Rainfall in Tokyo

Where do I put all these feelings that clog me up like a ball of old hair?

In her book Beauty Talk & Monsters which I read on the flights from San Francisco to Tokyo and from Tokyo to Bangkok, Masha Tupitsyn quotes Kathy Acker as saying, “I write to get it out of me. I don’t write it to remember it.” That’s it for me, too. That’s it exactly.

When I write for work, I need to be concerned about the interests of my audience. Here, I don’t need to care. There’s no focus-testing here, no tailoring, not even for the one I most wish I could reach, my heart’s current intended audience, the one it’s broadcasting for. “Every heartbeat needs a reason.” 

Before the plane takes off from SFO, the woman next to me, a 50-something lesbian who, along with her girlfriend, is part of a tour group, asks me if I’m meeting someone in Bangkok or if this is a solo journey. I could explain why I’m going to Bangkok but I’d rather not so I just say it’s a solo journey. She says she wished she’d done more solo adventuring when she was my age, which makes me feel young for a moment, which is nice. One thing I struggle with sometimes is the feeling that, though I feel I’ve done the best I could have done saving money and moving forward with transition as opportunities allowed, I’ve still missed so much, and there are so many experiences I wanted to have that I’ll never get to. Of course, her question also reminds me that I am alone.

“Are you alone?” everyone asked her when she traveled. “Why?" 

Because being with people leads to that, Gloria always wanted to say, or sometimes said.

Gloria wanted someone and something to stick. She was alone, then she wasn’t. Then something would happen, and she’d be alone again. There was never any middle ground. There was never any transition. It was either complete consolidation or complete deficit.

Beauty Talk & Monsters, p. 230

I like to get lost in books, but it’s always different for me when I read Tupitsyn’s work, and this is no exception. I’m going to Thailand, alone, for surgery that, while intended to treat the very real problem of gender dysphoria, is still about changing my appearance, and her book, with all its talk of loneliness and of faces and noses and changing faces and noses, is pushing back against me. It doesn’t let me off the hook. It forces me to think about what I’m doing here in ways that I wouldn’t otherwise. It holds up a mirror. I need to engage with it, to converse with it. I’m glad for the companionship.

When I get to Thailand the next day and have my consultation with the surgeon, he tells me that, because I’ve opted not to have my nose altered ("Desire, like a nose, should never be fixed.” –Beauty Talk & Monsters, p. 134), it may be even more prominent after the surgeries intended to make my forehead, brow, jaw and chin less masculine. But while I’ve decided to have the structure of my face changed in the hopes of ending up with a face that doesn’t lead people to immediately put me in the box labeled boy, I don’t want the features of my face changed. I’m not after some generic ideal of female beauty here. (I think of the chilling Twilight Zone episode, “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.”) But still, I’ve caught myself doing it again since the consultation, scrutinizing the faces of other women, looking for noses that rival my own.

During the consultation, the surgeon also says that my face’s structure is quite masculine, which of course I already know and which I hear as “Look, I’m gonna level with you. There’s only so much I can do with a face like yours, I’m not a miracle worker. So don’t get your hopes up.” Which I’m trying not to do anyway. Despite how long I’ve waited for this and how much it’s costing me, I’m trying to go in with no expectations and let myself be pleasantly surprised if I actually get any benefits out of this.

—–

When I fire up the laptop on the plane, I’m reminded by a stray program on the desktop of something I’d forgotten, that you’d used this laptop once. And the fact that you’d used this laptop once makes me feel something. And then I wonder if it’s silly that this matters to me in some way, if it’s teenager-ish. But I don’t think it is. I think about how Tupitsyn recently blogged Thich Nhat Hanh saying, “When you love someone, the best thing you can offer him or her is your presence.” And I think that’s what my feeling is about, my remembrance of your presence, about the way that even though we were just sitting there quietly working, you were with me, in that particular place, at that particular time, and how it was all more meaningful to me just because you were there. 

This makes me think of Say Anything‘s Lloyd Dobler saying “We wouldn’t even have to go out, you know, we’d just hang out,” and this makes me wonder if the movies have damaged the way I think about love. Am I too dramatic? I don’t know. This all certainly feels pretty fucking dramatic to me. And I know that when I tell stories from my own life, I do so as if they matter, as if people should maybe find some significance in them, and yes, I suppose I feel that way, and maybe that is arrogant. But this is only because I find significance in the stories others tell about their own lives, too. I want to read/watch/live the lives of others vicariously; I get something out of it. And I think my life is pretty interesting as far as lives go, so naturally I hope that at least a few people might want to read/watch/live my life vicariously, too.

