Hiraeth

There’s writing that you have to do–as in, you’re obligated to do it–and then there’s writing that you need to do, as in, it’s just sitting there inside you, weighing you down, gnawing at the inner walls of your mind, needing to be expunged so you can do the writing that you have to do.

This is writing that I need to do so that I can get back to the writing that I have to do.

On a recent afternoon I got off BART at the stop near my home and there were Girl Scouts outside at a little table, selling cookies. In an instant an entire scenario played out in my head. I walked up to them, smiling, expressing enthusiasm about getting to buy some cookies, maybe making a comment about how much we all love Thin Mints, though I bet they hear that all the time. I bought a few boxes, wished them well, and went on my way. But none of this actually happened. Instead I just turned away and started walking toward my apartment. Reason being that I figured if I did, in actuality, approach them with the intent of buying cookies, the fact of my obvious transness might, perchance, have made one of the girls noticeably uncomfortable, or perhaps a parent of one of the girls, and I would pick up on this and then I would feel uncomfortable for having made them uncomfortable, and then the whole exchange would be tinged with awkwardness, and I’d just want to end it as quickly as possible to relieve their discomfort at me and my discomfort at their discomfort, and I’d walk away regretting that I’d put any of us through that. Of course I realize that there’s a chance that these particular young people and their present parents are perfectly comfortable around trans people, that there’d be no fleeting “How do I explain this to my daughter later?” flicker across a mother’s face, no girl hesitating awkwardly, caught in a moment of uncertainty about how to address me. But I can’t know for sure, and so even if I tried to approach the situation with the casual, carefree attitude that I wanted to, the fear of the possibility of things becoming awkward would be rattling around in me so loudly that I couldn’t hide it, and my fear of potential awkwardness would awkwardly poison the whole interaction regardless.

This happens all the time. This is how I live my life.

Last month, Bruno Ganz died. I love Wings of Desire, and his performance in it. Like his angel, Damiel, I sometimes feel like I’m observing life, but not really participating in it. I exist at a remove, wondering what real closeness and connection and participation in life are like. I know they can be wonderful. 

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“I wish I could see your face, just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here…to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together, it’s fantastic.”

The film punctures the lie that time heals all wounds. For many of us, the waiting and waiting and waiting is the wound. 

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Bruno Ganz was only a few years older than I am now when he made Wings of Desire. I don’t know why thoughts like that so often occur to me, but they do. I think maybe it’s because I’m so aware of time slipping away from me, time that I never get back, and I really want to start living before I die.

Today, and yesterday, and the day before that, I woke up starving for touch. Often the first thing I’m aware of when consciousness comes to me is a kind of ache in the body, like my skin is the frozen surface of a lake, and there’s warm water far, far below that could bring such relief, but it needs a warm touch on the surface to bring it floating up through the cold, to infuse my skin with life once again. This is one of the ways I am wounded by time.

Anyway, I want to tell you a story.

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(Bionic Commando, NES)

It’s actually not about the person I met when I was young, though I wish it was. I’d have only very kind things to say about them, but to write about them would not be a kindness. And so, like so many stories that purport to be about someone else, this is actually a story about the person telling it, and the effect that the other person had on me.

Was I young many years ago, when this story I’m about to tell you happened? I don’t know. I mean, yes, I was, and I am. I’m very young. Young like Yorkie in San Junipero. Her body may be 60 or so, but she’s not really 60, because she’s experienced so little. In the virtual world of San Junipero, she has the freedom to be herself, a young woman looking to form connections and find love for the first time. Even there, her complete lack of experience surprises the woman she clicks with, but still, with Kelly she finds acceptance. She can let her walls down and be honest about who she is, what she’s missed out on her whole life, and what she needs now.

Now I’m physically 42 but really I’m no older than Yorkie. I go on dating sites like Bumble and I can’t help but be extremely aware that I’m very different from most of the queer women on there, not just because I’m trans, and visibly so (though that certainly significantly limits the pool of people who might want to even meet me for coffee), but because I’m so inexperienced, and so guarded, and so aware that it takes a special kind of person to make me feel safe, and able to be honest and real.

