songs of love and hate

lent diary #3

Recognize the hook.

Seeing the hook. Making it visible. Making yourself visible.

Visible, like being at the end of a camera or a gun.

Visibility was something I felt in body this past week as I was on the road. A week spent driving through the American Southwest, wandering in the desert. Not alone, but with my friend Callisto.

I had a lovely time, a life-changing time.

But I didn’t expect to be so scared.

The first time I really felt seen on the trip (to flip that cliche phrase) was at the Red Hen, a kitschy Americana restaurant on Route 66. Callisto was driving, I was the passenger princess. On entering, we were greeted with pop country and a decidedly cishet crowd. Wrap-around sunglasses, khaki shorts, red faces.

Prepared for Vegas, I had on what a Californian would call “western wear” (denim shirt, slacks). Callisto had on his everyday all-black ensemble. His tank-top showed off his tattoos: images of Machine Girl, Sleepaway Camp, jagged lines. The top covered up the “FAGGOT” inked above his top surgery scars. Packs of cigarettes jutted out from our pockets. We sat across from each other, not side-by-side. We giggled.

How do you think we were perceived in there? I asked Callisto after we’d left. I’d wanted to ask the question as soon as we sat down, but I didn’t want to be overheard. The waitress called us “gentlemen.” Maybe she thought we were gay boys on a date. Maybe she clocked us, maybe she thought we were both cis. Most likely, she decided on our genders instantly and didn’t ponder beyond that.

I became conscious of the ways in which I had tried to understate my girliness and my fagginess in attempt to be safer: repressing the swish in my step as I went to the bathroom, making sure to talk about having a girlfriend, even ordering a large cheeseburger instead of what might be seen as a “pansy meal.” You know, like a salad.

Then the big dude with the military hat next to me got a salad, so.

I don’t like my compulsion to do all this. Bizarre, anxiety-borne thoughts like the aforementioned salad comment fill me with confusion and shame. I don’t like how the fear functions like a mirror, showing me who I am through what I’m scared of. Someone who wants comfort, someone who’s scared of the world outside her little university bubble.

Scared of strangers.

Someone who assumes the worst in other people.

Someone who tries in vain to hide the parts of herself from being visible and attacked.

But I can’t erase the signs, the tells of who I am. A few days later, Cal and I are in Kanab, Utah. The state’s “Little Hollywood,” if you’re listening to the signs across from the Mormon church. For me, it’ll stay the place with a pawn shop with a gun counter run by a man who compares the firearms with women: you take your pick. Whether you want a short one, a tall one, a blonde one, or a brunette. He says this with warmth and conspiracy to the other men shopping.

When they leave, he acknowledges Cal and I. Can I help you? His voice is not the same one that was laughing and joking earlier. The welcoming question sounds like an accusation. He instantly clocks us as tourists, as people who don’t belong here.

Where are you from?

Los Angeles, I answer.

Too far.

Two words. What did they mean? Was he saying that California is too far for him? That he’s not someone who wants to leave his smalltown, his home? Or is he saying that the two faggots with the audacity to leave their little city and walk into his store are too far from where they belong? Is he warning us? Is there hate in his voice?

I’ve felt so much hate lately. Enough anger courses through me that I feel I’m liable to snap and attack the next person who even slightly slights me. I hate that I can’t rip apart the politicians who are killing immigrants and Palestinians and Black communities and my trans siblings. I hate that I can’t see these murderers suffer. I hate that they speak for us, that they’re louder, that people listen to them when they tell lies about us to fuel their own campaigns of hate.

I hate that they’re not near me so I have to take my anger out on the people around me who are barely offenders at all, who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, who are probably having shitty days themselves.

I hate that I find it so hard to forgive the small slip-ups of family members who are otherwise my only solace, my main support system.

I hate the the horrific thought that comes through my head in the moments of anger and fear:

I wish I was cis.

Except I don’t. Not really. When I think about it a little longer, I find great relief and, yes, an overused and complicated and usually useless word, but joy at being trans.

I don’t wish I was cis. I wish I wasn’t scared.

The fear sometimes develops into a doubt if I’m trans. If I was *really* trans, I would be absolutely content and certain all the time, right?

A thought that is, of course, horseshit. A while back, I was talking about this to a partner that I don’t really talk to anymore. I said that, since coming out as non-binary at 17, I had gone back and forth on starting HRT before finally committing to it at 22.

You know cis people don’t think that, right?, she said. Cis people don’t have that doubt.

It’s the doubt, the self-analysis, and the desire for reflection and change that defines my transness and my faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a girl who doubts, to slightly paraphrase Conclave.

My knowledge that I’m trans is like my knowledge of God: there may be moments of doubt, but I can never close those doors again. I can never again pretend that they - my transness and God - don’t exist.

“I have very little attention for anything not related to transness, my own or other people’s, but almost unlimited attention for transness, like maybe the way evangelical christians feel about Jesus or like how a drowning person feels about air.”

(hannah baer, trans girl suicide museum)

Perhaps the lowest moment of the road trip came on the second day. Cal and I were taking shrooms in Zion, and I doubted whether I really wanted to be on this trip. I wanted to be back in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to be scared two states away from home. I wanted my girlfriend to hold me.