At the very end of the wonderful audio tribute to Masha Tupitsyn’s Love Dog, we hear James Baldwin say:

“I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me, and I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived. It was books that taught me the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive." 

 When I get lost in books, in music, in movies, am I disconnecting from others or connecting with them? (Music, too, may have damaged my–or our–perceptions of love. I think of another John Cusack character, High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon, raising these questions.)

Certainly I can find people, feel people, in the pages of books. But I don’t want to live my entire life there, in books, in songs, in movies, much as I might love and value my time spent there. I want the life there to inform and enrich the more real, more immediate life here, the life in which I and the people around me make and live our own stories. And I keep coming back to the idea/feeling that there’s no point in being in this world if there isn’t love there.

—–

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I’m human after all.

—–

I’ve listened to Make Love on repeat so many times that I don’t even need to listen to it anymore to hear it. I’m hearing it always in my head, quietly, a subtle soundtrack accompanying every moving image that passes through my eyes to my brain. Keeping me steady.

—–

In a section on horror and The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, Tupitsyn quotes Kathy Acker from Amazed, "Tried to escape by figuring out where I was, by finding out who I was, but I couldn’t because I was in a maze,” and that made me think of “Within” again from Random Access Memories, which I wrote about back in May and referenced again in my last post just before I left. Acker’s words made me think of the lyrics to “Within,” so relevant to where I’ve spent so much of my own life…

“There are so many things
that I don’t understand.
There’s a world within me
that I cannot explain.
Many rooms to explore
but the doors look the same.
I am lost I can’t even remember my name.

I’ve been for sometime
Looking for someone
I need to know now
Please tell me who I am.“

…and now that makes me think of the Overlook Hotel, and that makes me think of the cathartic psychological power of horror, something I know you understand and appreciate much better than I do. "Horror scares it all away,” Tupitsyn writes in Beauty Talk & Monsters. “All the shit that’s not supposed to be scary, but is.” (p. 68)

—–

I thought, intimacy is transmission, transfusion, a game of telephone. And even though there are all these other operators on the line, I know Peter is always on the other end. Some people don’t need to be lovers to be close. Some people are lovers but aren’t anywhere near each other.

Beauty Talk & Monsters, p.76-77

Of course the people I feel closest to aren’t lovers–I haven’t had an enduring romantic relationship in my short lifetime as Carolyn–and I think of conversations that Felicia and I had when we reconnected last year, about friends and lovers and closeness and how there are different kinds of closeness and different kinds of partnership. And then I thought about Maria Bello’s piece in the New York Times and how she and her friend seemed to fall into an understanding with each other. I hope it’s that easy for me someday soon. (Apparently when I’m not getting my ideas about romantic love from the movies themselves, I’m getting them from the lives of movie stars.) What happens when one person wants one kind of partnership and the other person another? What if Bello’s friend had rejected her feelings entirely? Where would that have left them? Do you think Bello would have been hurt? Do you think they would still be friends? I still feel a kind of closeness with you, and though it’s not the kind of closeness I wanted, it’s not without meaning for me.

I think I understand what love means to me pretty well already, but maybe I need to understand it better still. Maybe I need to miss you this way. Maybe it’s all part of my journey. I don’t actually believe in such things, that anything is destined for us or that we’re destined for anything, but like Kele sings, “if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is,” and this is the way it is, so I might as well try to find some meaning in it. What would I be writing right now if this wasn’t the way things were? Maybe nothing. This is who I am right now. You are a part of that.

I want badly for someone to need me, to see me, the way I see the big screen and everything on it. I think I need everything a lot more than it needs me. I deal with this by branching off and doing the most painful things on my own. I carry my desires like stains all over my body–countries on a map–as if I’d spilt them like coffee.

Beauty Talk & Monsters, p. 21

Doing the most painful things on my own. Like this trip. What choice do I have? But still, it is a way of dealing.

—–

Tupitsyn mentions seeing movies in settings that are so exciting-sounding to me, as someone who usually only experiences movies in typical multiplexes. She mentions seeing Saving Private Ryan in a castle and John Carpenter’s Vampires in an outdoor stone courtyard. I think settings such as these must breathe new life into the shared public experience of moviegoing. I’d love to see a movie under the stars on a warm summer night in France or Greece or some other place I’ve never been. On this plane, where it’s been slick romantic comedies, CGI-fueled Harry Potter knockoffs and lousy animated sequels, I’ve despaired for the movies. Just the reminder that John Carpenter exists makes me feel a little better. Even when his movies are awful, at least they’re not this kind of bland product.

