Stubble grew on an angular chin like weeds in a vacant lot. Remnants of painted fingernails ran through unwashed long hair (his one feminine feature remaining) the color of grass in winter. He was brought into the emergency department for suicide attempt, but he died long ago -died twice – he told me.
Cuts etched his arms like tally marks. Counting what? I wondered. He said they helped him deal with the pain.
“It didn’t work though, not really.” he said. Something lost in translating emotional pain to physical; both are red and linear, but wrists are not deep enough, “not even if cut clean through, so what’s the point?” he reasoned.
“What does it feel like?” I asked, like a baby bird, “being trans.”
He told me how it happened, how he died the first time. This is what he said:
“I had an image of myself in a mirror. It looked like me, but was not me, like in a dream when you know where you are but it looks different. I wanted to become it. The landscape in the mirror a homeland and I was abroad in a foreign body. The image looked and moved nothing like me, but I wanted to be it, to crawl inside of it. But as I looked I understood the reflection was not the image, but the real, and I was the image dimly reflected. This is when I died the first time: knowing I was the lesser image of a greater truth and was bound to it.
“I journeyed through meds and pills and pain and jeers. Through slow poisonings and surgical slicings I made me. I became an ally, a safe space, a monolith of confidence, a shepherd for the queer. I wrote op-eds for the New York Times, spoke on trans panels, produced trans documentaries; I was a paragon of the LGBTQ+ community, a success story. But after all this, the dream eluded. Inside, dissatisfaction rotted. As greed never has enough, I could not have enough of becoming. What do you call the image of a figment?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
“The mirror broke,” he continued. “I broke. The becoming me stood forever far off. Among the slivers I found myself, disjointed. I could see myself there still, pieced apart in a silver puzzle, fleetingly. In desperation I gathered the pieces in my hands and squeezed them. The tighter I drew the shards together, the clearer I became, but the more it cut. Until I couldn’t hold the pain and dropped them again. This was the second time I died.”
“Is that where the cuts come from?” I asked
He raised his arms and inspected the thicket of scars as if translating a hieroglyph.
“Want to know the hell of it all?” he asked.
“For as many pats of bravery I have had for my life, you are the first one to ask me about them. First one not getting paid to ask. Everyone is quick to affirm, quick to celebrate; slow to ask. They see the scars. Scares them off. Diversity’s become another fad,” he scoffed, betrayed. “It’s a badge. A business. It’s buying off the litigious to avoid a suit. It was about acceptance. But you can’t accept what you don’t know, and you don’t know if you don’t ask, and you don’t ask if you don’t care. And you don’t need to care to champion diversity. Not anymore.”
Here he looked into the middle distance.
“They come from the mirror, you know. The cuts. From broken pieces of me.”
Thought Butter 