happy new year!
29 Elul 5786
It's 2:22 AM in Philadelphia right now. I was going to wake up at 3:30 or 3:45 AM, but it looks like my body isn't going to allow that due to my myriad travel anxieties. I just jammed some coffee grounds into my french press and put some cheap beef patties (not Kosher, because I'm lazy) into an air fryer. 400 degrees F, 14 minutes. 7 on each side. Last night I ill-advisedly drank a Yuengling — I'm on this medicine that makes me a lightweight, I don't know if you've heard of it, it starts with an E — and watched the Phillies game. We lost to the Colorado Rockies, 9-7. Think about that, the Rockies winning a game on the road. Maybe it's a sign. In about 2 hours I will be catching a train to the airport, which should cause me to arrive squarely at 5 AM. I am not part of the generation that remembers not showing up 2 hours early to get through TSA, a ritual in which I will have to resume my perpetual transgenderly Peace-Cry as I get my lack-of-balls and presence-of-dick fondled by a random agent of the state. I'm then getting on a flight to Seattle, Washington, which is kind of like transgender LA, and I'll stay there for a week with my partner, Tautology, for fun. I am ill-advisedly traveling on Mother's Day weekend. Why did I do that to myself, you ask. I ask myself the same thing. A picture of the GEICO gecko is staring at me from my bookshelf. His hands are wide open. On the top of the image, it says you have, and on the bottom, it says the power to end these patterns. I sure do, but from this perspective due to the fact that I'm sitting down at the kitchen table, it just looks like the gecko is saying "you have". I wonder what I have. Psych medication, check. Estrogen, not check, I'm going to have to do that one later because I take enthanate and I'm not bringing that through TSA, so I did my shot Friday night and I'll do my next shot Sunday morning when I arrive back in Philadelphia. Clothes, check. Laptop, I'm using it. Phone, phone charger, check. I'm using another phone because I usually use a flip phone, but not for interstate travel. Toiletries, not check, I buy those wherever I end up because they're horrible to pack. Stickers, check. Books, check, here they are: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Capital, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (the Paul Reitter 2024 translation), Persona by Aoife Josie Clements, The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka, and a copy of the Tanakh, only in English, because that's the one that I have the most readily available. It's an older translation, the 1917 JPS I think, because, again, it was readily available at The Book Trader off 2nd and Market. I found it in the "Christian source materials" section. Let me tell you about the last time I got on a plane.
Let's talk about Carmel, Indiana, for a moment. I grew up there. It's a rich suburb of Indianapolis that is rightly hated by anyone in the surrounding area. This is because everything that you have ever heard about Carmel is true, insofar that anything about suburban white enclaves of America is true. Looking out in the park in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle that I'm staying in, I'm reminded of the same vein of overwhelming whiteness that I grew up in. I see a "free Palestine" sticker and I wonder if, should I shout at the top of my lungs, anyone in earshot would have actually given money to a Palestinian in need or if it's all just optics. The grass is too cleanly trimmed, the graffiti has been washed off, the skate park hasn't been leveled, and all I see is somewhere that hasn't had a chance to be lived in, somewhere so dreadfully normal that even the birds look confused. The playground has astro-turf. All these places are the same to me. I came out here to try and read a book, but I mostly just feel confused. I feel like an alien, like this place just can't welcome me. There's so many dogs here. I look up the income disparity in the Seattle area and scoff internally. But I'm not here for a place, I'm here for a person, so that's pretty open and shut. There's this webcomic, katalina krimson wants to try human flesh!!, that's inexplicably set in Carmel. I noticed as soon as I saw the shot of the outside of my high school, though the actual location wasn't confirmed until much later. I remember walking to there from my house, listening to Car Seat Headrest's 1937 State Park, hearing the line What happened to that chubby little kid, who smiled so much and loved the Beach Boys? What happened is I killed that fucker, and I took his name, and I got new glasses, imagining that it was me, that I was the kid. I knew nothing at that point, but the aspiration was really admirable. For lack of a better word, it's cringy aspiration. Aspiration, nonetheless.
It was May of 2024. I'd just moved to Philly. After I touched down at IND, and spent the course of the weekend in Carmel, I gradually felt more sick to my stomach, as primal unease settled into my gut. I'd already legally changed my name, and yet I was still deadnamed repeatedly, over and over, as if nothing's ever changed. My parents made references to jokes that I made back in 2018 as if my personality has not updated since then, since that's when I realized I was trans (on April Fools' Day, no less) and that's the last coherent version of me that they were able to parse out. Everything since has an unmistakable blemish that they'd rather avoid. I hadn't talked to my parents in a while, at least not in any real conversations. I laid prone in my childhood bedroom, face deep in a pillow. It all felt alien to me. The signs of life that I planted in it with my presence, my juvenile scrawls on the walls, the colorful paint, the whiteboard, the blackboard, the rock tumbler, the dresser, my books, the 3D printer I built from garbage, they were all gone, but I was still there, in my father's office, no longer my room. My mother's art hung above the computer, an abstract, colorful drawing of a woman next to the text "WELCOME RACE FANS". In Indiana, the only things that are important are the Indy 500, corn, and the gradual, methodical extraction of human misery. I stopped talking to my parents after watching I Saw The TV Glow at the Philadelphia Film Society East theater with Alice, Talia, and Talia. I saw it the day it came out. In the Uber ride back home from the theater, I blocked my mother's cell phone number and thought to myself in a burning rage that this is what she wanted for you, as if she was a super-villain who attempted to control my life. This is what she wanted for you. She wants you trapped in the Midnight Realm. I ruminated on the fact that I am breaking free, or something, or something, or something else, but not what I needed, never what I needed. I felt like I couldn't breathe, crying from equal parts anger and depression. Conversations with my mother slowly broke down over the course of years ever since I started transitioning. My parents were staunchly against it for "health reasons" and "expressing concern", or whatever. When I was 12, I yelled at a teacher for saying that homosexuality was a sin prohibited in the Tanakh, and I got reprimanded for it, and then my father said "it's okay if men want to dress up like women, but..." and you can imagine the rest of the but. I did not stand up for myself, and life went on. When I was 13, I tried to come out as bisexual after watching Hotel Transylvania 2, but she said explicitly "no, you're not", and that was the end of the conversation. I did not stand up for myself, and