Of course, I have had long, close relationships before, but that was before I transitioned, and despite all my efforts to pretend otherwise, there was always a barrier between me and my partners, because those relationships were all predicated on a fiction, the role I tried so hard to play while gender dysphoria carved up my insides. I was profoundly uncomfortable with my body, and didn’t really inhabit it throughout all those years. It was as if my soul was hiding away, trying to make itself as small and as removed as possible from the anguish of reality, possibly curled up into a tight little ball in my left pinky toe, barely present in the real world, always seeking escape into books and songs and movies and video games.

Now I’m uncomfortable with my body for an entirely different reason: it seems to prevent people from seeing me for who I really am. I’m definitely in less pain having transitioned, and there’s a relief in living with the integrity of being honest with the world about who I am, but still, the world can’t see me clearly. I’m misgendered constantly, and because I know I’m not clearly seen by the world, fear factors into every decision I make. I’m never free of it. Do I dress the way I dress because this is how I want to dress, or do I dress the way I dress because I’m trying to make myself invisible, because I’m afraid of drawing potentially hostile attention to myself? I don’t know, and as long as fear remains present, I can’t know.

Whether or not it’s true, I feel as if I exist entirely outside the marketplace of desire as a queer woman, and that the only times people want me are when they see me as something I’m not. One woman I dated briefly repeatedly misgendered me and even admitted to me once that she fantasized about me being a man. One woman made a pass at me by saying that she saw me not as a woman or a man but just as a person. How can I be present in a relationship if I know that I’m being seen and desired expressly as things I feel like I’m not, and not as who I am?

Loneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower, or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others.

–Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

So. Let’s talk about Alex. 

I’ve written about Alex before. I don’t know if i’ll write about Alex again. Some writers are fond of saying that all of us who write essentially write the same story again and again and again, but I’d like to have a new story to tell. I know Alex wants that for me too.

It was several years ago now that I met them. I was in a weird place at the time, having just gone through an intense defrost cycle on my heart. After focusing on transition and not giving much thought to relationships for many years, I’d had an encounter that made me painfully aware that finding love, closeness, and connection was supremely important to me.

There’s a great deal I can’t tell you about Alex that I wish I could tell you. What I can say is that they just had a particular kind of sincerity about them that put me at ease. Very few people can do that. I didn’t feel the anxiety around them that I feel around so many people. I didn’t mind just existing in silence with them. Time with most people drains my batteries. Time with Alex recharged them.

Alex did and still does things that I admire greatly, and I find them fascinating as a person, and I wanted more than anything to engage in the endless process of getting to know them. In the 1990 Hal Hartley movie Trust, a character asserts that respect, admiration and trust equal love. I don’t know if it’s as simple as that, but I do know that all those ingredients were there.

I could tell that Alex knew what suffering was in their own way, and that they struggled sometimes, which is essential if I’m going to be able to relate to someone, but Alex wasn’t wounded in the same ways or the same places that I was wounded, which is also essential. If you put me next to someone who’s like me, there’s just a chasm between us. All we can do is spin our wheels. Alex was someone I could relate to and understand, and also learn from.

Anyway, it eventually came to pass that Alex knew how I felt, just as I knew that Alex would never see me the way I wanted them to see me. The circumstances of this dual revelation would make for a more symbolically fraught movie scene about the anguish of a lifetime spent feeling invisible than anything I could concoct in a work of fiction, but I won’t go into the particulars. Suffice it to say that the next night, Alex and I met, I guess in the hopes of clearing the air. We sat on Alex’s couch, and Alex put their arm around me.

I suppose that’s the sort of thing you might do if you grow up in a somewhat healthy family that teaches you that your love has value.

The effect it had on me was the feeling of years and years and years of ice melting away, warm water rushing to the surface, my skin and my soul awakened in a way they never had been before. I simultaneously wanted to kiss Alex and to fall asleep in their arms. I wanted to sit there talking and laughing quietly while letting phrases like “I love you” slip out of my mouth, and I wanted to cry, to let loose all the grief that I’d carried around with me for so long and had never been able to share with anyone. I actually did laugh at the sheer wild luck of it all, of finding myself in that moment, and I laughed, too, at the wonderful surprise of discovering, after spending all my life in moments that I couldn’t fully inhabit, that really being there, right there with Alex, was the easiest thing in the world.

