There was an unseasonable thaw at the beginning of February. The snowdrifts in the yards melted and revealed piles of mud; what I thought was just snow turned out to be thrown-out mattresses or discarded desk chairs, now soggy and rotting. Grey water sluiced down the streets, puddling at the curb cuts. Part of the top of my cheap pair of patent boots from the thrift store peeled off from the salt and chemicals that ran in the dirty streams.
The semester started quickly and other parts of my life spun out at the same time. I started the process of moving a few blocks up into an apartment with a woman from my cohort after enduring what I vowed to be my last stay next to a party my neighbor threw until five a.m. I went to Iowa to see the play a friend of mine had wrote, and cried every night at the second act because it was so good. I decided to change a lot of things about my habits: relegating Tumblr to a once a month treat, sealing off my access to other social networking sites for the time being, thinking a lot more about what my body and mind need from each other.
I’m feeling out of place, some streams of my energy dammed up and others running wildly. My body feels stretched too tight but my mind won’t stop racing. I’m thinking about all the things I pushed aside last semester: top surgery, having kids, am I doing the right time period?, is academia the right place for me?, can I handle the snobbery?, why did I just talk about Hegel in polite conversation? I needed a stone heart to get through last fall, but the freeze and thaw of February is cracking it open—perhaps far too soon.
I missed K. J. Rawson giving a job talk about the affect-ability of transgender archives, but my professor sent me a link to the video version of it, sent only to the faculty, tacked to a message asking me to participate more in class. Maybe what seems like a deluge is just a pulse, a washing forth and back, growing stronger and weaker in traceable periods. After I watched the job talk, I listened to my own voice waver and change from the short recordings I did when I started testosterone, and then wondered why I stopped at eight months.
All the recordings in the beginning talked about coming out to my parents. I’m thinking right now about how far we’ve all come, and how hopeless it felt when I first started those hard talks with them—how we flood each other with emotions and then let them settle like silt for months at a time. When I was little I loved to talk to my geography teacher mama about oxbow lakes, the lakes that split off from a meandering river, seeming to snap back to a straight line and leaving behind a curved lake. Such slow pulses of mud and rain and erosion lead to completely different bodies of water, but you never notice them in the day-to-day, just in hindsight.
