There is a dying plant on your windowsill. It is wilting and stunted, and gets watered conscientiously enough that it continues to grown on spindly legs. But it never gets larger, and for every new, anemic leaf that buds out, two old ones are dying. The gardener comes and tells it, ah, you are doing poorly. You should be metabolizing the soil nutrients, putting out new roots, but you are not. Why is that? And the plant says, I don’t know, I’m trying, I’m just so tired all the time, it’s just so hard. And the plant therapist says, hmm, maybe you should photosynthesize more. And the plant thinks, I’m trying.
Some time later a new gardener comes to the window and says, oh, you aren’t doing so well, huh bud? And the plant says, no, I’m tired all the time, and I’m trying to grow, and I want to be better, but I can’t, I think something’s wrong with me. And the second gardener says Oh, well you’re not getting enough sunlight. And the plant says, really? Is that why it’s so hard? And the gardener says, yes, you need to get more light. And the plant reaches and reaches for the sun but there isn’t any more than there was before, and it overextends itself, and it collapses under its own weight, and it looks at its neighbors who are hale and healthy as could be and it thinks, I just wasn’t meant to live.
And then, one day, a third gardener comes and says, oh, poor thing! You need direct light, but this window is north-facing, so you never get any. Why don’t we get you a grow lamp. And for the first time, the little plant feels energy building in its cells, sugar flowing through its veins, and after a week it puts out a new bud, and then another, and then another, and its root network expands to reach the edges of its container, and for the first time in the little plant’s life it knows the feeling of having enough life to pass through the night without falling down. And it starts to break down the soil nutrients, and put on height, and unfurl gleaming leaves. And it is still limited, because a grow light isn’t like the sun, really, but now it can breathe.
You come back to the windowsill, and see the plant vining upwards towards its light source, beginning to get leggy with enthusiasm. “Summer has come,” you tell it. “I think I can move you outside.” And the plant feels a deeper joy than it had ever experienced. Outside is difficult, and windy, and it takes every drop of the plant’s fortitude to weather reality. Deep inside, it knows that this is where it was meant to be all along. But if the gardener had moved it outside in its weakened state, it knows it would have perished. The plant grows and grows and grows through summer, through solstice, through autumn, and the cold comes and it gives up its last breath of life but it feels right to die, then, and it does not fight it. It will live again, come spring.
I look in the mirror; I note the line of tension that runs from the base of my skull down through my spine and shoulders. I push the muscles of my ribcage forward, shoulders back, and watch as my chest takes on a shape that I do not recognize. It reminds me of a department store mannequin. Whatever band of ligature that keeps my heart and lungs in place stretches tight, as though strained, and something opens to the world that I do not wish to open. The world of this mirror, of myself, of whatever estranged body lives on the other side of it. I wore a red shirt today, one that I like because when I got it, in the fifth grade, they had been giving them out to everyone and there had only been boy’s sizes left. Boy’s sizes, though, don’t stop my breasts from showing. It’s appealing, some well-trained part of my mind comments. My body slopes the way it’s supposed to. This is good. This is safe. This is what we used to look in the mirror and ask for, when we were younger. And now we have it; all the soft curves, the round and dripping shapes, a body like a melting beeswax candle, gentle and warm and sweet. Bloated. Grotesque. Lumpy.
And how many bodies have I stared at and stared at because they look like a collection of sticks under bags, the suggestion of a skeleton beneath artful clothes. The bones of a better structure. The largest of clothes look elegant on this kind of body.
I remember how I always used to hate being called pretty. I was maybe six or eight, elementary school, and my mother insists to me in the backseat of the car on our way home, you have to say thank you! It’s a compliment! They’re being nice! And so I learned to accept the blows of the world with gratitude. And of course, pretty, with time, ages into sexy, and I aged into myself in the mirror, curating my figure and my body to the world that fondled it, and which I realize now will never stop. I look in the mirror and finger myself like it might cast a spell, rendering the increasingly fatter figure there into a different shape that looks like sex or handsome or whatever the word of the day is. My mother still sends me clothes that don’t fit her and coos over the phone that they always look better on me. I am no longer smaller than her, really, we are the same flesh and blood, after all. But I will always be younger, and that is enough. Why did it have to be a race? And why does everyone else think I’m always winning when I feel like I’m always losing? I can still render myself fuckable. Wrinkles and lumps in the right places. Heavy with someone else’s desire. I like the shape of me better when I am all twisted up, muscles in my shoulders, like Michelangelo’s Sybil, a woman drawn by a man who never had actually seen a women. I feel more like myself when all the skin of me is pressed up against itself, feeling itself, stretching and folding and sketched in shadow because it is more real that way. To know myself by touch rather than sight. Queer to feel drawn to the expanse of chest below the collarbone but above the cleavage; the folds of the lower stomach, the cord that runs down the forearm when the hand grasps; the shadow of the ankle and the worn line tracing the nose to the corner of the lip. I have been learning how to let my belly out, and doing so has changed the shape of it so that I don’t fit into my old pants anymore. Our choices shape us and they are not always reversible.
I think I’m supposed to be a girl who’s learning how to be a boy but I don’t feel that way at all I feel like a boy who wants to learn how to be a girl and could never quite get there and I want it but I don’t, and sometimes it’s fun, and I want the one thing I can’t have, don’t I.
Lying in this dry riverbed between knowing and getting it I feel like the ghosts of symptoms have taken up residence in me. Three stubborn hairs have started growing out of my chin, thicker than all the rest, and I trim them back with cuticle scissors. Anger flows harder and I need to push my hands into the floor as hard as I can to banish it. For a sixth night in the row I can’t sleep without coming, and I’ve had so many orgasms that for the first time in years my pussy is sore, because going from playing with a dildo once a month to fucking yourself on it for two and a half hours every night for a week takes a toll, apparently. What strange mirror mockery is this. And worst of all a strange sore throat that makes it painful to speak low, but not high— what are you telling me?