Posts Tagged ‘heartbreak’

23 Jul

Transilient

Posted by phonaesthetica in dyke, heartbreak, lesbian, trans. Tagged: , , , .

You know what ruined documentaries for me? Being in one. Because now I grok how that particular sausage is made. What Upton Sinclair is to the meatpacking industry, I am to cinematic verisimilitude.

The doc in question — about my transsexual partner, Jane, who was preparing for sex-reassignment surgery — did well on the American and British circuits. They probably loved it in Thailand too. Those crazy ladyboys!

Small parts of the movie represent reality; the rest is total bullshit. To wit: the filmmakers told us to be ourselves and to forget about the cameras. We weren’t and we didn’t. Neither did they. They’d started the project with a standard “woman-trapped-in-a-man’s-body” trans narrative: Jane was born a boy named Jim. See this childhood photo of Jimmy getting a train set for Christmas? Watch as it morphs into Jane putting on lipstick!

“So THAT’S where my fucking Crimson Glow SmileSlick went,” I muttered to Jane as we watched an early draft of the film. “I mean, I’m happy to share, but I just wish you’d leave it where I can find –”

“Shhh,” Jane said, re-loading her bong as the scene switched from our bathroom counter to the city skyline.

Early on, Jane had refused to give the filmmakers a photo of herself pre-transition. They found one online, e-mailed it to her and asked if they could use it. She went into the bathroom and puked; the same reaction she had the day I found an old electric bill with her former name on it.

“Damn, Jim forgot to turn off the lights,” I said, holding the bill aloft. “This thing reads like the defense budget.”

She froze. “If you ever find anything like that in the house again,” she said, “destroy it and don’t tell me. It’s in the past.”

I apologized and promised. Her pain was terrible — I could only imagine the cognitive dissonance, and I didn’t want her to be sad for even a moment. I would have crawled on my belly across a field of leeches to make her happy (and, by the end, I felt like I had). So, when she told the filmmakers that everything between us was great post-surgery; just absolutely awesome, I let it go. Even though I knew that a credulous viewer would come away with a false understanding of how transition affected her sexuality and our relationship.

And I wondered: How can one* hate a part of oneself so much and still be whole? How can one redact one’s own history like a North Korean censor and not marinate in shame? Shame not only about the history, but about the act of erasure? Doesn’t treating the past as though it were shameful create new and deeper shame? Wouldn’t it rob you** of your own experience as a tool for healing? Isn’t the past, in some ways, all we’ve really got?

The past. Ask any historian or survivor of violence: There’s no such thing. Everything that ever happened to you is still happening. The past has a vote; a wallet full of ticket stubs; its own apartment. The past is a fundamental ingredient in the recipe of our humanity, and omitting it means a cake without flour that you insist is pudding but only tastes like pudding if you eat it drunk and in the dark.

 

*Yes, “one” is pretentious, elderly teacher-speak. Am doing the pronoun dance.
**I give up.

19 Jul

Heartbreak and Healing: The most lesbian title for a blog post, ever, unless I add “dolphins” and “tracing the salty ridges of your seashell.”

Posted by phonaesthetica in dyke, heartbreak, lesbian, trans. Tagged: , , , .

The reason I stopped writing was, she murdered it. Which sounds blame-y, but I never bought the “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”* thing. In my experience, people sure as hell do have the power to make you feel inferior; shamed; mind-crippled. Ask any middle school girl bullied into an eating disorder.

So, yeah: she murdered my prose style like Macbeth murdered sleep, except it happened 400 years later and I lack the dramatic skills to do it justice. When I think of her, I remember that trope about how a butterfly’s wings flapping in Holland can, through a complex chain of interrelated events, cause a devastating hurricane in Barcelona. Except her wings were more like Mothra’s, the fictional Japanese monster who was formidable in battle and also fertilized her own eggs.

We met because I wrote. She was a tech type who liked the fact that I made a living at it (people who have never worked in print journalism think it’s more exciting than it is. Unless you’re a travel writer. That rocks. I once spent a week at a Carmel resort, judging summer Rieslings and getting massaged until I lost the power of speech).

In those first few weeks we knew each other, I wrote electronic reams of comedy, tragedy, and history with lesbian erotica thrown in; also some solid love letters. The Tenant of My Affections thus secured, I relaxed.

You should never relax.

I salamandered around Toronto all that first summer, getting off at every subway stop to visit minimalist specialty markets for ingredients. I bought a lot of ingredients. Back then I specialized in American comfort food — pot pies, meat loaf, vegetable and potato masterpieces thick with drippings and thyme — but I figured since I was a new Torontonian, I should kick it up with spices measured and priced by the quarter-teaspoon by elderly Laotians and Balinese.

I wanted to feed her. I watched her eat with the avidity of a shetl bubbe and the lust of a dyke who thinks she’s finally found happiness. I ground pepper on her salads with a practiced and steady motion. I baked cookies — chocolate chip; chunky peanut butter; oatmeal raisin with fresh cinnamon. Mothra fluttered her wings in astonishment, having never baked anything from scratch.

