The thread

Let me tell you a story. I say this on every post as a centering ritual, but this is specifically about a story.

In my life I hang out with a lot of trans people. Though I feel at a distance from a "trans community" at present, I appreciate the mutual solidarity I have with trans people. This often involves telling a personal story about gender identity and coming out.

This month marks four years since I came out, eight months into COVID as it transformed American society. The story I tell changes a tad every time, but the start has remained the same. I talk about the first time someone asked me if I knew what "transgender" meant. It was the mid-00s and my sibling brought me to a retro soda jerk place in Silicon Valley. They do not do this sort of thing without some kind of news break. Someone close was transitioning, who I knew in a younger then-brother way.

I don't feel starting any earlier than that makes sense if trying to link with the present day, and I feel deeply guilty for ever leaving this out. This whole episode was not super salient until it became important, and then vital.

The thread of time connects this to 2020, to now, to many moments along the way. It will connect to the future. I will talk about it in old age or whenever I exit stage left.

This person was killed by a car in a dangerous pedestrian crossing in Portland. I went there for the first time on the anniversary this year. It is still a death trap. I cried. I then went to the Asian market next to it and bought a sugar cracker box, one of the metal ones. My folks have a saltines box they've had for decades. I thought maybe this would be like that for me. I feel deeply silly for this kind of hack symbolism; yet, I would rather lose most things in my apartment than this cracker box now.

I will say it was weird to feel much more deeply about this fifteen years after it happened then at the time. I do not really know much more about this person than I did then. Grief is a reflection of ourselves, and since we persist after someone is gone, it doesn't necessarily get simpler or easier over time.

In the last year or so before their death, I developed a pretty substantial crush on them. The last time I remember seeing them, I volunteered to walk them to the bus stop. It was one of the few times I didn't feel like a younger sibling. That maybe, in time, I would figure things out as an adult. I haven't, but that doesn't mean the feeling was bad, or unwarranted. I've spent my life running from my inherent naivete- that maybe my dreams will come true. I don't really believe they will, but I also now know having dreams is what sustains the things I do accomplish. I don't polish poetry for submission with the belief that it all will be rejected.

I also know that this memory may not have been the last time I saw them. We live with the weight that sudden tragedy is preceded by time that is likely not rigorously committed to memory.

I feel like I am holding a videotape that has been rewound too many times, the picture fragmented and irregular.

I don't know what this person would think of me at thirty-four. Since they were a similar age to my sister, I have always mentally catalogued them as older. In a video essay on the personification of death, Red points out that human minds almost refuse as a principle to believe someone or something is genuinely gone. Instead we think of someone as not here right now. When I looked up the incident to make sure I had the right date, I realized they were twenty-three. At twenty-three I wasn't out, wasn't dating, married, divorced, I had not graduated from community college, let alone gone back.

I don't want to put words in the mouth of those who entered the great sleep.

All I hope is that they'd be proud of me.

Artemis