The Skirt

The skirt doesn’t quite fit: your hair is too short, thighs too thick — feminine… Not enough balance, or something. The skirt doesn’t fit. What would help? A long/violet wig? Different shoes? If you only had a different body. If you could only alter you as in a game, stretching cheekbones and thinning legs to mannish ones, pulling out little hairs along your chin — if only it were cheap. Easy. Common. The skirt doesn’t fit; you unzip and pull it off. Stand there in your underwear, exposed.

The skirt never fits, or hardly ever does — it fit once or twice, on those euphoric days of which there have only been a few, maybe four days: where you lay on the carpet floor of your childhood bedroom feeling good about yourself and your gender; the skirt didn’t matter because you were on a high — you have now been drunk once, post twenty-one, so you can say it now, that feeling of gender euphoria is like feeling drunk. That night you drank yourself high you were stumbling in the downtown night telling the woman beside you I feel like a cloud, not very poetic but realistic —you were happy, floating on the proverbial high of science. Gender euphoria, rare, feels quite similar: you are happy because you stopped caring, ten minutes past, about the crook of your glasses and the length of your skirt along your thin, girlish legs; you feel, for once, like you. It comes maybe every five months or so—you are reading a novel about a similar character to your own when it occurs to you that you are okay — that you are a boy — and that you have, for an hour, at least, emerged from your fog. Or you watch an inspirational film at the end of which you cry out all your confused pain. Or you take a shot of testosterone (prepare the vial, the needle, penetrate the former with the latter, draw up, push out bubbles, stick the thing into your stomach and push) and you know that now things are alright. You are lying on the carpet floor of your childhood bedroom with a stuffed unicorn and its ten siblings peering down at your lying body and you are wearing the skirt and it splays like a paint splash across the soft lines of your thighs, the old carpet. You take a shot of testosterone and it stings, but you get to wipe the red blood bead from your skin and then bandage it over, like love. It is literal self-love, you think, and grin.

You look into the mirror in your father’s bathroom and do not recognize yourself, so you look a little longer, staring until you start to take on the old shape. Your head does not match the rest of your body — your head does not match your hair — you were born with wrong parts and the godly quest, ingrained, to find new ones. In which holy, gold grail will your future chest lie? Physical transition is a matter, you consider, of receiving and removing. You are trying to lose the breasts. Maybe then, you think, you will achieve heaven. Maybe then, you will have run yourself free from wonderland.