Month: December 2019

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Choose

I fantasize about running through a red desert. The breeze is cool and tinged with coming night, the red of the sand seems to reverberate with the last vestiges of the fading day. In the distance, a monolith mesa rises from the creosote-dotted earth to block the eastern horizon.

In this fantasy, I shuffle slowly along. I have never been a fast runner and there is no need to pretend otherwise for the purpose of this fantasy. Besides, in the soft, silty sand it is hard to run quickly and I am more than content to lope along. Footsteps kicking up clouds. Breathing in control. Sweat sticking my short hair to my head. In this fantasy my body is familiar, capable, powerful.

But I am not in a nameless red desert. But sitting alone on my couch in my small Seattle apartment. The last of the day’s fall sunlight leaks through the window in watery rays. Dust motes stir on the desk. I watch the world grow dark around me, marveling at the stupefying effects of oxycodone.

Even through the drug, my chest feels like it is bound in searing ropes. Not painful exactly, but uncomfortable enough to warrant constant notice. A reminder, as it were, of what I have done. What I have chosen. A surgery to shave down my body into one I hope be more comfortable living in. Top surgery, yet not a full mastectomy. I did not wish to remove my breasts entirely, but to move myself from visibly feminine toward a different place altogether. As a nonbinary person I am no more a man or a woman than I am a combination of the two. Instead, I am something different, less a middle ground than a third option entirely.

In choosing to have reduction top surgery I wanted to give myself a body that I could tolerate inhabiting. One that didn’t project unwanted femininity at every opportunity. One that I didn’t have to bind and conceal and endure every single morning as I desperately tried to find something, anything in my closet that covered my chest and made me feel normal. Invisible. Unneeding of attention. A human blip on the radar of society soundlessly gliding by without a protruding prow out ahead of me.

For days after my surgery I wore the same oversized red flannel. Even with the bandages around my chest the shirt fell nearly flat. It was perfect. Comfort like a deep sigh of relief. 

Rather than feeling strange or shocking my new chest felt normal, expected. Like this was how I was always supposed to look. And it was this sense of rightness that would carry me through the coming months of healing. As the last of the beautiful fall days passed I sat on my couch, I fantasized about running across a red desert. I dreamt of a strong, capable body as weeks passed and my muscles atrophied.

Physical exertion and strain seem to be the only ways I can understand this body that I inhabit. Being forced to abandon those tools quickly left me feeling lost within my own skin. Weak and without recourse to manage the sickly, vibrating energy that seems to fill my very bones. The price of making my body my own is to be forced to sit and handle my discontent. Energy within me that bubbles and strains, looking for a way out. This new chest is one part freedom, one part test of patience. Wholey a lesson in coming home.

Through healing from top surgery I came to see my body as an old house. A thing that I inhabit but do not love. A thing that requires maintenance and understanding, that is both imperfect and impermanent. A thing that I can shape to a degree, but short of total destruction I will never be able to transform it fully into my own. I can paint the bathroom, knock down a wall, but the structure is the same.

I am coming to accept that this old house contains the very core of who I am, a constant energy seeking a way out as though my very being is discontent to be trapped under skin. Yet through effort and ink and knife this body of mine is starting to become familiar. And if I sit here long enough it will heal and I will be allowed to return to physical exertion, to wild places, to the brutal joy of endurance. I fantasize about running across a wild, red desert. I wait.

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Iceland

We leave Reykjavik under a heavy sky that is just beginning to lighten. It is 10am. Starman pilots the car through endless roundabouts as we make our way north out of the city. After 40 minutes the low buildings of Reykjavik drop away and we are deposited into rolling countryside, hemmed in one one side by an expansive ocean while the other rises quickly to mountains ground flat by immense glacial rivers.

This land feels desolate and removed from modern time. Only the occasional gas station with its neon lights creates a tenuous link the present. Though Iceland has only been inhabited for 1,000 years, the remote hamlets and farms feel ancient beyond scale. The world is pale grey sky, black rock and umber grass.

I dream about living here, alone and distant. In this fantasy I occupy a small cabin, just a single room with a loft for sleeping. Warm wooden walls and a fireplace to heat. In the summer I would walk in any direction I chose, climbing mountains, following streams and drinking from their cold waters. I would grow a garden under the endless sunlight and in the evenings, sit on the porch and watch the sun dip lazily across the southern sky. Feeling the Earth turn as the seasons march forward.

In the winter I would draw myself close against the dark and biting cold. During the short days I would ski slowly and without intent across the land, returning home in the evenings to melt snow for water and watch the wind blow patterns in the snow. I would marvel at the changing face of the land, both familiar and born anew each season. I would read and write and burrow into my solitude like a warm bed. Contented and held by the land, by the desolation of this small, imaginary cabin.

And in the spring I would re-emerge into the sun and into a life with people. Having been healed by time and space and loneliness.

I have been in Iceland for less than 24 hours and already this land calls. Speaking a language I didn’t remember knowing. Something in my bones aches to be ground down by the wild remoteness of this land, I wish to be unknown as I come to know this place. Perhaps, I think to myself, it would be possible to live here one day.

On our second day in Iceland we drive to the black sand beaches of Vik and I pretend that I am standing at the end of the world. The Atlantic stretches like gunmetal to the horizon. A brutal, cold sort of beast whose mere proximity stirs something desperate in my mammalian chest. Danger and awe. I am fragile and impotent standing next to such a force. I relish its power to destroy me and I am smothered in the presence of vastness, of enduring authority, of power without scale. Water not for play, but as a vast mote around a small island.

The water takes many forms in Iceland but none is as captivating as the waterfalls. Foss, as they are called in Icelandic. Gullfoss, Iceland’s most iconic and popular waterfall drops like curtains into a gaping maw of a canyon. And we stand on its rim and oggle like children at the size, the urgency with which the water flings itself forward and down through slot and sluice. The roaring of the falls is seconded only by the wind. That perennial Icelandic wind, pushing at our backs as we run to the car. Feet slipping in the mud and snow Starman and I laugh until we are gasping. Past the accusing eyes of tourbus pedestrians we fly. Each step a leap of faith that we will come back down to the ground. Any moment we could be carried away by the wind and set free.

Like any first attempt at love it is over too fast. Eyes widened and cheeks wind-burnt I find myself at Keflavík Airport. It is time to go home.

The flight path to Seattle travels north over the arctic and from the window I can see the mass of hulking white below me. The vast, craggy expanse of the arctic is enchanting in the dregs of daylight. I cannot help but stare and wonder. Wonder what it would be like to walk day and night across the ice until northbound travel becomes south. And I become nothing more than a laugh on the wind, alone in these northern places that call to me.

For more photos find me on Instagram @karaontheoutside