life went on. When I was 15, I tried to kill myself because I was afraid that I would never see a world where I didn't transition, and my mother replied with "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" when driving me to inpatient. I did not stand up for myself, and life went on. When I was 16, I was in my therapist's office, and the therapist called her in, and my therapist called what I was doing "transsexualism", but he had the spirit, and then my mother described a John Waters-ian video of people compressing ketchup packets between their legs to simulate periods, and my therapist looked at me like I was already dead. I did not stand up for myself, and life went on, and my mother began asking me what I had been talking about in therapy. When I was 17, my father attempted to get me to sign power of attorney over to him and gaslit me into believing that this was a normal thing to do to your adult child. I did not stand up for myself, and life went on, but at least I didn't sign the papers. When I started transitioning at 20, or 19 maybe, I don't remember, my mother broke down crying in the car not because she knew I was doing anything, but because she found an insurance charge for routine blood sampling and was under the belief that it was for my hormone levels, it was, but I lied about it, because when your mother's crying in the car you don't want to add gasoline to her fire, only to her car so that you can get out faster. I did not stand up for myself. Life went on. When I went home later that same year, my mother cornered me after she showed me a shitty comedy, because she still thought my humor hadn't developed since I watched The Office. We talked about how she was concerned for me, and I smirked. It's a tell that I'm lying (at least she thought so), or that I find something funny, and I did for the first time. I found it funny, because I realized that she did not control anything that I did, that I had a full ride scholarship to college, and that I could begin making the moves that I have been meaning to make for years. I stared at her, and I told her that it is 11 PM, that I am tired, that I didn't want to have this conversation right now, and that she knew exactly how this is going to end. I smiled wide and walked up to my room. Life did not go on, not for her, as she was and is trapped in the 2018-me, the me that she used to know, and she is now forced to reckon with it. She walked up to the bedroom I'm sleeping in, not my room anymore, and gave a half-hearted apology. I did not accept and told her I needed to sleep. From then on, she texted me daily. Good night Love you I replied simply: night
At Snoqualmie Falls, I'm staring down into the water near the Salish lodge. I look at the cresting waves from the water falling, and hear the opening notes to Julee Cruise's Falling in my head. There's a narrative overlay to this place — one where I can very easily see Laura Palmer's dead body floating down the riverbed, wrapped in plastic with an ethereal glow. I can see Leland driving down these streets, blood-shot eyes, white hair, reckless abandon with his steering wheel, as he gets pulled over. I also can see myself. I'm there. I wonder if I can channel this feeling into my art. I haven't written any Arbiter in a long time, I've been stuck grinding my gears on a scene before realizing that I just had to write another scene. Now I'm stuck grinding my gears on that scene, but mostly because I'm just not writing it, not because I'm trying and failing to do so. The waves open, and shut, and open, and shut. I breathe in the air and think about how the PNW has a specific-enough climate that people tend not to move out of here, because if they did they'd struggle. It's frankly a fairly Floridian justification, but it is what it is. I wonder what mathematical models can explain the fluid patterns I stare at, and I wonder if the math cares about me. I wonder if it ever did. I got my answer to what I think about entropy a long time ago.
I was in Indiana, after already having blocked my mother's number and then briefly unblocking it for the purposes of the trip, for my cousin's Bar Mitzvah, which I wouldn't miss for the world. I knew that this was the tipping point, as I'd already lied to my parents about my job in Philadelphia. I said that I was going to graduate school at Drexel. I assume they knew that this wasn't the case, but they didn't have enough information to counter my lie, so they took it sitting down. I called my uncle, and I gave him the low-down saying that I am highly likely to stop talking to my parents after coming back home just this one time, speaking in hushed tones as if I was going to summon a ghost with my words if I wasn't careful. As a result of the Bar Mitzvah, I was going to synagogue for the first time in years. While in college, I generally avoided my faith, and throughout high school I declared myself to be "probably atheist" or "agnostic Jewish". I didn't have any opinion on G-d, because having an opinion on G-d meant having an opinion on my upbringing, which meant having an opinion on the rampant homophobia at my conservadox Jewish day school I attended until I was in 8th grade, which meant having an opinion on the Zionism and the deliberate factual inaccuracies about the foundation and existence of the state of Israel, which meant having an opinion on the Islamophobia my parents taught me, which meant wondering to myself how on Earth my teacher in second grade had us draw a "picture of Jerusalem" and I drew a mosque because it was the only building I knew and my teacher said it was a "Muslim building" and so I wrote "CONDEMNED" over it in big black letters because I was fully under the spell of hatred, but to conceive it as a spell is too generous because it implies that there's something that was cast upon me, something immaterial, something inhuman, but it was all too human and that's what made it hurt, like a child that has never even seen a bee getting stung in the eye. For some time after all of that, I viewed my culture as a stone casting me away from the body and life that I wanted to inhabit. When I actually was in education grad school, I sent a deeply close friend of mine a paper I was working on that was a critical reflection on my upbringing for a class called "Race, Culture, and Equity". She said that I sounded like I was afraid that a Zionist sleeper agent would awaken if someone said the right phrase to me. I was also broadly self-hating in general, but that's kind of there and not here. So, suffice it to say that my relationship to Judaism was really complicated, and sitting down at congregation Shaarey Tefilla was haunting to me. I felt so distant in a place that should have been my home, in a place that was once my home, although I was never a member there since it's a Conservative synagogue and I was raised Reform. Regardless, I'd been in this synagogue many times, for my uncle's wedding, for other Bar Mitzvahs, with my friends from day school, and so on, and so on. I felt in this moment genuinely afraid. The Amidah concluded, and we transitioned to silent prayer. I sit there, tears in my eyes and yarmulke not on my head because I associate that with being a man, and I said this in my own head, roughly speaking.
Hi, G-d. I'm sorry, it's been a while, I've thought about reconnecting before but I don't know how to do it. I don't know if I should go through with cutting off my parents. So, and I don't know if you only do this in movies or whatever, but if you could send me a sign, I'd uh- appreciate that.
