the bits stay down and i function like a girl
Sometimes I feel an enormous sense of loss-- I worry that the longer I pretend to be normal, the more the part becomes my skin and I grow dependent, unable to operate outside of my protective armor, my pseudoself. And I am not good at pretending to be normal, understand. I'm all right, considering. I pass. That's all. My body language will never not be peculiar enough that others take notice and, occasionally, become frightened of me because I don't quite move the way a human being is supposed to move. I don't know whether I'll ever be able to fall in love, or take pleasure from the kinds of physical closeness most people take pleasure from, or mourn the dead, or. Or. Probably lots of things. Even just not-be-ill-at-ease-among-others. I'm never going to be good at being a person. That would be okay, I guess, except that I worry that the longer I inhabit this place where I'm trying to be a person, trying to be normal, I limit and then lose my ability to access other spaces, states of being where I can exist more fully, and just exist, and let all the world flow through me and not name or be named unless it gives me joy to do so and there is no linear progression, not exactly, and the boundary between me and the sky is infinitely permeable and I cannot describe this to you. I just sound like some drugged-out hippie. I'm not going to claim that anything I experience is necessarily beyond description, oooo mystical, but some things I experience are beyond my personal ability to adequately explain or describe. It may simply be that my ingenuity with the English language is inadequate, or that there's some other language that has exactly the precise words I need, but I happen not to speak it. And so.
If it were a trade between being able to...well. That, and being able to be a truly ordinary woman with the full range of abilities and feelings an ordinary woman would have, at home in her element, then, frankly, I would probably choose the latter. (Or at least, I would when I'm in a mopey, cue-the-world's-tiniest-neurodivergent-violin mood.) I would do what the girl does in The Empire Of Ice Cream when she takes the pills and trades her art and her synesthesia and her "imaginary" friend for not being lonely anymore. Never feels the sound of the telephone as burlap again. But that is not the trade I'm making, and I'm afraid, sometimes, that I'll always be kind of lonely and lose most or all of the enjoyable parts of being different, besides.
All things considered, these are not big concerns. Everyone sheds selves like snakes shed skins anyway, and usually without half this much angst. And someday I'll be dead, regardless, and whose skin will I wake up in, then? Maybe death will be wider and more open than any sky ever was to me when I was flesh. Maybe I'll grow up and learn to walk in shoes that pinch my toes (I'm getting better at this, even now) and live in a house with small windows, and maybe I'll jump trains and maybe I'll be tied to tables and made to arc and shudder with blue light, and maybe I'll get married and maybe I'll have a daughter and maybe I'll have a cat. Maybe I'll move to a commune. Maybe my sister and I will share an apartment and argue about the color of the walls. Maybe I'll work in a library. Maybe I'll work in a cubicle. Maybe I'll fall in love with mathematics. Maybe I'll be eaten by tigers. Maybe I'll walk into a river with pockets full of rocks. Maybe civilization will collapse within my lifetime. Maybe a freak accident will destroy my frontal lobes. Maybe I'll learn to knit socks. Maybe I'll develop a smoking habit, a drug addiction, a passion for soap operas. Something will happen, and I'll forget I was ever any different till the next sea change.