If I died tomorrow, and it turned out that, like in Hirokazu Koreeda’s film After Life, I had to choose just one memory to take with me, that would be it, the time I spent in Alex’s arms that night.

When I left, it felt as if the whole world was vibrating. That’s not an exaggeration or some kind of metaphor. I mean that it felt to me as if everything was humming, as if all of existence had become charged with life, or perhaps as if all of existence were always charged with life, and for the first time I could see and feel it, because for the first time I was part of it.

Maybe this is what Sam meant in Gone Home when she said she felt like a shook-up can of soda. Maybe almost everyone experiences something like this when they’re young, and they learn that they can be loved. But I still haven’t learned that. I’m still waiting for my first mutual experience of it. I don’t expect love to mean undergoing a massive spiritual experience every time the person I love touches me. Not at all. I want to get to a point where being held by someone I really like doesn’t feel like winning the goddamn lottery. But when you’ve waited for it for as long as I have, it’s powerful, when it finally happens. I don’t expect love to be grandiose. For the most part, my time with Alex wasn’t grandiose. It was low-key friendly get-togethers, conversations over drinks at bars, playing games together, or just working quietly on our own things in the same place at the same time. That was all it had to be.

Of course, I knew even as I was sitting there with Alex, being brought to life by their warmth and their presence and their touch, that they didn’t mean for it to affect me so profoundly. They were just trying to comfort me, their friend, in the hopes that it might be easier for me to let go, to move on, to just be friends. The next day they texted me and asked me if I was feeling better. What could I say? That the night before had changed my life, that it was the most incredible thing I’d ever experienced and that I was, if anything, more full of yearning than ever before, that all I wanted was to hold them and be held by them?

I said that yes, I was feeling better, and left it at that. That was years ago now, and in all the time since, I haven’t met anyone else yet who has felt like a chance to me the way Alex did.

Sometimes some of my friends say that monogamy is bullshit. The people who say this around me, though, are always attractive people for whom love and affection and touch are widely available around the city in or the planet on which they live. When people ask me if I’m poly (as they occasionally do, I suppose because I’m a queer-identified woman living in the San Francisco Bay Area), all I can do is laugh. I can’t even find one person I like and who likes me who I want to know deeply, with whom I feel safe, with whom I can be vulnerable, with whom I can take my time to form a bond of closeness and trust. If my life were completely different, if the world taught me to move with confidence rather than fear, if the world taught me that I was seen rather than invisible, would I be poly then? I can never know the answer to that. We are all shaped by our experiences within the world, the messages the world sends us about ourselves, and if the world sent me different messages about myself, I’d be a different person. But I do resent the attitude among some that polyamory is inherently more enlightened or radical than monogamy. I think that in this world, where people so often use other people and then dispose of them, there’s something radical about ordinary devotion to one person, between two people who know each other deeply, trust each other completely, have seen each other at their worst, and still support and rely on each other.

The other question I get, I guess because of my lack of experience, is whether I might be asexual. But I’m not. When things are firing on all cylinders, I’m definitely sexual. But I really need to feel safe and seen with someone, seen and desired as the woman I am, and the world doesn’t make me feel that way, so it takes time for me to feel that way with an individual. Over and over again on the dance floors of life, I see people seeing each other, desiring each other and being desired, and I feel invisible, and I’m still dancing on my own.

Alex felt like home. I’m still looking for home. Not the exact same kind of home that Alex felt like. Everyone’s love makes a different kind of home. Just a home, one where I feel safe and seen, with someone I trust and respect and admire and can learn from and have fun with and be myself with, a home where I’m inclined to let down the walls that I have spent so long building up. In a world where everything about my life is complicated, feeling the way I did about Alex was the simplest, easiest thing.

I know it doesn’t stay that way, but it seems to me like a good place to start.