Immediately after this prayer concluded, the synagogue wished for a swift execution of Israel's goals, and I was transported once again into the belly of Zionist belief. I sat down at the oneg with my cousins from Florida, and I asked them how their life is going, and it was clear that they were falling down some right-wing rabbit hole. G-d forbid I explain to them that I'm attracted to other transsexuals, or even explain to them that I am transsexual, so I just talked about jiu-jutsu, which I'd been doing at the time. I still need to get back into that. I had a nice bagel, with lox even because people tend to shell out for good lox at B'nei Mitzvahs, and I drink the wine that's served rather than the usual grape juice I actually drink, because even though wine isn't my alcohol of choice, I figure that drinking something is better than dealing with the emotional reality of the situation. My psychiatric meds made me enough of a lightweight that I could get drunk for religious purposes! What a wonderful world. My cousin saw me doing that, and then proceeded to try and get me drunker. Sure. He was 13, so that makes sense. I went back to my childhood home, and I cried while listening to yeule's cover of Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl while waiting for the actual party later that day. At that party, a thirteen year old talked to me about D&D and I talked about my current tabletop campaign as much as I could, with the caveat that I couldn't really talk much about my campaign to a thirteen year old on account of the fact that it is my campaign. I downed my estrogen pills, which I was still taking at the time over injections, off of a compartment on my carabiner. I was asked what they were, and I said they were my normal pills. My uncle replied, simply, "they aren't working". Fair enough. It was a murder mystery themed party of some kind, and we were all appointed roles to figure out who killed some staff member. I downed a single peach schnapps and sat down at a table far away from my parents, appointed to me deliberately by my aunt and uncle on account of the fact that they are actually fairly cool. I made small talk with the table, and left to use the restroom. My stomach gurgled and things begun to happen that are fairly indescribable in well-mannered prose. However, I will try. I sat back down at the table, desperately trying to be there for my cousin, but my stomach continues getting worse, and worse. It was beginning to tear a hole in me. I headed back to the bathroom and the diarrheal nightmare continued, leaving absolutely no room for interpretation as to whether I needed to get out of there. My stomach gurgled. I ran over to my father, the one I didn't want to talk to, as if there was one that I did. I said I needed to leave. He said OK. I walked out of the venue. My gut got worse. I ran out of the venue. I looked down at the concrete that I'd seen hundreds of times, by the Subway, by the FedEx, by this place, I never really went in here, and I HRRRRKed my guts out like I had never HRRRRKed before, like I didn't even know how to HRRRRK, and I stared down at the remnants and I wondered what food I had even eaten, if anything, I barely had anything back in the building, and I wondered what the people sitting at my table would think, but they'd never know. I'd never see them again. If I did, they wouldn't know who I am.
Seattle feels like a place that you get when you prioritize aesthetics over function, sprawl over urbanism. It feels a bit like Pittsburgh, in that Pittsburgh is a bizarre city because you can get into sprawl ridiculously easily. I found that out easily enough when taking tog the PRT bus there to see Monkey Man with Alice back in 2024 before I had to head to the airport. I'm walking through the woods with Vector, who I haven't seen in a while because they moved to Portland from New Jersey. This was ultimately a good move for them, probably, because living in South Jersey is, like Carmel, another nowhere. I wonder how much of the US is just nowhere, how much is inhospitable to human life for those who value any sense of real connection with other people. I talk with them, since they live in Portland, about how much of the politics of the PNW is just lip service. That's probably why I feel so strange here, is that I don't give lip service unless I'm giving head. The two of us walk out of the park, and we end up on scenic Aurora Ave, which used to be Route 99, the gaping wound forcing the horrid construction of the city. Consequently, we are in the middle of nowhere. We were going to go to the zoo, but then we see that the pedestrian overpass is inside the park/woods/whatever that we just left, and we start walking in a direction. This entire thing is stroad hell. It's not quite Breezewood, but it's just trees to our left and right, no bus stops, and no semblance of how to get out of here. We eventually hit a RapidRide stop, but we have to use a pedestrian underpass to get to it, and we begin heading downtown. I wonder what impulse causes you to do urban planning like this. This is one of the main reasons that I could never live in Seattle — the transit is just bad, I'm sorry, but no, absolutely not. If you think this transit is okay, you probably haven't experienced better. Vector was the person who actually put my current synagogue in Philadelphia, Kol Tzedek, on my radar. This is notable because Vector is not Jewish, and is a prospective convert who has not put in the leg work yet. So is Tautology, the partner I'm visiting. When I was told about Reconstructionism, I was flabbergasted, because nobody had ever told me that movements outside of Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform existed, but also because I found a Judaism that I agreed with, one that understands that the position of chosenness is morally untenable. But we'll get to that later.
I spent the night back at my parents' house miserably ill and desperately trying to sleep, still listening to the TV Glow soundtrack. I convulsed in my bed like I had never even felt illness before, like it was all a trial run for what I was currently going through. I didn't measure my temperature, but I knew it'd be bad. While generally speaking, the advice is to never travel while ill to avoid spreading whatever you have on the plane, I genuinely could not spend another day in Indiana at this point. I fell asleep for a measly few hours before waking up at 4AM to go back to Indianapolis International Airport. I don't remember what my father talked to me about in the car ride there, probably something banal and benign, like all of our conversations had to be out of necessity, because you can't really go into deep conversations with someone you don't know. So I tucked my arms in, and I stepped out of my dad's Honda Fit, the car I learned to drive in, for the last time. Maybe it was my mom's Prius. I don't remember. What I do remember is the last conversation I had with my father. He said that he wasn't sure when he'd see me next, and that he'd miss me, and that I was going off to "the big city", et cetera, et cetera. I tried my best not to cry, because I didn't want to make the situation any worse than it already was, and I said that I would miss him too. Which is true. I still do. I got my luggage out of the car, made a beeline for the airport bathroom, and blocked his number, as well as my mom's, while inconsolably weeping. I don't remember what the last conversation I had with my mother was. I think it was about TV. Sometimes, I don't remember what either of their faces look like. I try to conjure the memory with desperate will, trying to recall something positive that happened, and it's almost like you're trying to commit a lethal murder with a water pistol. There was never any hope in trying to pull the trigger, it's not even the right weapon, it's not even a weapon, and you wonder why you're bothering, but you try again, and again, and again. You can't see the other end. It's pointing away from you. You look at your target again. They're already gone. They were never there. It's all so funny. Isn't it? So I got on the plane, coffee in hand, and I sat there to connect to the airport in Washington D.C., since the airline messed up my flight because we had to cancel a previous flight leg because reasons, and I forget what I did on the plane, if anything, aside from listening to the soundtrack over and over like a guiding light. I got off the plane, having eaten absolutely nothing that day, and stared at DCA. I'd never been in DC before, since there was no reason for me to do that, so I figured I'd just walk around the airport for a while while waiting for my next flight in 2 hours. As I did, I noticed that my footsteps felt lighter, my stomach growling, and I realize that I'm... fine, completely fine, like I was never sick in the first place. I walked over to a Five Guys and I got a burger (still not