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[callmewhenurfree]

the day i realized i was not a boy

an excerpt from my journal

and on that lovely easter sunday, traipsing through the marigny streets amidst pastel houses and daybreak blooms, i felt myself becoming lighter and lighter as it dawned on me that i didn’t have to keep being one of them. i was raised to be one of them, and the identitarians would say i can never be free of what they did to me, but as a goddess-sleeved wrist pulled back the fog curtain that hung between us and the fresh sunbeams poised above new orleans, all ideologies and critique fell away, and what remained in the wake of words was a simple truth: be kind, to everyone; yes, even to them, because nobody asked for what they were given in this world, and most everyone is doing their best with what they know how to do; yes, people are trying, so love them, try to love them all much harder, starting with yourself.

this lightening of my load, this featherweight love felt like it flowed from a fountain, una fuenta, headwaters of a mother that taught me strong and soft are not opposites but two streams crossing, caring, flowing on. suddenly divorced from their anxious answer-seeking, frantic obsession with pinning every definition in a grid of “objective knowledge” (lol), their neverending contriving and sparring with their minds, that mental complex in which they trapped me, gnarly web of hang-ups, “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that “sickly o’er with the pale cast of thought”—on easter morning, i became unstuck. the web had always been a construct from which i could opt out. it just took some time; i put in the work. and the mushrooms really helped.

but if i was indeed not a boy, then i had to be something else (or so i thought back then). i tried to picture myself as a woman. no, i channeled the image of myself as a woman, and it felt like relief i never knew was gonna come. certain things now made sense: the jitters i felt when my friend came out; the tears i shed when espn gave an award to caitlyn jenner, even though i don’t like her. these were but the first trickles, the un-turning of an overtight faucet, as a closed fist began to open and i let go of all i’d been holding back; didn’t even realize i’d been trying since birth to crush myself in the palm of my hand, but in the days and nights since easter i am freeing, learning to dredge buried breaths up from the depths to support me as i cry yet more tears, enough to flood a room while gasping for air, profound exhales, heaving, pushing, sweating in the damp spring sun as quads kick my bike forward, for i am pushing, for days on end, i have been in labor without even knowing, bringing a new being into this world; yes, they thought we couldn’t do it alone but i will give birth to myself, i will become a child again as the seasons begin anew.

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

imperial flume

i‘m pretty sure Flume’s new visual mixtape does little more than aestheticize settler colonialism. the music features a number of stunning rappers and female vocalists, yet the entire video revolves around a lone white dude, Flume, driving across Australia in a colorful bathrobe like an overprivileged stoner. it exotifies the plant/animal life around him (“Mud”, “Ecdysis”) while beautifying things like gas stations, shipyards, highway overpasses, and even a power plant on fire, rendering these ugly/toxic human interventions in eye-pleasing colors and shapes (“How To Build a Relationship”).

hanging from the rearview mirror is a peacock feather and some kind of dreamcatcher, bc it’s 2019 and Flume has yet to wake up to the reality that not everything belongs in white hands. the mixtape portrays him on an aimless mission to show off his flashy vehicle and trip all over sand dunes that clash with the musculature of his ancestral genome. it’s all very neo-colonial, in the sense that he’s not actively seizing land or killing indigenous people, but he is normalizing (and even glorifying) the image of a settler state in which those natives are presumed absent, kept out of frame. instead of honoring the land’s many sacred sites, we worship plastic, fast food, and the joys of the open road that stretches across a continent violently purged of real life.

in the most eerie sequence (“Is It Cold in the Water?”), Flume alternates using a shovel and his hands to hack away at the ground itself while a Soviet-style montage shows heavy machinery pounding, drilling, and otherwise penetrating the earth. what is Flume digging for? at first, it seems to be some iridescent substance that isn’t actually in the land, but rather projected on to it. as he digs deeper, however, he finds a black-faced body totally buried, covered in oil that somehow looks almost pretty. we even see the body’s face. it gasps for air. then Flume scampers off, laughing, leaving the body half-buried alive.

there seems to be a nihilistic trend in pop where artists are capitulating their humanity & grounding in a wayward embrace of climate chaos, as if it could be beautiful? Grimes is on that tip. and this isn’t the first time Flume has used his innovative music to glamorize a violent status quo. last time i saw him live, his visuals included fighter jets shooting ammo and dropping bombs. similarly, “trap” artist RL Grime has featured high-gloss military tanks and predator drones in his music videos.

i actually think the *music* on Flume’s new album is great, and that’s why i’m taking pains to criticize the videos. marrying his unparalleled, futuristic sound to all this regressive imagery is tired. it’s squandering his potential. he could be using these future-forward sounds — these body-bumping, ice & fire-textured sonics — to bring people together, to challenge injustice, to remind us all of the finely balanced web in which we live. but he hasn’t managed to free himself of the colonial impulse that is his/my inheritance. he abdicates his true power by staring at the throne, getting lost in the aesthetics of his country’s pilfered treasures.

