Strutton said there were ghosts in my life. I told him I’m just haunted by the future*

The past is always running in parallel tracks to me, I see me

streaking through the frosted glass, slipping on a milky beam, falling, caught, yanked back by my hair, and catapulted forward again

It is crowded in here

on the parallel greased racetracks of time

every one of me thinks that if they just run faster, they will be right

every one of me is mistaken

but I don't have time to parent us all. 

Occasionally, I've stopped, and sat in a circle with myself, 

and gathered her and me into my lap and told us she is loved, and it soothes us,

the mes of before

I can tell because when I do it, Me heals, a piece of me which was broken ceases to be broken, it un-breaks

like time flows backward and creates a little bypass for that me to slide around, holding my hand.

I play in the temporal paradox, I dance dangerously with the hard and fast rules

-Don't see yourself in the past

-Don't change anything

-You might cease to exist

but in my case, everything is reverse engineered anyway. 

I ceased to exist

and so when I time travel

I look for myself on purpose

and I change the past

causing me to come more into flesh

it’s not the silvery figures 

of long limbs and awkward elbows

-oh when I look at them straight on today, I feel the fear rising like opening a portal to a raging sea

-howl

-she comes straight at me howling

-she runs away transforming

and so when I time travel

I look for myself on purpose

and I change the past

and I cease to not exist

it’s not the silvery figures 

of long limbs and awkward elbows

that I see when I can see her

but a jumble of words

and she is swathed in them, they clutch at her feet and crawl through her hair

Alice caught in the tulgey wood of not-truths presented as cakes to eat

eat me

believe me

I want to scatter across the skidding time frames 

"don't!" 

and "fake news!"

but when we are six, we trust the guardians of our childhood, don't we?

I have a secret feeling that if I could just perform one act of righteous violence, 

provoked, 

I would heal

....and sometimes I think

come on, give me a reason, I’m strong enough now.

Please. 

The specter rises and asks, what would happen if you stepped across that divide? The knife-edge of control? The fantasy is delicious, but I could never tell you I do it, think about it, know it exists as an alternative to compassion.

that would mean admitting I’m not as healed as I want to be, need to be, insist I am

that would mean knowing she's coming.

Here is the ghost that haunts me, then

It is not the mes of the moment or decade before in all their trauma

that all is known, and anything known, no matter how horrific, is un-scary. I like to turn all the lights on and look directly at my fear. 

bare. 

naked. 

clinical. 

facts. 

Past.

Truth.

unblinking. 

no. it’s not the past mes who haunt me

it is the me of the future

the imprint of she who is coalescing and forming as I enflesh

as the pasts overlap and build me a memory at a time

she terrifies me

she has the capacity to be unfeeling

and uncaring

and sharp

she doesn't couch her successful navigation of the world in kindnesses which protect others

see that's my skill set what I mean to say is

she doesn't give a fuck if having healthy boundaries hurts your goddamn feelers your problem is your problem 

get too close and I'll backhand you with my cast

I don't want to break your heart or destroy your life

I want to physically move to act against the theft of the past

in other words, I want to hurt you

(oh shit she is a specter purpose-built to wage the war of the past

that young me could not)

I need to take her offline 

she will cause reckless havoc in my life

because she isn't born in the system

she's a product of threading through the timelines

a separate me, unlike the others

a potential me, but unfettered by ethics, morals, bent by vengeance

she lives only for reclamation of all that was stolen

of innocence eaten bloody at the table every Friday night

smeared on the lintel of my prepubescent body

I have a plan for her, this monster of the future me when she shows up

bristling for a fight

I’m building a safe space where she can live

and then I’m going to make a ritual

and burn marks into the floor

and ask her to come through

and let her form

and then I’m going to ask her to teach me how to paint.

*a response to Derrida

I have always wondered, really

What is a woman? What is Woman for that matter, the cascading demonstrations of my life: No one likes a fat girl. Sit like a lady. You look like a whore. What a wonderful Woman. She has beautiful breasts. There is nothing sexier than a pregnant woman. I mean okay, I’m past words because there’s just so much to unpack, the problem is, I don’t have marks yet either. This red haze of rage escapes my ability to communicate. I am searching. I am fucking searching and searching for a way to express the incredulous understandings of my programming as they are revealed to me. I am a psychic surgeon, I insist I will be whole. I will take the raft of beautiful lessons I learned from my abusers and with a laser scalpel I will remove the oils of their touch from my worth generator. I ruthlessly interrogate my programming, I peel it off in microns and lay it like tissue paper on the floor, and after a while I see it as separate from me, the lines, traced back to their hacker origins are pulled out and the access points sealed. I post a guard at every gate. I get taller every ten days.