kosher!) and I ate the burger and it was a burger and it was real and I felt so burger. I reveled in every bite, because I hadn't eaten anything in about 24 hours at that point, and it was like I had never even seen food before. I put on a jan Misali video or something, I think it was the one about Mario (for all that narrows it down), and downloaded it to my phone so I could watch it on the plane back to Philadelphia, and I just sat there, and I talked to nobody for a bit while I let my thoughts settle. Why would I feel so sick in Indiana, and then suddenly feel well the moment I left? What could possibly have given me the worst illness of my life in one place, genuinely more miserable than the time I got COVID-19 back in 2022, and then suddenly turn around and make me feel completely alright? There are scientific explanations for this, of course, I'm willing to bet. Something about post-traumatic stress, something about stomach bugs, maybe I just ate something bad, who knows. But, given that I asked for a sign, I decided that this was it. I got on another plane, and got off, and took the train, and took the train, and walked a bit, and went back to my friend Alice's where I was staying, and I stared at the ceiling, and I wondered how I got here at all. The world felt fake, to me, and I desperately needed sleep more than anything, but given what I'd been handed I didn't know what to do. I briefly considered watching a long video of actual paint drying on my birthday, which was the day after I got back, as some kind of arcane grieving ritual, but I decided against it. Instead, I watched the Don Hertzfeldt movie It's Such A Beautiful Day in the theater, which was probably a mistake. There is a certain finality that I find that It's Such A Beautiful Day disavows in a really potent way. The narrator of the film rejects the idea that Bill will die under the tree at the end, and instead he lives, he continues to see the stars die, he continues to achieve, things go on, because they have to, because who else would do it. This is how I viewed the relationship with my parents that I had. I always thought things were going to blow up in some climactic way, that I would die a bloody death from suicide or I would send them a giant text just to tell them why I was leaving. In the end, I did neither. I blocked their numbers quietly in a bathroom, and then I stopped feeling sick to my stomach. From that point on, I began to see G-d in the smallest things, in getting better from illness, in coincidences that I didn't feel should happen, in dynamic, entropic systems, in the water of Snoqualmie Falls hitting the riverbed, in seeing faces where faces shouldn't appear, in natural beauty, in urban high-rises, in all the things we can't control and some of the things that we can. Of course there's more to it, and of course these things can be explained without the notion of G-d, but for me the primal wonder we feel at something beautiful is the touch of the divine. Showing me the equations that dictate fluid dynamics does not destroy the natural beauty of the water, and showing me the biological processes that birth trees does not make me appreciate the tree less.
I'm standing in halls full of movies. Blu-Ray boxes line my left and right, my front, not my back but I could rotate to make that the case, my up, and if I was on the second floor, they would line my down as well (but ostensibly not my up). My point is I'm not standing on Blu-Rays. That would be bad. I'm at Scarecrow Video, one of the last remaining video rental stores in the US and in general. There are quite literally over 150,000 films available to me for the price of 5 dollars per rental, which feels expensive without accounting for inflation and the chronic devaluation of art. There's a much smaller set of Blu-Rays for sale, which I'm looking through like it's a candy store. Mad God, check. The Watermelon Woman, check, no wait, there's a box set I want, put those two back, I can get those later and I want to focus on movies I haven't seen, they have a DVD of Saw? well I just love the packaging and that movie was meant to be seen in 480p basically anyways, and Chungking Express, no wait, the whole box set, they have the Maiku Hama trilogy that I just finished watching at Lightbox with Kerry? and I keep walking and I slowly realize that the budget I set for the Seattle trip will be absolutely destroyed by just this single stop. Tautology looks at me and sees a kind of vague mania in my eyes. It's right to see that. I feel like I'm in another world. Seattle is one of the few places that I've been that seems to culturally revere art as sacred still, as something not just worthwhile to exist but important to protect. You can get a glimpse of the sacred at points, in the right places, talking with the right people, but I've never seen a place that would let somewhere like Scarecrow survive. Here, it is alive and well, and given the fact that they recently purchased their building and have a steady stream of membership income, they aren't going anywhere any time soon. I think, to some extent, this may be one of the few places that would let a video rental store from the '80s and '90s survive, where a project to purchase the building would actually succeed rather than inevitably fail. Of course, you can find artists anywhere, you can find art everywhere, in all things, in babbling brooks and the tops of trees, in the layouts of cities and the depths of sewers. But I do not think you can find this anywhere. Maybe once that movie store on Passyunk opens. In the car ride back, I genuinely consider moving for the first time, but shrug it off. The transit in Seattle does not work very well, and I'd have to uproot my entire life, and I don't really think I could live in a region built on this much white fragility. But I do think about it. They have Kroger, too. I grew up with Kroger, back in Indiana. They call it Fred Meyer, or QFC, but it's Kroger. I miss the Kroger.
After I arrived back in Philadelphia, I was still experiencing constant issues of derealization. I did not believe that the surroundings around me were extant, and I missed my parents even though they were awful to me. I threw out my Delta-8 vape which I was using to cope, largely because Delta-8 was sending me into psychotic episodes. Moments like this, transitory times, often have the side effect of causing people to get fairly close to G-d. A more cynical part of myself viewed the fact that I threw up outside the Bar Mitzvah as just another random event, and that I needed to fly back to Indiana as soon as possible and apologize immediately, that I was making a horrible mistake even though I'd been thinking about it since high school, that the family unit is insoluble and sacred, that I need to give up because my life in Philadelphia isn't going to work out, that my job won't work out, that my friends will abandon me, that I am not worth the effort, et cetera. Despite that voice, my spirituality had a certain sense of surety to it, in that I felt that while I hadn't received incontrovertible evidence of G-d, I had received enough evidence that I was more or less convinced. So I started going to Kol Tzedek, at the recommendation of my friend Vector from earlier. When I was a child, I would always hear the same thing from my mother before I fell asleep. Shma y'isroel adonai eloheinu adonai echad. I heard it again at KT, as one of the centerpieces of the service, of course, and I started sobbing uncontrollably in the back rows. I think it was a B'nei Mitzvah, or some special occasion, since there were more seats than usual. The aliyah for healing appeared, and I came up and took it along others seeking healing. I didn't know if healing was the right word. Healing implies a wound, when I had something else, a clarity maybe, at least that's what I thought it was, since it was a wound. That wasn't important in the moment. Some people remarked on how good my Hebrew was. I wanted to go thanks, I had a horribly traumatic upbringing but I didn't say that. I know enough Hebrew for synagogue, which is to say I know a few words and I can read it after a few tries if someone calls me up to read the Torah. I got a free bagel, sat down, and talked to nobody. I left. I did it again a few weeks later. Same deal, I walked in, did services, got a free bagel, talked to nobody, left. Walked in, services, free bagel, no talking, bye. Repeat. Eventually, I scheduled a meeting with Rabbi Ari Lev to talk about my life, because I really needed something to try and ground me. We met in the multi-purpose room, and I made myself a cup of tea. It was warm and tasted like defeat, and I wondered to myself whether meetings with the rabbi were only for members, but I got to schedule one anyway, so who cares. I talked about reconnecting with Judaism, about Zionism and how I conceive of it as one of the great cataclysms of the world as well as