[callmewhenurfree]

As long as you do not know how to die and come back to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.

Goethe

[callmewhenurfree]

winter

it’s winter and what i want is warmth, for men’s veins to grow over me the way roots and fungus weave a web beneath the forest, to be tangled up in limbs. i want to be taken back into the thick of it, enfolded, please, for hot blood to thump thru arms and freeways circling my head like a halo. i want warmth and big groups and togetherness, for my body to not be so alone all the time it was not made for this, it was made for embraces and clawing at someone else’s skin and dissolving in cuddle puddles at 3am and all the cool shit we did in college when everyone lived on top of each other, which made me feel way more alive than whatever this is, this being alone in the cold bed in the woods after my fire’s gone out, this day i spent all alone with no one to talk to but me and my cat and it was cute but now i’m over it, please take me, take me back to all the arms and legs, enfold me. SOLITUDE IS OVERRATED.

[callmewhenurfree]

is dick a want or a need?

lately, I’ve been a ravenous slut. i suppose this often happens to me in the summer — the presence of leo in the daytime sky tugs my blood downward, toward my root and sacrum, filling my vigor each morning, and often throughout the day. this seasonal impulse is hijacked by grindr, scruff, porn gifs on tumblr. i say “hijacked” because it feels INVASIVE. instead of a healthy cycle of build-up -> tension -> release (which can stretch out over days) i get turned on constantly, inorganically, thru images of strangers whose virtual virility makes me want to cruise/fuck/cum more than i really need to.

it’s a question of WANT vs. NEED. i’ve been pondering for years: do i want dick? or do i need it? plenty of lesbians have healthy sex lives without dick or phallic substitute. but for those of us who imbibe (or rather, impale), it begins to feel like a matter of health and sometimes even sanity to find someone who can really give you that d. it’s qualitative more than binary, not a matter of getting/not getting it in, but getting it good, getting it right, getting fucked *properly*. sometimes, after a lackluster lay, i’ve found myself searching even more fervently for the next one, craving satisfaction. once the hunger is opened, it demands to be stuffed.

i’ve gone months without sex, and usually feel fine. the dickless times are often the most productive. but they can be a challenge, especially at first. the second month of celibacy is easier than the first. as with many of our addictions, we can wean ourselves off and on as needed. dick is less a need like food or water and more like finding your phone when it’s lost: you know you can survive without it, but damn, life would be so much easier if you could just GET IT, right?

this is revealing to me the limits of the word “addiction”. just ‘cuz something has me hooked, like i can’t live without it — green tea, the writing, the Internet, friends — is no solid grounds for its expulsion from my life. perhaps what i’m realizing is that my relation to sex has often been COMPULSIVE: once i start to want it, i suddenly need it. in a terrible way, it’s like a bug bite: you think you’re helping  the itch by scratching it (“i’ll just get off, and then feel relieved”) but really, you’re spreading the poison around, digging the toxins into your skin with your own fingernails. 

i’ve shifted my mindset so that bad hookups don’t drive me crazy, aren’t hounded by a barking sense of guilt and remorse that clouds the rest of the day. instead, negative experiences with sex are followed up with thoughtful reflection, awareness, and another tally in the column of “hm, didn’t feel great.” these days, i find myself adding such a tally after more grindr experiences than not. i want to stop scratching this unquenchable itch, and prioritize intimacy instead. i believe that the bite can be healed with the balmy salves of family and companionship. and that healing starts from self-love. as rupi kaur says, “loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.”

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

spontaneous

if plastic bags be good for anything then at least let them be as good as this moment in which i tuck the ruffles of my new handkerchief into a baggie, and ziplock seal the teal fabric right up against those small dried flowers (whose purpleness is barely perceptible) to ground dry lavender into the fibers of this probably synthetic fabric, which i will later raise to my face to stop the drip of seasons changing thru my brain and out my nasal, bringing calm to mind’s appraisal of all things into good and bad, with pleasant fumes of flower that must have been grown elsewhere, in another land. here, now, with me. woven into the grand tapestry of fates neatly intertwined, played on a keyboard by an old drunk named chaos, while consciousness crosses thru long untreaded paths, which only merge now and again, bringing sustenance at last, giving color back to flowers, stretching nights and daily hours in a swirl of love and light, where dark is never cause for fright.

