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.