polemic in favor of a transsexual gothic
Once or twice a year on a night where I can't fall asleep I feel compelled to log into the social media and email accounts of the me I was before transition.
With the bored apprehension of a nightwatch guard patrolling an abandoned building I check to see if any old friends missed the memo reaching out to catch up, if any old contacts or projects bore fruit while I was away, anything of the sort. Instead I invariably find nothing more than the slit on the back a cicada husk, a half dozen "[a name now dead] has left the group chat" and little more.
My transition began with a mass ghosting event, a pulling inwards, recoiling from the world. Usually quietly, sometimes loudly, a person that I embodied for 20 years was rendered out of other people's lives. I never made any announcement or anything of that sort, rather that version of me ducked out of everything and shuffled off stage. A hundred little "ope let me just squeeze past you"'s into the dark.
My transition began as a moment of clarification. Not in the figurative sense but the culinary sense of heating an oil until to reduce it's water and to leave behind what you want. I felt myself extruded. Hard to hold on to others through that.
I guess I find myself returning to these accounts because, like looking into an abandoned building, it is haunting in a way I can't escape. I feel haunted by this husk, by the ease with which it all ended. I say to myself that it speaks to the hollowness of that life that even eight years later these accounts still lay dormant. That this is evidence that I was not meant to live that life, those connections and bonds sloughed off me so easily.
But part of me always wonders, would it be like this again? Would all I've built, despite how firm the footing feels, look similar a decade after another dissipation of self? Is everything just held up through momentum like a balloon in the air? Are the connections I hold dear that ephemeral, only held together by constant renewal and repair? Would that really be so bad?