[callmewhenurfree]

one night in woods

one night in woods that's all i need to finally mute the rambling feed of phony apps that fill my screen and seed my heart with subtle need for things i hardly even want as mind is filled with so much thought that sometimes i can hardly see the blessings which around me be obscured by words that clog my brain as fountains fill with murky rain just like a river's ebb and flow which one can only hope to slow until the head spends 'least one night beneath the glow of moon's warm light

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

t-girl at the gay bar blues

sitting in the corner, nobody looks my way. first time in this city & i don’t know any names. i came out looking cute with my eyeliner on point; in my pack of cigs i’ve stashed a finely rolled joint. i came here with a friend who i thought would introduce me, instead just left me planted here as if i was a fruit tree. my colors are the brightest here but nobody can see ‘em. the gay boys break my eye contact before i even meet ‘em. not long ago they used to eye me; i’d be feeling seen. now i see the shit they do that isn’t even “mean”: just a flagrant disregard, or offhand comment on my look. i could read this basic party like a children’s chapter book. instead i chat with boys on grindr looking for my kind. a bi boy who wont mind my scruff is what i hope to find. it’s hard to not resent the gay boys with their matching chests. i’ve crossed the line of femme for them and have not even breasts. so i sit alone, smoke and try to catch my breath, being a trans girl among fags: a little sip of death. i know i’m not the only one that wants for space in here. so many more fall in the gap between “gay man” and “queer.” it’s on this edge i’m sipping, boots are bouncing to the beats. i’m ‘bout to call a lyft so i can finally get my treats, while i hang with my sis, who will appreciate these shoes; ’til then i‘m in the corner, with my t-girl at the gay bar blues.

— published in Into

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

lonely

if i feel lonely wherever i go then i must be bringing it with me. i’ve lived among queers and i’ve lived among muggles; i’ve fled the city and returned from the forest, yet nowhere on my path did i feel i belonged. what is belong? an image in my head: the six-second pan on somebody’s story of friends gathered, gabbing; why am i never tagged? is loneliness real or is it a phantom, projected by apps we can’t quit? when we feel lonely, we look at our phones more, when we look at our phones more, we feel lonely. we’ve never had so much “social” media and we’ve never felt so alone. i got a cat to feel less lonely and i still feel lonely, how fucked up is that? i know couples who are lonely together. i know nine million people who live in one city and often feel lonely as they pass each other swiftly. and maybe if we all looked up from our phones for five seconds, we could have a conversation about how lonely we feel.

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

nature

don’t get to be in nature all that much, so when we do we feel it all fast and at once, and spend half the weekend convincing ourselves it’s real. speak fluently of the sunsets and tree-lined drives in our hyperreal argot: it’s like an Instagram, an HD commercial, a scene we saw in a nature doc when we were taking bio. in a world where you can 3D print a gun, how can i grapple with the infinite bliss of the pattern that inheres as the skin of this great, smooth rock i turn over in my hands, modeling with google-glassed eyes something not quite like a sphere before i rub it against the rougher rock to make a sound of dubstep anguish — calvin squints his eyes and grits his teeth as my rocky, roaring rahhhrahhhr (and he beats his own rock) clippclippclippclipp (slightly faster now) clippclipclippclip, rahhrahhrahhr, faster and faster, until we’re all glued to the raging ride of the rock and roll and slip and subside and his eyes open wide, the wave rolls back, and we’re seven boys on a pebbled beach. later that night, kevin‘s hands play puppet piano on the wall of our tent, rendering shadows caught on the keys by ocular cameras of futures passed. he pantomimes playing the synthesized beat that spills from the LED speaker on my left, revealing the edges of the light to our eyes, giving rise to lives that lie buried, like embers beneath ash, needing only breath to turn back into flames. 

[callmewhenurfree]

[callmewhenurfree]

basic-ass daddy

basic-ass daddy missing out on sweet pussy because he can’t wrap his mind around the notion that i don’t just want to play “girl” in bed, i’m trying to be the bitch that rides his face. “what other options?” he asks when i say i’m non-binary, as if it were not a fact of my being but a selection he lingers on briefly before turning the dial back to “young men,” the only genus he thinks he desires. “if you’re only attracted to men, look elsewhere,” i tell him, batting mascara’d lashes at my screen. i am no man. “but if you’re attracted to me, let’s talk.” our chat stalls for the first time since I sent him that picture of my ass. then he lobs more intellectual mortar against my being before settling in his allegiance to the gender binary: “i’m attracted to boys, not uncategorizable aliens,” he says. i sigh, twirling a finger thru the curls of my high pony, gazing out the window of my tower in suburbia. daddy claimed to be the “feminist dom top” that my profile says i’m “looking for.” my prince is coming, any day now, i’m sure…

— published in Into, “Before and After My Transition”