Newlyweds
A was declarative, emphasizing the pronoun: Well, you are incredibly defensive. Like I almost could empathize more if you admitted that you weren’t ready to let him go rather than having to listen to you construct some kind of impenetrable logic that proved what you were doing was the right choice. She was right of course. Every time Z and I argued, I laboriously explained the progression of why I acted or said certain things, as if I thought that linking them in this linear fashion would cause him to sympathize with my position. With A, I conceded because I agreed and no longer felt that my choice needed such meticulous defense; the outcome of this relationship proved what I feared most—that I would inevitably make a mistake and finally be forced to admit that I am irrational, governed by something other than intelligence. Whatever logic I constructed or clung to like a child gripping their favorite blanket crumbled almost immediately. There is no logic, only one emotion followed by another: nostalgia, heartache, betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, joy. And the gap between this language and my bodily experience of grief widens each day. I can admit that I wasn’t ready to let him go.
Each time one of my friends asked me to describe what happened, I fumbled for words for the first time. I don’t know. It just didn’t work. I said. Our separation remains unexplainable even though he articulately explained his reasoning, his anger. It remains unexplainable because of this gap between language and emotion, none of my words could convey the depth of my sorrow or constitute a sufficient apology. I have not transcribed a single word from that final conversation in my journal. Instead I have written about the times where we felt inseparable, outside time, unburdened from the narrowing societal constraints that determine what a relationship between a transsexual and a cisgender man could look like.
I wrote about the night Z and I spent together after my birthday. We drove to Wisconsin in an attempt to see the Northern Lights. At Jewel Osco we bought a handful of snacks and spooned mouthfuls of cottage cheese into our mouths with large sourdough pretzels. I told him that I associated cottage cheese with my mother and her never ending quest to lose weight when I was a child. Sometimes I worried he was affected by a similar hatred of his body that might lead to disordered eating. We stopped at a welcome center outside Beloit to use the restroom and took a photo in front of the “Welcome to Wisconsin” sign. I took off one of my boots so that we could prop my phone against it and use the self-timer. He kissed me. A passing car honked, and we laughed uncontrollably, like newlyweds clinging to each other as their friends and family showered them with rice.
We conceded defeat and drove back toward Illinois but stopped at Rock Cut State Park in a last ditch effort to see the spectral phenomena. He circled the lake and parked. There were no other cars in sight. He turned off the headlights, and we looked at the sky above the lake. I think I see some color, I insisted even though it looked unremarkable, I think because I wanted to infuse the night with significance. I tried not to fall asleep in the car on the ride home and forced him to listen to the first season of Serial because I wanted to introduce him to something he might like the same way he rewatched countless movies with me.
Months later we finally saw the Northern Lights. He picked me up from my apartment. I was tipsy after sharing two glasses of wine with a friend and was sour because my friend confessed that she was certain that she and her partner would marry. I envied her certainty, ached for a sense of security that he and I belonged to one another, that we would be inseparable, at least legally. I cried in the car. We parked across from the Montrose Bird Sanctuary, walked through the prairie, and emerged near the easternmost tip of the peninsula. The lakefront was crowded with people using their phones to capture the light, which was practically invisible to the naked eye. We used my phone to take pictures of the aurora and walked to the end of the pier. A flock of geese huddled in the small cove created by the curvature of the pier. After midnight the phenomena strengthened and the sky began to visibly glow with streaks of green stretching vertically across the sky, accompanied by a faint reddish glow along the uppermost edges. We took portraits of each other beneath the aurora. Neither of us liked the photos of ourselves, but I adored his smile. It was innocent and playful. Eventually we grew bored and wandered back toward the car. We had to piss and stood beside each other to relieve ourselves into the brush. We crossed our streams and both of us grinned, laughing, any semblance of my earlier melancholy gone. Whatever we were searching for that first time, I thought that we had found it.
I wrote so that I could remember the sweetness, the ease, even if it was punctuated by insecurity and frustration when we failed to be translatable to each other. The writing was a futile project motivated by a naive belief that if I perfectly arranged every sentence and word I could reanimate our love, that we could resume without interruption, my life filled with affection and laughter again. I imagined it as a rhetorical game, one whose rules I could master. Instead I am left with carefully dictated stories. At least these stories can serve another purpose, I thought. They could remind me that love as a trans woman is possible even if imperfect—a reminder that I will be adored again even if just for a moment in spite of this bleak, transmisogynistic world.
Image: Nicole Eisenman, Close to the Edge, 2015.