The minute I hit Route 29 and glimpsed a view of the ranges ahead, I started crying. Maybe it was that time, like the rising hills ahead of me, was expanding. Time for myself, I remembered. I’d been driving for hours trying to get other people out of my thoughts. Others’ voices, concerns. I have a habit of letting someone else’s voice get too loud, even inside me.
I started off scared. I worried about bears on a trail, or strangers. I think I was actually manifesting fear of their absence, because then I’d be left with me. And I did find her, them. Me.
Alone and Together – writing from Shenandoah National Park
Alone and together is my gender story. I am assembled in women yet dissembled simultaneously into something else, something unnamed but different than woman. I am alone and together at once. I imagine woman big and mighty and transcendent from how the world treats me woman, with their Misses and their manners and their eyes that read me wrong. I don’t know what I am. I think I must be something, someone. But what I am feels most cohesively as not. Not what you think or say or assume. Not what I think, either. I am afraid that at my core I am a simple thing, simply woman (whatever that means). I am afraid I am all the woman that the world puts upon me. I’m not sure what else I think, who else I could be, so I avoid thinking on me altogether.
When did I feel good, as myself? I got a kind of high from wearing suits, ties. I think it was the transgression that I liked. The not after all. It was not about reflecting my inner butch self. Man or woman be damned, it was the damning itself. Because I do not damn, rebel, transgress. No, those are inner wars and battles I wage while the outside knows nothing of it. Not my family or my friends or strangers too. I think there’s a lot of anger inside. There are a lot of questions, too. There is a lot of desire.
I say and think that I want to be post-transgression. At least, the superficial transgressions of garb. But how have I moved into the other realm, anyway? I see how superfluous clothes are, but I damn too the world that only sees my tunic as a dress. That only sees my body when I try to exceed myself.
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All these negative constructions, all these not’s make knots. I dream of unspooling. That is my loneliness. I want to uncoil from the fight with others, someone else at least. Because you cannot be a self, no not a self for long, in a constant fury. Of denial, of withholding, of noncompliance. I want to be unruly and unruled alongside someone. I want to not be afraid in my fighting. Unafraid that I will lose and loose. To be myself. To not regulate.