“I’ve never seen this DONE before,” she kept saying. “I mean, sometimes my mother would bake scones, but I didn’t know you could BUY vanilla beans and crush them like that.”

Like I said, I relaxed. I was so fucking happy, I forgot to write. And then it was time for her surgery (“Operation Chop It Off!” she called it) and when she woke up from the anesthesia, we were over. Except I didn’t know it. It was a lot like the time I slashed my right calf to the muscle and it took 30 seconds to bleed, or when a little kid falls down with a huff and can’t draw a second breath to scream.

After the surgery, everything I did was suddenly and irrevocably wrong, and I could see all my offenses written across my forehead in thick black ink: Does Not Look Hard Enough For Yoga Teaching Gigs. Too Shy at Parties. Heteronormative.

Once, I lovingly called her “The Master Of The Grill” while we were making shish kebabs.

“MISTRESS Of The Grill,” she barked, spearing all the yellow squash.

She never touched me again. I memorized the shape of her broad, turned-away back like I was lost and it was a map. I got up in the mornings tasting bile and oily fear sweat. Two of the cats sniffed me and edged away, but the other — who was dying of cardiomyopathy — let me hold him. We stayed in the bed that smelled like my lover, our sick hearts beating and beating. I cried into my ears.

And I went mute. “As a sheep before its shearer is dumb, so he did not open his mouth,” I thought obsessively, dozens of times a day. You wouldn’t think a Southern Baptist university would give me the Scriptural tools to associate Jesus with rejection by a post-op transsexual, but the Bible offers something for any situation.

I thought that if I could write something transcendent, she’d remember why she loved me, and then she’d love me again. If I could just think of that one clean shining sentence, I could have her back. It was a quest. If I fucked it up, I’d lose everything. I lost.

Now I know that it didn’t matter what I wrote or didn’t write. And I think that my suffering — every drop of oily sweat and saltwater — made me more compassionate, but also more wary. I no longer believe that my life is necessarily bound for a happy ending; nor do I believe that love is solid. It’s breakable if you kick it hard enough, and it can also just sort of dissolve as if sprayed with corrosive chemicals.

I learned that if someone wants to walk away from you, you should let her.

Five years later, there’s a woman who loved me before she read a word I wrote; therefore, I can write. I’m not afraid that muteness, if it returns, might make her pack up her eyes and walk away. Words are not my currency; my Phillips screwdriver with interchangeable heads; my shining silver Thermos; my license and registration. If I can’t write enough, or if it isn’t any good, I’ll still be who she thinks I am. (Of course, it helps that we have no seismic gender-related issues. So grateful over here!)

 

*Eleanor Roosevelt, our first lesbian president. Seriously! FDR was sick a lot, and she basically took over.

17 Jul

cis and non

Posted by phonaesthetica in heartbreak, lesbian, trans. Tagged: , , , .

My thoughts, these days, turn to all things trans because (forgive the expression) I’m still “processing” relationships with two different trans people that left me shredded. This is likely because I’m now in a healthy, happy partnership, and the contrast between now and then is so striking. I want to write about what I saw, heard, and experienced in those relationships as it pertains (forgive the sentence construction) to the baffling intersection of transactivism/radical feminism/inclusivity vs. the need for FAB space.

I never want to be hurtful, nor do I want my observations chalked up to dump-ee bitterness. Both people in question are good people, and I loved them very much. I don’t hate them now.

Maybe I’ll start with something small: I resent the prefix “cis.” My former partner would use the word to describe me — as well as “non-trans” — and when I said I didn’t like it, she usually turned it into a “See? That’s how it feels to be ‘othered!’” sort of polemic. And I’d say something like, I certainly don’t want to “other” you or diminish you in any way, but please don’t call me “non” anything. I’ll call you whatever you want, but you don’t have permission to name me. I get to name myself.

I never felt heard, and I could tell she believed I didn’t get where she was coming from, so I let it go. Even though letting it go felt wrong.

8 Jul

u-hauling

Posted by phonaesthetica in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

D. and I are moving in together in August. It’s different from any other moving-in-with scene that’s ever played out for me: not a desperate attempt to save a relationship; not entered into without first having seen the other person in direct sunlight. The only fraught aspect to it is that we don’t have enough boxes.

I’ve been living alone for over two years now. I started out in this apartment with a stripped-down version of everything: six white dishes; four white sheets; one white jar of sea salt. I wanted lots of space between each white thing. I wanted to start clean and spare, like a Carmelite nun. As the months went by and the heartbreak receded, I started adding color — crazy Marimekko prints; cobalts and indigos; carmine and pumpkin. All your basic gay-man shades.

