am, once again, starved of human touch. 

It’s mostly circumstantial now, I think, since over the past couple years and especially over the past few months I have either been building new relationships which are inherently more touchy-feely or have been loosening up into more comforting touch with some established platonic friends. But in the past couple weeks especially the sources of comforting, friendly touch from my queer spheres of friendships have drastically diminished, or temporarily been paused, for different reasons (seasonal illness, new jobs, new relationships, fatigue, conflicting schedules…). And for many months now I haven’t had my other source of physical connection that comes from climbing with my close buddies. That has also been circumstantial (injuries, new life goals/paths with spouses and/or new careers…), but it’s real and affects me. 

The temporary loss, or decrease, of physical intimacy and/or or comforting touch from my friends and chosen families, i.e. from that safe “little bubble of mine”, added to the general hostility I’m feeling toward my community and myself as a trans person, in particular, from the “outer world” has just become almost impossible to bear in this past week. I can really feel it affecting my emotional and mental well-being. 

My battery of human touch is drained, I’m down to a dangerously-close-to-unfunctional level of loneliness: how do I replenish this battery that we need so badly as humans?

Do animals really know when they’re about to die?

[Trigger warnings: aging, dying, death.]

Do animals really know when they’re about to die? 

I don’t want to go into the scary details here, but the physical and mental decline that I have been experiencing over the past year feel more than just the “natural decline that starts in the fourth decade of life”. I’m having really acute, scary episodes of both mental and physical decline that feel beyond “normal”, beyond “natural”, i.e. actually unhealthy, heralding the beginning of the end. This doesn’t feel like “natural aging” or like “having reached the peak and now slowly going downhill”: this feels like I’ve suddenly turned a sharp corner and come to stand on the edge of a precipice. 

I’m going to reach out to my doctor and get all the tests I can (I know from family history one of the possible causes of this, unfortunately). But if nothing shows up, can I still trust the “animal instinct of the approaching end”? And if so, what do I do?

“… we’re all terminal on this bus”

[Trigger warnings: terminal illness; death; loss.]

From Anne Lamott’s book Bird by bird [chapter Writer’s Block]: 

“

I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this one particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn’t, but she said something that changed my life. “Watch her carefully right now”, she said, “because she’s teaching you how to live.”

I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours. So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, “Okay, hmmmm, let’s see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?” Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filing me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but I’d also love to be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present.

“ 

“Some instructions on writing and life”

“On a bad day you […] don’t need a lot of advice. You just need a little empathy and affirmation. You need to feel once again that other people have confidence in you.”

“A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.” 

“[…] I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who doesn’t respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding your breath.”

“You’ll know when the person is right for you and when you are right for that person. It’s not unlike finding a mate, where little by little you begin to feel that you’ve stepped into a shape that was waiting there all along.” 

[Some excerpts from Anne Lamott’s book Bird by bird — Some instructions on writing and life]

The comfort & safety of sleepovers

The other aspect of sleepovers that I miss and crave, and sometimes really need, is the sense of comfort and safety that I get from them.  

They are comforting in a deep way to me, dating back to my childhood. I grew up in a family in which I didn’t feel seen and where I was constantly forced to share both physical spaces and relationships (including my own friends) with my younger sister. So sleepovers at my friends’ houses, by myself with my close friends and their family, meant not only fun time with a friend but also a reprieve from an environment that felt hostile and/or stifling to me. 

So sleepovers bring back sweet, cozy, warm, comforting, safe memories from my childhood & teenage years. 

They also feel comforting and safe to me now, as an adult, from a practical, logistic viewpoint: I often visit friends who live an hour drive away, each way, and when we hang out in the evening there’s the possibility that I might feel too exhausted to drive an hour to get back home, back to safety. It might actually not be safe for me to drive back if I’m too tired. So knowing that I’m visiting a friend on whose couch I can crash or whose bed I can share, gives me a real, tangible sense of safety, an important Plan B, which also allows me to relax more into the time spent together without needing to split my brain in two, to be extra vigilant about where my energy level is (i.e. “do I have enough energy to actually drive for an hour to get home after this?”).

The intimacy of sleepovers

The gender-expansive guy with whom I hooked up in the chorus & I both feel that our interactions have been “more than just hooking up”: we like each other and want to really build a friendship, leaving open the possibility of being “friends with benefits” further down along the road. 

“Friendship with benefits” is something that I have done in the past and I know that it works for me, I know that I can do it well, given the right circumstances. And I really don’t mind if the people with whom I’m “friends with benefits” have other “friends with benefits” or hook up with other people or have romantic partners (as long as it’s all safe, consensual, ethical non-monogamy) — just the way I don’t mind if my platonic friends have “friends with benefits” or hook up with other people or have romantic partners, of course. 

I’m not jealous. 

Relationship anarchy works for me, among other reasons, because it releases me of the pressure that I feel if I’m “the only one for someone”. 

Tuesday night I hung out with the gender-expansive gay guy from the chorus. He lives in a different town from me, about an hour drive each way, and for now I have always visited him there on days that I have some other errand or commitment in his town. Logistically it makes sense, since he doesn’t have a car and public transit between our towns isn’t great. So the other night, as we chatted about our respective plans for the rest of the week, he mentioned that he was going to visit another friend who lives in my town on Thursday evening and then spend the night there. Which again logistically makes sense because there would be no public transit for him to get back. 

Yet something was nagging at me for the next couple days.   

Was I jealous? I.e. did it hurt me or bother me to think of him visiting someone else in the town where I live? Or did it hurt me or bother me that he might be having sex with this other friend? Or would I have wanted him to visit me, in my town, instead? 

No. It didn’t hurt or bother me that he was visiting another friend in the town where I live nor do I want him to visit me here. And no, I’m totally unfazed by his having sex with other people or other friends. 

I’m not jealous. 

And yet something in my heart felt painful. So I sat with it and let it unfold until it finally surfaced: I miss sleepovers. 

I don’t want to have a sleepover with this guy in particular — I’m not ready for that, yet, and I’m sure he isn’t either, and it may never come to that for us two. But I miss sleepovers with other friends. And I mean also platonic sleepovers (most of my sleepovers have, in fact, been platonic).

There’s an intimacy & comfort to sleepovers that feel unique to me. Those late-night chats over hot cocoa or herbal tea or weed that somehow get more relaxed, more intimate as it gets later, as we get sleepier. The intimacy of seeing each other in our pajamas or underwear in the morning. The intimacy of seeing each other still groggy, “without makeup”, right out of bed or before breakfast. The intimacy of cooking breakfast together, of seeing what they eat, if anything at all. The intimacy of discovering if they’re a tea-drinker or coffee-drinker, or maybe neither. The intimacy of sharing a pot of hot tea to start the day together. And possibly the intimacy of sharing a bed, of pulling covers off of each other inadvertently while sleeping, maybe of spooning.

I miss that. I don’t get enough of that type of relationship, that type of intimacy in my life right now. I wish I had friends with whom I could do sleepovers more often than once every blue moon because I truly miss that type of intimacy & comfort. 

And maybe now I miss it more than ever because of the hostility I feel from the external world and thus the extra need for closeness and comfort that I need even on a physical level, through touch and/or the physical presence of a friend nearby.