Judaism, and how I'm tired of every Jew being tacitly assumed to support Israel, and I talked about throwing up outside the Bar Mitzvah, and my upbringing, and theology. For whatever reason, I was under the opinion that my idea that G-d is a force, some kind of entropy almost, more than anything corporeal was a really contrarian opinion. Talking to an actual Rabbi shot down this opinion very quickly; I was taken aback by the fact that I had, somewhat independently, discovered an opinion that was stated over a millenium earlier than me. It was perhaps the most math-degree moment I had with regards to faith, given that one of the things you learn when you study mathematics is that you will accidentally come across a theorem that already exists. I had a brief flash of thought when this was told to me, one where I saw the historicity of culture flowing through myself, as if I was part of a vast web of things before me, and I was a speck in this giant graph of people, of discourse, of disagreement, of complaining, of kvetching. The Rabbi eventually gave me a very good Rabbi answer, which is to say a question. After discussing the Bar Mitzvah experience and feeling disconnected from my family, I was posed the question: "What would it mean to honor your parents, while also not talking to them?" Which is, crucially, absolutely not an answer to the question that I was actually posing to him. I was wondering how to square my Judaism, and the Jewish belief in family bonds, with being disconnected from my family, and I was given the same question I asked except phrased in a different light. The question, however, had narrowed in scope, shrunk slightly to the point where I could answer it for myself. A sunbeam cannot do much on its own, but when focused through a magnifying glass, it can start a fire as you hone it further to a point. So I worked to answer that question, gradually, and my answer was to stop considering my parents as supervillains, and stop pretending like they didn't love me or that they didn't care. They did care, and they did love "me". They were, however, wrong, militantly wrong, wrong in the way where they must assert that wrongness with hammers and shovels lest something horrible happen, like I assert my agency over them. They did the things they did in the name of caring about me, and in some way, that is true. They were wrong in the notion that they wanted to protect me from myself. This took a lot of therapy, mostly, and a lot of horrible tears where I wept and desperately thought about running back to Indiana and abandoning everything. It would be a choice to do so, and it would be the wrong choice, the same way that their ripping out my doorknob after I confessed suicidality was a choice, and a wrong choice. I don't know if I believe in bad people anymore. I mostly believe in bad actions. My honor to my parents, then, is acknowledging that I do miss them, even though they did abuse me. These facts, despite how I used to feel, are not mutually exclusive; they are still, on some level, my parents. I am the daughter of a technical writer and an artist; you can see how that reflects itself in my interests, in the words I write, in the words you're reading.
I still don't remember what my mother's face looks like. I know we have very similar hair, with the way our curls tangle up. We have very similar faces; the only thing I was told I inherited from my father was my ears, which I don't see. I can't see his ears anymore. I don't have any photos. I had a conversation with my mother once where I actually explained my hair routine to her, since she was alarmed at how I was able to get so little frizz (despite the fact that I still have tons). This moment of banal acknowledgement of our shared genetics was probably the closest I ever felt to being her daughter. The main thing I inherited from my mother was her sense of reason and opinion-making, her ability to commit to a belief and hold true to it. I see my artistic interests when I see her art; if she was more of a horror fan, I'm fairly certain I'd be able to sell her on David Cronenberg's work. She loved eyes, putting eyes everywhere, putting mouths where they shouldn't be, creating strange almost-human creatures, but she did body horror in only the sense that a TERF could. Which is to say, poorly. I feel some kinship with her and her narrative of escaping from her horrible stepmother after her parents died in the military, but I don't know the story in full. She never wanted to tell it to me, and I can understand why. I feel the world revolving, and I'm just sitting on it. My parents are somewhere else on it, but I don't know where that is. Maybe we were always on other poles, one without a shared language, only connected through holes representing the pupils of our eyes. Maybe there was no inside. No outside. The reality of it is that I am still my parents' daughter. Tzivonim bat Adam v'Laura.
All the leaves are brown / And the sky is gray / I've been for a walk / On a winter's day. I love romance in Wong Kar-wai films, because it's almost entirely divorced from reality. Faye Wong's character is functionally kind of an obsessive stalker in Chungking Express, if we're adhering to any human standards of what acceptable behavior from a woman is — it's the type of manic pixie dream girl that makes you wonder whether or not this type of person can, or should, exist to begin with. Tony Leung is only somewhat fazed by this fact and the two manage to hit it off anyways. Wherever you want to take me, I suppose. Perhaps more importantly, Chungking Express is a film best expressed as a story about romance through the exchange of gifts and goods. Takeshi Kaneshiro's character is a police officer entirely divorced from reality who desires some form of physical intimacy but can't get it, instead juxtaposing it with the romance of objects (pineapples, namely) as a physical manifestation of the fact that he cannot take the hint. Faye Wong's character is a woman who is performing almost all the labor that is archetypically associated with (and do imagine my voice twists as you read this) female gender roles, but does so thanklessly and without credit, as a manifestation of the fact that she doesn't talk to Tony Leung's character. An exchange of pineapples, an exchange of labor. They're the same exchange. The part that isn't divorced from reality, to me, is the understanding of ritual as a key aspect, if not the defining aspect, of human connection and relationships. There is only so much time you can spend in a honeymoon period, and from then, there are small acts that you do to continue the romance, manifest it into being. Gift-giving, physical intimacy, date nights, all these things we associate with romance are rituals, and they are ultimately somewhat dull. Maybe that's my aromanticism speaking. But relationships go beyond these gaudy displays of affection; being in a relationship also means bickering over tiny expenses, taking care of your partner while sick, grabbing a thing because their back aches too much, having conversations about your emotions normal style, in-jokes, et cetera. These are small rituals, but they are rituals that indicate to the other person that you care about them. They are the real meat of relationships, ones where the closeness between two people manifests into a shared appreciation of banality. These rituals are more dull. They are much more important, too. Watching Chungking Express with your partner doing something entirely different in the background as the two of you collectively form a California Dreamin' counter and then basically immediately lose count is not necessarily the definition of romance to most people. It's not the definition of romance to me, either, but that's because romance is not really a thing that I do. However, it has the side effect of bringing me closer to Tautology, and I like being around it, so that's kind of open and shut. Maybe that's what romance is? Nobody has explained this to me in a way that makes sense. Most of the trip to Seattle has been spent in these highly banal moments, especially since Tautology is between two places right now, and so a lot of what I'm doing has a lot less to do with Seattle tourism and more to do with helping it move; going between two places (one of which is evidently highly ill-served by transit), back and forth, lifting with my legs and not my back, assembling furniture, back to the other place, like the swing of a pendulum. My point, though, is that these moments of subtle connection are what relationships are actually about. I don't understand tourism, I don't understand trying to woo someone, and I don't know what this trip would look like if I pre-planned every event for maximum fun or maximum connection or maximum... anything, really. It is what it is. I wanted to know what Seattle was actually like. I do know now that it's a place I don't want to live in.
