Moving my body through time

This book makes me feel less alone whenever I read it. The first time I read it I was on a plane back home, rapidly realising how alone I felt in the relationship I was in at the time. The book, a gift from one of my closest friends I had just seen for the first time in years, was a significant comfort.

Whenever I open it, i want to start highlighting portions of it, quoting them, but quickly come to realise that I would simply end up writing most of the book down, word for word. Its warm, reading it feels like a slow summer afternoon on a day that is hot but not too hot.

Hey, I live in a house with a door!

I am reminded of my urge to share my small experiences of the world, like the child, so excited to share theirs. To write, to photograph, to share the intimacy of these things with the people around me, almost desperately. Time is a Thing feels like it encapsulates so many possible forms of intimacy in a way that is almost aspirational.

Bodies like mine

The first time I read this book was possibly one of the first times I felt truly seen. At the time I didn’t know many people like myself, “people with complicated genders”. Not only do I feel some sense of kinship with the narrator in the way they describe themselves, but also in the way that complicates the relationship they have with queerness and they way they move their body through time and space.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about this is that I’m not supposed to be next to anyone, in the sense that I never knew people like me existed, so I never imagined myself next to someone or not.

I’ve read quite a bit of literature from queer and trans authors, but very little of it has felt like the experiences portrayed within have mirrored my own. So much of my life - especially post transition - has come with this sense of ‘other’. The way people treat me, at least before they get to know me, is often informed by my transness more than anything else.

The way people react, I know that they are thinking about what they would call my gender and, in the way most people find gender and bodies to be irreducibly the same, that they are thinking also of my body, … I know that when I am talking to a large group of people, in their heads are odd confusions about me, and that when I am talking on-on-one, a slight nervousness sometimes - the fear that they will say the wrong thing, and their language will reveal how they see me.

The quick glances at my chest while saying ‘he, sorry, she, sorry, they’. Referring to me only by name to avoid using pronouns and opening themselves up to mistake and possible critique (im so tired and rarely bother to correct people these days). Hookups questioning their own sexualities and genders after fucking. “Why do you get to look like that when you don’t even want to be a woman” one asks, I quickly cover my body in an attempt to alleviate the dysphoria she experiences looking at it. “I’ve never been with a trans before” another states proudly; months later she messages me, desperate for reassurance from me that something she said to another person wasn’t transphobic. It was.

“I can see we are all scared by what we aren’t saying”.

Its a strange thing, to feel so powerless in these situations and yet see people are scared of how they interact with you. Time manages to encapsulate this feeling through such beautiful prose that its hard not to feel deeply emotional each time I read it. And yet it expresses the experience of becoming with such unrelenting joy that it aches.

If I am adding myself to the crowd of people who write, I would like it sometimes to be me when I am warm. I would like people to know that I am happy, sometimes.

I am happy, sometimes.