Chimera
I am in a Walgreens in Lower Manhattan trying to return a misprinted passport photo. I am barely employed. I slept over at a lover’s the night before, and now she’s off to work and I stayed in her bed until I heard her roommates leave, and I have really nothing better to do but to walk the long route to the drugstore so I can get my $16.99 back so maybe later I can buy a sandwich and leave a tip. It’s winter and it is cold cold cold, and the tall buildings are creating a wind tunnel straight through my forehead. I am bundled in my L.L. Bean coat that covers my chin to my knees, its sherpa lining kissing my eyebrows. I am listening to Prince, and doing a silly little shuffle-dance down the street, and all things considered it is shaping up to be a pretty okay day. I get in line at the Walgreens and wait and wait and wait, until finally the manager says “isn’t someone going to help this young man?”
I used to really care how I was perceived. I used to be constantly vigilant. I used to go visit a girlfriend in the city while I was still in college in Massachusetts, and I was nervous even holding her hand in public. It made me come off cold and distant. Although I was proud to be gay, proud to be with her, I hated to be other. Now living in New York, I care much less about how I come off and far more about not being pushed in front of the subway. My paranoia just translated itself, I suppose. Either way, I’ve never minded being called a man, or a boy. I got it all the time in Cambodia. But it is often so curious to me. I get it the most in airports, where I tend to be wearing a hoodie and a mask. In the Walgreens it surprises me. What makes me look like a young man, especially when presented with my feminine jacket and only my face? Does my voice not give it away? If I could poll every person on the street, what would they think?
I have always assumed all young women have complicated relationships with their body. All things considered, I’ve gotten off pretty well, and the fact that my body and its presentation exist outside the societal norm helps. I like my stomach, although only looking at it right down. I like my happy trail. I’m losing hair again and I hate when it comes from my head but in some ways even more when it falls from the milky white expanse between my belly button and waistline. I have struggled with my body, with my weight, with the feminineness, the dyke-ish-ness of it all, of my wide-set hips, my thighs, my chest. My navel hair peaking over sweats makes me feel masculine, if only from this self-angle. My right side, from my tits down to my pelvis, is still dotted with bug bite scars. They have faded to look like hickies. I have a faint birthmark on my neck that looks like the last day of a sucking bruise, and I always wonder if I should cover it up for interviews. All young women learn to self-objectify. If we are lucky, we do not learn to center our desire around being desired.
Last night I prayed my lover would wake me up with a slow, deep kiss. I wouldn’t have even minded it mingled with morning breath. I wanted the kiss to deepen and pool and pull at us. I wanted it to twist like taffy around my tongue, a sticky sweet mess, a Chinese finger trap, tongue-tied cat got your tongue. Instead, we woke up exhausted and sleepless and irritable.
Presenting as a man has not led me to view women as a man. I often want to be wanted more than I want to want. Laying in bed with another, I touch my body as a stranger. I touch their body as a surrogate for my own. I am tender with others where I am harsh with myself. I bite them where I would want to be caressed. The pretty name pain sharp on my tongue, and soon it is a bad fanfiction, my head trapped between their legs. Soon I suffocate on their sex.
But as I get older and older I pour less of myself into others’ vessels. I’ve tired of viewing myself from the outside looking in.