By the time I met D., the place looked pretty good, given that my parents picked it out and the first thing I thought upon seeing the faux-wood wall paneling was, “Oh, THANKS for renting me the apartment of someone who NEVER GETS LAID AT ALL.”

I did, though. And each woman helped put me back together again — D., the tireless hiker/physician’s assistant with whom I argued about the ethics of porn; T., who’d been dumped after a 14-year relationship; C., who weighed 250 pounds, had a laugh like pigeons cooing in the roof, and reduced me to hysterical laugh-crying as we made a show of dry-humping on the hood of my car in the feminist bookstore parking lot; and more and more. One after another they came, so I forgot to watch the pot of my own grief until I realized it had boiled down to nothing and I was far away from this Craigslist post I wrote in 2007:

***

Looking for the perfect post-breakup apartment

I thought I was done renting forever, but hey! Not so much! Surprise! Happy mid-30s to me!

So. Here’s what will help me re-join the human race, living-sitch-wise:

- Tininess. The ex is taking most of our stuff, and the last thing I need is a big, empty apartment to remind me.

- Funkiness. Nothing too institutional or “unit”-looking. I’d love a miniature guest house or small, informal complex. A row of tan-colored doors with identical, increasing numbers is going to make me more suicidal than I am right now, and I’m already listening to Leonard Cohen to cheer up.

- Darkness. The sun, she mocks me. Also, I have reverse seasonal-affective disorder, so I need a place that doesn’t have BRIGHT! HEAT! POUNDING! EVERYWHERE! Shadows are good. I’d like to wake up and have no idea what time it is. I guess I could always do the windows in foil and duct tape, if you’re cool with that. Or curtains or whatever.

- Liberalness of cat policy. I have three, but one of them is dying of progressive heart disease. He’ll probably kick it within a few weeks of moving in (thus delaying my emotional recovery for months) plus he’s hairless, so no problem there. The other two are traditional cats. They’ve never damaged anything, unless you count the time they absconded with a box of tampons and used them to make little nests all over the house. I owned a house. Did I say?

-Northwesterliness or U of A-ness. Proximity to family or to cool student types? Cannot decide, so either is good.

-Month-to-monthiness. I plan on staying a year, but what if she decides she can’t live without me and wants me back? This is most likely wishful thinking. But. Still.

What else…I don’t play loud music — any music, really, since everything reminds me of her — and I won’t throwing any loud parties. Mostly, I just cry and shop for replacement kitchen items. I’ll pay you on time and won’t get crazy with interior paint.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

P.S. On-site laundry would be nice.

8 Jul

Heavy

Posted by phonaesthetica in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

I started lifting weights the week my my ex-partner had sex-reassignment surgery. We were in Trinidad — a red, cachexic desert town of blue-collar families, pre-operative transsexuals, and feral cats — and I already knew things were going to end badly.

Usually, I hung out at the hospital or the bed n’ breakfast. But there was also this gym, one with more iron than cardio.* I paid $40 for a week-long pass and went from one sheared-off metal thing to another, testing and trying and dropping plates on my toes.

You have to understand: Until then, I’d spent my life trying to be smaller. I was a 103-pound woman doing 20 shy bicep curlettes at LA Fitness, trying to get “toned.”** Suddenly, in Trinidad, I was OK with getting bigger if it meant I was made of stronger stuff. If it meant that I was stronger. It happened when my lover was able to get out of bed for the first time, and I helped walk her, slowly and carefully, to the shower. Her powerful, athletic body looked shriveled; vulnerable; not just because of the draining and bruising between her legs, but because she couldn’t really move. Under the warm spray, I realized that physical movement is a gift. It can be taken from us, so best to do what we can while we’re able.

Also, I knew I was going to need the strength. I knew that she would leave me. That when she could walk again, she would walk away.

I don’t have to try to make a metaphor out of this.

Do you know when muscles grow? After you lift. You’ve broken down your muscle fibers — done real albeit minor damage — and your body handles the trauma by building itself up again. But stronger this time, because it knows more damage is possible. Probable. It doesn’t trust you anymore.

It’s ready for the next hurt.

When I see strong, trained female muscle, I see healed pain. Muscles are scars that can do things — lift, push, pull, carry — unlike scars from a razor blade, a needle, or the ground-in half moons you get from scraping front teeth against fingers. Stop starving and shrinking me, the body says, and I’ll carry you. Stop fighting me, and I’ll help you fight for yourself.

That was five years ago. I’m bigger now, and smaller. I have more scars that can do things; fewer scars that show I tore myself up. It still hurts that she walked away, and I still don’t really understand, but I am covered in ripples and dents that show I can choose productive pain over waste-of-time pain. And I am grateful.

*Most cardio machines are more pointless than decaf coffee and dental-dam sex. Elliptical machines = the Sisyphus of gym equipment.

**THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “TONED.” There is only “muscle” and “fat.” You cannot “tone” a muscle without making it bigger and stronger. You don’t like it; take it up with science. Or the deity of your choice.

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