seen and unseen

In Ammonite, Kate Winslet plays a deeply lonely woman with a heart in need of excavation.


In The Green Ray, Marie Rivière plays a woman who finds it so hard to find real, meaningful connection that she feels, in a sense, invisible.
—–
“Do you need a bag, sir?” she asked.
“Ma’am,” I replied, more brusquely than I intended, but sometimes it hurts, even when I know it’s an honest mistake, the constant reminders that despite having transitioned many years ago, living full time, having had facial feminization surgery, all of it, to the world at large, I remain and will always remain invisible, read as something and someone that I’ve gone through so much trouble to assert that I am not.
Carrying my groceries away from the market and beginning the long walk home, I wondered if he’d be there, the one person I sometimes saw on my shopping trips who never misgendered me. Sure enough, as I stepped out of the building’s shadow, I immediately heard his voice calling out to me. “God bless you ma’am,” said the man who often hung around outside the neighborhood grocery store selling copies of Street Spirit.
“Thank you,” I said quickly, politely, not wanting to make him feel invisible–I know how painful that is–but also knowing where he usually took things and not wanting to encourage him. I continued my brisk walk away from the store and away from him. Then, from behind me, I heard it.
“I’d like to get a cup of coffee with you sometime.”
An involuntary “aw” escaped me, but not the “aw” of “aw, that’s sweet.” An “aw” of sympathetic pain, for him and for me, too. Because I know that, as desperately lonely as I am, there’s nothing he can ever say or do that would make me want to get coffee with him or anything else. And because I know only too well what it’s like to long for time and closeness with people for whom, whatever it is they are looking for, it will never be you. How many of us are doomed to live our lives in solitude and invisibility, being seen only by people who we will never want and yearning always to be seen by people who will never see us? Eleanor Rigbys, the lot of us.
It’s not my fault that I don’t want closeness with him, and it’s not the fault of anyone I’ve ever yearned for that they don’t want closeness with me. As if to emphasize this, just as I was walking away from him, my Spotify shuffled up Bonnie Raitt’s song “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” “You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t,” she sings, and so it goes. But I can’t wait like this forever. In a world that doesn’t see me, I need one person who does, someone to give love to, someone to come home to. I hope he finds that, too. Because what is life without that?
Notes
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