I am not to be defined or understood by anyone, who has hope of that anyway? We don’t even know who we are, let alone who someone else is. After spending my life interrogating that role, WOMAN, slipping into each archetype and filling it out until it pushed its needy flesh through the seams, I arrived at the exhausted, slightly bitter despair I’ve come to both associate and dread in feminists of a certain age.

Then my child came out as a transgender woman. I will not lie, one of my first thoughts was - oh shit - what kind of a role model have I been to a young woman? Followed almost immediately by the head-smacking realization that this bias makes me part of the very system I’m fighting against.

Because if I’d known she was a girl, I would have parented her differently. I find myself now feeling like she is vulnerable, she is a woman who was never indoctrinated into the sisterhood of Things We Know. Her father told her to stop using so many razors, to use them longer, to save money. Her father doesn’t shave 90 percent of his body every day.

The conversation over, he went back to his phone. I leaned in and looked at her, eyes on eyes and the rest of us hidden behind covid masks as the train rocked back and forth. “Don’t ever let a man tell you what to do with your body. What is allowed, how it should look, how to “prepare” it, and how much you can spend on it? This is not his body. This is your body. If you need three razors a week, use three razors a week.” She’s savvy, she’s not trying to waste money.

What else haven’t I told her? How is it possible I spent so much time wondering how she would feel about women and would she ever really understand them, would she ever be a toxic male? This was my fear, growing spineless boys or toxic men. Meanwhile, neither of those things were even close to being a problem. She wasn’t playing Warframe with its just-below ass level camera to look at the shiny space-aged Kardashian flanked heroine to ogle and objectify a woman, she was playing Warframe to embody experience as a woman. This is why she wants a VR headset. That and it’s cool, but what better way to handle not having to face the enormous gap between realizing you are a woman and finding yourself in a body that matches that reality.

She’s terrified of needles. It took eight hours for her to get a vaccination when she was thirteen. She hyperventilated in the nurse’s office and hid under the desk. They had to bring in a specialist to help us get her out of there. How in the world will she even start thinking about the realities of transformation? VR all the way baybee. She’s amazing. She’s a blazing fucking supernova of certainty even floating in a cloud of dysphoria, she’s pinned down in the center. All compasses point to Ellen. I watch, and I am amazed.

I sometimes have trouble sorting myself. I mean into categories. I don’t understand fluid because I’m everything and nothing all the time, so when I have to squeeze my sloppy, amoebic self into a container I get confused. My body has always felt like an alien thing, it stopped being mine to own when I was six years old. I took it back one cell at a time in a war that wages on, lines redrawn, territory conquered, the bombed out buildings of my body losing their value as once fertile fields fall fallow.

For instance, here are some categories, I don’t know, how would you handle it?

The raw canvas sucks 

on the paint and 

shows the pigment 

suspended inside the threads 

it is like watching the canvas eat the paint

and then 

the paint will eat the canvas. 

Painting ate me. 

This is me trapped inside myself and trapped in limerence with painting.

I thought I had figured it out a couple of times, honestly. Every time I was like OH! THIS is what a Woman is, or this is how I can pretend to inhabit this social construct that fits like a prickly coat made for someone with narrower shoulders than me. And for a while I stood really firm in that, I rooted. I couldn’t buy anything pink, or use pretty colors in my painting yet, but still, I had found my musky femininity in the realm of the wild. There was a crack in the door where the light spilled through and in that space, I flexed my mannish nature into heels and hair.

Funny how that was an act of drag, but it fulfilled the fantasy? The woman I ended up with was sort of like a build-a -body, layers of transparencies overlaying and obliterating until the shape was me, there I was, but I was a Luwak, a shaper-shifter, a sprite fulfilling fantasy to take form. I couldn’t find myself. And then I got breast cancer. And everything changed.