It was now April 2026. I'd head out to Seattle in a month, but that's not important. I was headed to Somerville, MA, an exurb of Boston, for a Passover seder with my girlfriend's mother. This was a deeply bizarre situation to me, because I never actually conceived of being in a relationship with someone long enough to have their family have... any opinion about me, really. In earnest, I didn't really think I would ever be in a relationship with someone who still talked with their family on any consistent basis, let alone was on good terms with them. But this is the terms of my relationship with Talia, my partner who has mostly gone unmentioned in this work. I live with her. It's kind of a big deal. I'd already met both of Talia's parents before this, but on both occasions they'd come to me, not the other way around. This was the first time I was going to one of them instead, which meant that I had to go to the unholy land of Massachusetts, a state that I can never spell correctly on the first try, where the air makes you annoying and you can get hatecrimed outside of a Dunkin Donuts while asking for an iced lahge and a strahberry frasted. I'd say Massachusetts is neo-puritanical but there's no neo in it. Every time a Boston band comes down to Philadelphia there's about a 95% chance they're going to play one of the worst sets you've ever heard. Enough of that. I got off the train at South Station and got on the green line to Somerville, staring at my surroundings like a caged bug. I'd spent time in Boston before, since it was one of the places I considered moving to back when I lived in Indiana in 2023. I'm very glad that wasn't the outcome that I ended up with, not least because I would have likely been roommates with my best friend's abusive ex. Well, I didn't know he was abusive at the time. Talia and I stopped into Havurat Shalom, the synagogue, if you can call it a synagogue, that she grew up in. The Hav is a very strange place that Talia had already griped to me about many times, but I didn't fully understand how strange of a place it was until I really immersed myself in it for the weekend. The walls around me were familiar, but had a tinge of understanding that I hadn't felt many other places, like I was back to study for my Bar Mitzvah, but I wasn't, but I was. I talked with some members, largely older Jews, many queer, about the history of the place — its anti-war activism during Vietnam, its commitment to feminist liturgy from the beginning, its overall highly strange approach to organization... they don't have a Rabbi. As in, there are Rabbis there, but they're an independent breakaway minyan. I wonder who runs the mailing list with the Shabbat messages, the ones I'm used to. Who knows. But to be surrounded with an unapologetically Jewish community, one that truly wrestles with G-d and attempts to remove the seeds of war from its liturgy, and moreover one that saw me for myself, was a blessing on its own. I had gone to Kol Tzedek on occasion in Philadelphia, but strangely enough, being here was the thing that actually caused me to want to go to KT. I thought to myself, if I had grown up in a synagogue like the Hav, I probably would have had a very different relationship to Judaism. Moreover, I realized that the nature of Judaism within myself was not something that could be killed, nor something that I could be "divorced from", so to speak. My agonizing for connection was the wrong thing to agonize over, because my upbringing was the connection, so to speak. It was in these moments that I realized that I am more than welcome to treat my surroundings as being in conversation with my past, that it is not a mark upon me for having been traumatized as a child or being surrounded by Zionists that sought to treat me a Judaism I did not agree with and could not agree with. But the Judaism is within me, and a Judaism is what I construct from it. It was around this time that I began practicing Shabbat and Jewish holidays as days of intentional rest. For the period I was in the greater Boston area for Passover, I deliberately did not go on the Internet at all to see what would happen. I grew up with a severe dependence on the Internet on account of being Gen Z, and wanted to see what would exist in the absence of that. Mostly, it served to allow me to connect more with my surroundings in the spiritual sense, and also gave me a lot of time to read, which is a thing that I generally want to do. The Judaism I wish to construct for myself is largely built of these small rituals designed to ground me in the world around myself. I imagine myself with roots stretching into the earth as I pray on Saturday mornings (my apologies to Phil Elverum, as my roots are weak and shallow). I have a Mezuzah on my door largely to delineate the home from the rest of the world, to allow myself to unwind slightly. I go to synagogue largely because they give me a free bagel and I get to see people I care about. I miss rituals, things that required a lot more effort to bother with. Everything is so easy now. You can make coffee with the press of a button, get the whole world of music at your fingertips, because American individualism wants you to exist in this kind of adversarial mindset where the monotony is something to be killed. The monotony, the repetitive tasks, are things that you're doing instead of being productive, instead of being an efficient worker, or whatever. I do not think that my building rituals for myself is some kind of political action or something like that. I'm just sad about their disappearance. I tell my roommate that the Mezuzah is a Wi-Fi extender, though. It's a Wi-Fi extender that you have to kiss to make it work.
Here is what happens:
▲4 1-0 Miguel Andujar doubles (10) on a line drive to left fielder Randy Arozarena. Gavin Sheets scores. ▲7 2-0 Sung-Mun Song grounds out to first baseman Josh Naylor. Miguel Andujar scores. Ramón Laureano to 2nd.
That's it. It's 53 degrees outside and the roof is closed. Cole Young hits a single in the bottom of the 9th to bring JP Crawford to 2nd, putting 2 men on base, maybe something could happen, but then Mitch Garver and Brendan Donovan strike out to end the inning. Padres 2, Mariners 0. It is a nothing ball game, one that isn't going to turn any heads or have any impassioned write ups. There are no particular stakes — the Mariners are still the 2nd in their division, against the Athletics, who do not currently have a city I can describe them with because they are playing in a minor league park in Sacramento for stupid ownership reasons. It is the most beautiful ball I have ever seen in my life. The baseball itself has almost nothing to do with it, although I do love small ball and it was a beautifully tight game, no explosions, no homers, no nothing. What matters is the air around me and the people I spent the game with. Mariners fans never seem to boo at players who are doing badly, they seem to root for every last guy up, they cared all the way through to the bottom of the 9th. The air was always vibrant to the point that, if you were an observer from another baseball team, you would think this could be a playoff game. I don't know. If I was in Philadelphia right now, at Citizens Bank Park, there would be boos abound and people would see it like a massive disappointment. Here, it feels more like "we'll get 'em next time". The Padres will go on to sweep the Mariners in this series, but I can't talk about that because it hasn't happened yet. I break down crying in front of Tautology looking out towards the horrible transit that takes you to and from T-Mobile Park. It asks me if I'm crying because of the loss, and I tell it that I'm crying because it was beautiful, that people genuinely seemed to care about these guys, that there was something almost sacred and romantic about it. It tells me that I could see more Mariners games if I moved to Seattle, and I went no why would I do that. But I am thinking about it, in earnest. I'm thinking about it up until I'm on a crush-packed light rail train headed to a bus, because there's no rail extension where Tautology lives yet since they keep stifling it, and I realize that this city sucks and I couldn't get around here without a car. But there's Scarecrow, there's the Mariners, and there's Kroger. What else do I really need, I think to myself. Why do I keep telling myself that I don't want to live here? I don't live in Indiana anymore. I live in Philadelphia, which I quite like. But why am I telling myself that I like it? Why do I need to?