I was crouched on a rock as the Virgin River flowed past me. I felt the crushing doubt of if God was real or not. Facing the silence. Begging, over and over, under my breath:

please god please god please god please god please god please god please god please god

Asking for a sign. I stared intently at the mountains, the sky, the rocks at my feet, trying to find a face, something that would tell me I wasn’t alone.

Eventually, I grounded myself. Stopped trying so hard to find a sign and paid more attention to the person I was with. I wasn’t alone. I was with Cal.

I walked around with him and we talked about transness, about our pasts, about a million things. A dyke and a faggot, a classic pair. My love for him helped me love myself, the signs of my transness: my swishy walk, my growing chest, my goofy smile.

The way I laugh, especially. There was a moment on this trip when I was nearly doubled over with laughter over a bit Cal and I had been repeating for hours. In that moment, I knew, knew, that I looked like my mom as I was laughing. I thought of a picture where she’s laughing with her best friend from college, of the many times my Dad has made her laugh, of their persistent and beautiful and complex relationship.

She was maybe the first person to see my signs: she often tells a story of seeing me move in a certain way when I was a kid and knowing I was queer. Seeing a certain something that I wouldn’t see myself until years and years later.

So me laughing like her is a sign that I am a woman, despite the fear and doubt. I’m very much my mother’s child. Someone in a long line of women.

One of her favorite movies is Signs (2002). Things happen, the movie proposes, and it’s on us to see them as random or as signs from something greater. My mom is haunted by this movie - she says it’s the only thing that makes her doubt her atheism.

A lot of my life is searching for these signs.

A few days later, when I wasn’t even thinking about it, I saw a face on the bathtub in Callisto’s childhood home.

Most of the times, the signs come in the forms of people.

A bit after peaking on the shrooms, Cal and I locked ourselves out of our hotel room. The thought of having to talk to other people minorly freaked us out. But we made our way to the lobby and got help from a woman named Kathy. She was absolutely patient, loving, and helpful. The three of us went back and forth, trying all different types of keys, even taking apart the lock entirely when nothing worked. She gave us free food and drinks. She was kind. She helped us. We learned about each other.

When we got back into our room, a fear, an aching, crept into my body. I decided to take a bath, and calmed down when I listened to the music my girlfriend had put into a playlist for me. I listened to other songs that make me think of her. Among them, Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” which might be her favorite song:

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

A month ago, my sister sent me a picture of a Beanie Baby anteater, asking if I needed him. He was just the cutest little thing I’ve ever seen. I felt that I did need him.

A few days after that text, I met my girlfriend. And I found out that anteaters are her favorite animal. That’s a sign.

In Vegas, our first attempts at Blackjack were helped enormously by a very patient Midwestern couple who showed us the ropes.

In Flagstaff, our fears of being in a small Arizona town were assuaged by the trans girl running the front desk at the motel and the numerous queer employees at a pizza place who smiled at us.

barrenness and trans/substantiation

Angels, maybe, or more likely just other humans who are kind and loving. In my first Lent Diary, I talked about being both material and symbolic. I don’t want to do the very violent act of forcing people into the untouchable role of an angel or a saint. I want to give them love back. As the old prayer goes, I want to have the strength to forgive their trespasses as thanks for them forgiving mine.

So I must say it quickly:
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know -
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook.
Recognize the hook.

(Leonard Cohen, "S.O.S. 1995," Book of Longing)

Are there people who don’t deserve forgiveness? It’s a question I don’t have an answer to. I don’t have the strength in me, or even the remote desire, to forgive the people far away from me who live and act with such strong hate, hate that goes beyond emotion to become law. Abstraction made violent and concrete.

But when it comes to the people around me, whether they’re brief encounters in another state or the friends and family I see everyday, I want to be able to recognize the hook more. Remembering the goodness they’re capable of, the complexity. At the very least hoping there’s love there. I can try to do more love.

I can try to not be scared of the world, to not hide myself when I go out into it. Maybe I’ll be a sign to another trans girl, someone who’s just as scared as me, that there’s others like her. Maybe I’ll meet a cis person who’s never (knowingly) met a trans person outside of the stereotypes they see on the news and my kindness will change their mind and change what they do and change their hate.

Maybe. I don’t know.

Doubt.

I saw so many literal signs on the road trip. Many about God, about Jesus. Some about heaven, some about hell. Some with phone numbers. I wondered how the person on the other end would perceive my voice if I called. If they’d launch into a tirade about my damnation if I told them I was trans. If they’d sing the glories of the politicians weaponizing Christianity to try and kill me.

Or if the person on the other end would be kind. If she’d bless me. If we’d laugh. Have a nice conversation. And we’d say goodbye and she’d answer some other calls and maybe think of me a few times but most likely be caught up again in her own life and the people in it who she loves. The people she hates. The people for whom she feels a mix of both.

And then, once it got dark and it was time to go home, she’d hang up her headphones and say goodbye to the other people at the station. She’d go out into the cold desert air and want to light a cigarette but would stop because she promised someone close to her that she’d quit.

And she’d drive back to her little apartment, back to a man she’d rather not talk to today but has no choice because that’s the promise she made years and years ago.

She’d buy time by pulling over to the side of the road and looking up at the stars. Stars she hadn’t looked up to see in a long time. Millions and millions and millions. She’d think of the cities she’d been to and how she couldn’t see any there. She’d be very thankful.

And then she’d eventually go home and recognize that man’s hook and he’d recognize her’s and they’d try to live with a little more love than they had the day before.

Maybe.