Someday I hope to see more of Japan than the airport. At least now I can say I’ve seen the rain fall in Japan. I love the rain. (Did you know that about me?) We were on the tarmac for a while, so I plugged in the provided headphones, tuned in to the air traffic control channel, listened to men from Japan and men from Singapore and men from America and men from Australia (or maybe New Zealand) communicate with each other in short bursts of speech that included lots of numbers and words like “hotel” and “charlie” and “sierra” and “whiskey,” and just watched the rain fall. 

—–

Masha is based in New York but at one point in her book she talks about coming to San Francisco and reading in a cafe on Valencia, and now I’m thinking about that neighborhood that I love, that seems so much more alive and exciting than my own, that neighborhood that I look for excuses to spend time in, and usually find those excuses in a certain cafe on Valencia. 

I land in Bangkok. The driver sits on the right in front, and this is so alien to me that my brain keeps trying to resituate him on the left, to convince me that I see him in the front left out of the corner of my eye.

He tunes the radio to a station playing songs in English. The song that’s playing is “California Dreamin’”.

—–

The next day, I go to the Grand Palace and to Wat Pho. I feel like Scarlett Johansson in the “Alone in Kyoto” part of Lost in Translation. (I may have a cinematic reference for everything, but still, this is my own story. I never said it was original. It’s Oscar bait, full of the triumph of the human spirit.)

In these places, I take pictures, and I think about how my dad said on one of our trips when I was a kid, maybe the one to the Grand Canyon, that a photo doesn’t mean anything unless it has people you care about in it. But of course I don’t take those kinds of pictures. I’m in my pictures, as the one behind the camera. If I were with someone, it would be different; photos would be a way of saying This is something we did together. Me taking photos of you, you taking photos of me, us stretching out our arms to take pictures of ourselves or bugging kind-looking strangers to take pictures of us. I see some people snapping selfies, but I don’t want to do that. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to document my own solitude, or maybe it’s because of how I feel about my face. Of course, I do have one photo of me with you. I like that photo. I don’t even mind how I look in that photo.

At one point I thought, I want to return to these places someday with someone, tape over my memories of solitude the way I used to tape over my mom’s old episodes of Knots Landing.

—–

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I spend a lot of time sitting in sacred places, paying my respects to ancient things like love, considering the connection between body and spirit, how one can aid the other, or betray it. Hoping I’m on a loving path, a path toward connection.

Later, as I’m making my way through a crowded marketplace where there are people selling food and jewelry and knickknacks and dusty old cellphones, I see a Tarot reader’s table with a sign that bears that cheesy old quote, “People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.” And I wonder what it is I’m building.

—–

That night, as I’m in a cab on my way back to the hotel, the driver asks me, “You lady?”

I let the ugly question hang in the air for a moment.

“Yes,” I say.

“No!” he says. “Why?!" 

I just shake my head and sit there in silence. What the fuck does he expect me to say to that? And as I think about why I’m here, what I’ll be doing on Saturday, I flash back to earlier feelings about my face. I remember how, before the onset of puberty, people would sometimes say things to me like "You’d make such a pretty girl,” and how I always pretended to be insulted or embarrassed but was secretly thrilled, and then how, just a few short years later in high school, my jawline was earning me comparisons to Nick Nolte. Nick Fucking Nolte! (Cursed by the cinema already.) And I wonder what the future holds. Will people see me differently? Will people treat me differently? Of course, on some level I want them to. But then, will I get caught in the loop of asking myself, “are they treating me this way just because I look different from how I used to look?” A person could drive herself crazy thinking about these things. I could drive myself crazy.

Earlier, I’d sat outside a restaurant in the warm evening air, laid-back summery rhythms emanating from the back of the restaurant as couples strolled by having quiet conversations. It felt liberating being there, and I wonder if that isn’t because of the movies, too–specifically because places like this are almost never in the movies I see. If I see a location resembling this one in a movie at all, it’s maybe the backdrop for a chase sequence in a James Bond movie, not a place where people actually live. But these people I was observing, most of them do live here, and as I looked at their faces, I wanted to know their stories. I wanted to watch their movies.

There was a guy sitting alone at the next table who looked a bit like a smaller, more bookish Michael C. Hall. He spoke perfect English with an accent I couldn’t quite place. I made eyes at him a bit, smiled when he insisted that his food not be spicy at all after I’d asked for mine to be somewhat spicy. I guess maybe I was just hoping for someone to talk to a bit, someone to tell me a bit of his story and someone who might listen to a bit of mine. (Again, echoes of Lost in Translation.) I didn’t get anything from him. This could have been for any number of reasons, of course. But I hope that when this is all said and done, there are more scenes in my life about connection, and fewer scenes about solitude.

“If I mattered on my own, I wouldn’t need movies.”

Beauty Talk & Monsters, p. 13