I miss my family. I talk about convincing those around me to understand the nightmare of Zionism, but I truly don't have many left to convince. I haven't spoken with my parents and grandmother in 2 years. I recited Yizkor for my Trump-supporting dead grandfather on Shavuot. He would have hated the person I am now. My aunt and uncle didn't even mention anything on my birthday, and often only message me when I talk to them first. I miss my cousin and I hope his life went well after his Bar Mitzvah. For a great while I didn't believe that found family existed. I still kind of don't, but my best friend's mom cosigned my lease and there are people I lean on in my community. I suppose that's what a found family is, not reconstructing the power dynamics and structures of family but finding something anew. Who knows. I still don't know how to grieve. Maybe that's why I like the structure of religion. It provides a set of rules for it that you can follow, special days on the calendar to remember those you've lost. It isn't useful when you're grieving someone that's still alive, though. I'm tired of Maybes.
Maybe, at some point in the future, I'll be back in Indiana. It'll be 9 Elul 5787. My grandfather will have been dead for 10 years. I will take Talia with me on the plane. It's likely that my family will not know that she's trans at all. It's a problem she's been running into lately, where even other trans people often don't know she's trans. Maybe that'll be good for dealing with my family, as horrible as that is to say. They're the type to just dance around conflict if they can, interlocking just outside its perimeter to try and appease everyone possible. I will stay with my aunt and uncle. My aunt and uncle will dance around the fact of my transness, but I will still talk to them cordially. I will see my cousins who I have not seen since the Bar Mitzvah. They will great me with similar awkwardness. They know too much about me to adjust to a change like the one set before them. It'll only be natural. I will rent a car at the airport. I will light a candle. It will burn for 25 hours. I will drive to the grave in Fishers. I will say the words that I want to say, which I don't know yet, I'm still working on it. The nice thing about someone being dead is that you can be with their spirit in the truest sense; you are free to view whatever you'd like with rose-colored glasses. I will remember flying model planes with him in Kokomo. I will remember going with him to the Thai place in Indianapolis I liked. I will remember the time he let me eat non-Kosher food for the first time. I will remember the last conversation I had with him, which was at a McCallister's Deli off of 116th near the Starbucks where I camped out in high school repeatedly. I will remember the times that I stood outside the Starbucks and stared at the deli. I will remember remembering, and I will remember remembering remembering. I'll write a poem, probably. It'll have irregular meter and it'll finally say everything I want to say. I will tell him how my life has gone. I will tell him about leaving Indiana, about going to college, about finding partners, about transitioning. I will explain it all, and it will be perfect. He will understand all of it. I will leave a bundle of tulips by the grave, with my notes scribbled down in gel pen at the bottom of the vase. There will be tears smudging the ink. I trust he will see all of it. I will take my girlfriend to landmarks from my childhood. I will bring her to my high school, and show her the outside of it. I will show her the library, which will not be the same as I remembered it, because it was renovated at some point when I was in college. I will see if anybody I know is still there. I do not remember any of their names, but library jobs tend to be fairly secure. I will show her the Indianapolis Zoo and let her pet the sharks. I will try to feed a giraffe. I will show her the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and I will hope that the Dinosphere is still there. I will see if any of the same equipment is still being used. I will try and find a DIY show, or something interesting, to do in the area, just to recontextualize it all. I will experience a glimpse of the life I'm living now within the life I lived before. I will see a spark within an ocean of darkness. I will see good lives in a place where I rehearsed my own death. I will see a puddle of gasoline on the road and I will remember burning an ocean of homework with acetone with my best friend in his backyard. Then, and only then, will I go back. I will complete teshuvah. Maybe it will be to my grandmother's home. I'll go there and I'll knock on the door, because I know she's been waiting for me. My girlfriend might help me navigate the conversation,. My grandmother will turn around, she has to. She'll understand why I did all of this to myself, why I had to run, she'll finally get it. I can't imagine another world where it goes badly. It's too much for me to bear, the idea that it could. I'll go upstairs and I'll show my girlfriend the room where I used to sleep. I'll show her the weird arrangement of furniture, and I'll show her the shitty window A/C that kept giving me allergies. I'll show her the nook on the second floor where I used to program stupid garbage on the computer, like a tic-tac-toe solver that one summer, or a solution to the n-queens puzzle in Scheme. I'll show her a version of myself that used to care about things like this. Or, and this is the harder part, maybe I'll go home. I still call it home. I'll go back to the place that shaped me into the person that I am now. I will sit in the rental car, and it will be parked just across from the house, and I will wait. My girlfriend will not be there. I wouldn't subject her to this. It'll be about 3:30 PM on a weekday. I'll watch my mom's Prius pull into the garage, and I'll duck before she can see me. I'm just an inconspicuous car visiting another house. I'll look at the back of her head and I'll maybe catch a glimpse of her face, that face that I've desperately been trying to remember, that face that I have no pictures of. She will still be yelling at my brother, who I think I remember the face of better. I'm not sure anymore. When they go inside, I'll scurry out of the car and leave a letter in the mailbox. I will run back to the car and drive away. I will put one of the stickers I put everywhere on the sign for the condo complex for someone else to clean up. Actually, I'll put stickers everywhere. They all say "THANK YOU FOR BEING A PERVERT". I will put them everywhere I can. If you're a pervert and you're still in Indiana, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are stronger than I am. I will look at the patterns of grass, and I will look at the cobwebs, and I will look at the trees. It won't be the same way that it was. I'll sticker to try and get this place to remember who I am. I'll beg it to remember who I am, that I was here. I'll beg it to remember that it hurt me, that its restrictive yet nonexistent walls caved in around me, that it shrouded me in an uncomfortable blanket of nothing at all. I'll cry and scream. I'll honk the car horn and my mother will hear it and she'll walk outside and I'll have to drive away, and she'll see the side of my head, panicked, crying, and she will feel
and I'll look at her lifeless body and think to myself this is my fault, this is my fault, this will be my fault. On the day the aliens come, I will be ready. I will welcome them with open arms. I will let them take me away.
It's, well I don't know what time it is, in Seattle right now. Or SeaTac, specifically, a city named after an airport that I am also in. I've arrived far too early at the airport due to anxiety about TSA times, despite the fact that whenever I show up at the airport it always seems like I get through TSA incredibly quickly. I find a small piece of plastic with a catgirl drawn on it in the TSA line that says "zooey" on it. I don't know what it is, and I ask if the TSA officer knows either. They don't, and say "Well, we can't prove it's not yours. It fits your vibe", which I am deeply taken aback by given the fact that this is a TSA officer. I walk over to the gate and pull out my laptop, and work more on this essay. I don't know how it's going to end yet, but that's not important right now. The structure isn't even codified properly. I wanted to talk about the time I threw up outside a Bar Mitzvah, but now I'm talking about more things. Maybe if I stayed more focused on writing, maybe I wouldn't drift as much, maybe I wouldn't balloon the word count to 12,000 words, maybe, maybe, maybe. I unplug my laptop as the boarding process starts, and pull out my vaguely iPod-shaped music player. Tautology showed me the album If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle and Sebastian on the trip, and so I put it on to solidify the memories I built. It said this album was "twee", or that people called it "twee". I disagree. This is music to die in a snowfield to, watching your blood slowly seep into the snow as you drown in a sea of what if and if only. They never know it, because you'll never show it, you always get your way. The plane is claustrophobic. Thankfully, I have an aisle seat this time, which I prefer, generally speaking. The middle seat experience was horrible on the way here. The couple sitting next to me is watching Zoolander for whatever reason, and I find it strange that Ben Stiller has somehow made two pieces about mind control and the absurdity of capital. Not to say that Severance is riffing on the same themes as Zoolander, because Severance is, crucially, good. I always find the time before the plane takes off, but after it leaves the gate, to be contemplative. You're at a point of no return now. You can't run off of the plane, abandon your ticket, drop everything to spend another hour, another day, another week, another month, another year. You are going to the place that you are going, and that's that. The ride has started. You can only watch. The plane begins to take off as Fox in the Snow trails off into the next track, and tears run down my face. I can't bear the thought anymore. What if I made the wrong decision by moving to Philadelphia? I moved to Philly almost on happenstance, because Talia wrote gay poetry about me, and that's just the life that I ended up in. What if the same entropic force, that same G-d, brought me to Chicago, or Baltimore, or Seattle, or New York, or Boston, or anywhere else? What if G-d brought me nowhere? At the final moment I cried / I always cry at endings No, that wasn't what I meant to say at all, I don't believe that, do I? From where I'm sitting, I can see the skyline get further and further, as if the world is falling underneath me. I always thought there'd be a climax when I stopped talking to my parents. I thought I'd find the killing blow to make them cry with my words, tell them goodbye, an honest goodbye that reflects the bitter nature of it all. But no, I took the path of least resistance, I took an opening when it came and I fled. There's no bravery in that, not to me. There's only resignation. I'm not going to hit anyone with a car, I'm not going to have a giant ending to the story, I'm not going to have everything blow up in my face. I want to imagine that I do, but I don't. Get me away, I'm dying I miss Tautology already. It's all coming back, swinging into full force. I've never taken a vacation before, I've only either scoped out places that are more queer-friendly than Indiana, or was forced to go somewhere by my family or happenstance. I thought this was a vacation, but no, I was doing one of these things, I have to be doing one of these things. Get me away, I'm dying and the tears roll down my face, and I imagine myself as if in a Wong Kar-wai film, exhibiting brooding melancholy lying in a snowfield as the same musical motif plays for the thousandth time, putting a piece of paper into a wall to see what happens, Get me away, I'm dying I don't remember what I put into the wall in the first place, it was so long ago and I didn't want to go, they made me leave early anyway because I didn't know anyone there and so I just spent the time playing around in iMovie while listening to Isqa Get me away, I'm dying maybe my life isn't what I wanted it to be, there could be something more, there has to be Oh, I'm dying and I resign myself to being on the plane as the sky falls onto my face.
I try to watch The Secret Agent (2025) on the plane, but I can't pay attention to the political drama, I'm far too tired from sleep deprivation. I try and sleep, but I can't. I end up watching But I'm A Cheerleader — I liked the part with the gay people in it. The plane lands in Philadelphia and I am fully not perceiving my surroundings. It's 6 something AM. The feeling persists on the train as the wheels hit track with an endless screeching reminiscent of the SEPTA Silverliner series. 30th Street Station is familiar. I walk out the 29th Street exit and get a cab home, and I stare out the window. The feeling fades immediately upon the cab hitting Broad Street.
The life I have built for myself is built out of intention and ritual, built out of finding the friends that I care about and keeping them close, built out of rejecting those who treat me poorly, built as if made with a chisel. There are hands guiding my own and they are largely built out of histories I do not fully know or understand. But to act as if I had no say in the matter is laughable. I have done the things I do on purpose. I can build another life for myself, but for what? The issues I face today are of a different shape now. I hate my job, for one, but who doesn't — it, at least, has the good sense to commit fairly minimal psychic damage and give me ample opportunities to do time theft. My boss does not fully understand the life of a delirious 24 year old transsexual and wonders exactly why I take so much time off. I am still dissociating all the time, but I am building ways around it. I am able to avoid binding myself to blindly following my own traumas and histories, deciding that I need to drop everything and move, deciding that there is an imminent threat around me. I can shape the world around me as I see fit, build myself around communities that value me. There are choices that I can make and can continue to make. I have the option to drop everything and move at any time. I could abandon everything with the flick of my fingers, move to another city (again), change my name (again), run away (again). But am I really going to do that? Nah. Don't wanna.
I changed my name on 9 Elul 5786, a year before it'll happen. I went up for an aliyah, and the parsha was Ki Tetze, and my specific aliyah had Deuteronomy 22:5 in it. Rabbi Lev said something about me "redeeming the text" here, which I found very funny. I briefly spoke about memories I had of my grandfather, and about how I like to mix transition milestones with grief. It grounds me in the reality of things. Most people have not gotten as far away from themselves as I have. Being trans already takes you far away from yourself in the name of getting close to yourself, but as far away as Philadelphia from Indiana? That's a ways. I didn't say everything I wanted to say, or else I would have said every word here thus far. I didn't even have all of these words written at that point. I am eternally grateful for the fact that I have such a supportive community surrounding me at this point in my life. I have no words to express it. These will have to suffice. I don't believe in endings. L'shana tova u'metukah.