Ian,
Today, my struggle is with caring. If I had a cross born to me every day, it would be today the cross on which I have hung all my care. I wonder if my care would look like a dying and beaten 26-year-old boy. I wonder if he would look like you. I wonder when 26 became a boy to me, and not a man.
When I was 26, I was a boy. When I was 17, I was a boy. When I am 41, I'll be a boy. You're days away from 32. You're a boy. Last night, I saw you become a man for a brief interval when I watched you express violence over a woman and not another boy. No matter what I do, I wonder if in the future no matter how angry I might make you, if you will always be rushing at me to shove me away in our boyhood rage, kicking hard with your shoe the heads off of daisies.
The violence among boys is always done in a sly grin. You and Brad fight, fight to find what between you there is to prove, and proving it exists, set out to prove that still again; the age old and self-evident question of, "What's it to you?"
Adam, Bonnie, sometimes Brad or Grady can make me feel like a girl. But there is some often sought idea of womanhood I've watched other people grope toward that I have either not cared enough to try for or thought I had been all along, to end up holding this cigarette and this note to you, folded neatly into a box and sealed with the print of my lipstick.
I watched Jack do it sometimes, reach for this...matron, I guess. Maybe people thought I did that with Red, but really I thought it was understood it was kind of a joke. I guess I never thought she was regal. I guess I thought she was...goth.
How she wanted men to treat her, was strange to me. Maybe all our absent fathers instilled in us a need to be worshipped in some way. The truth is, I think about women like Circe and Calypso and Helen of Troy, and I think they were probably all pretty scared. Do I know any women, or just girls playing pretend?
Jack felt like a girl yesterday, and it was hard for me to watch because I felt like I could make her feel better. That's how I knew she was a girl. Because this part of me felt like I could make her feel better. That's what this boy in me feels. I'm better at the dance she wanted to do. I think to myself, I know where she wanted to go and I could have taken her there. Told her what was real, led her by the hand all the way to the bus stop, told her goodbye. I believe I can do that.
I believe that about myself, that that's what I do, is validate the fears of girls in such a way as to ensure their terror is real. She is growing up now, but I'll be this boy forever and it matters to me, I think, how I'll echo inside someone. It matters that they can find their way back, because I can't end anything on my own.
But I think I could tell, she wanted to be a woman, in the end. When a girl lowers her voice and smooths it out like she's run an iron over it, so it softens to something velvet, that's when it happens. I think it sounds nice, but I've come to associate it with disingenuous message it tends to be used for, and when it's cued in my life, from anyone I know, I scoff it off. Usually to her utter. Fucking. Horror. I mean, how would you feel if you were trying to femme fatale me and my reaction was to put your toy gun down and laugh?
I wonder about men. I'll never be a man. I'll only swing in this place, back and forth between the gendered options of teenagers. Are boys ever men?
I think they must be, when they're so full of the rage of a girl they enact something violent with their hands. Yesterday, it seemed like you might as well have been wrapped in a gown of your mother's design, up on a stage, singing wavering You Made Me Love You, so broken was your heart.
Now, I swing back and forth, on the rope swing of my identity. What do I do now? Do we talk like I'm your brother? Do I hold you because you've become a girl? Do I crawl in the lap of the man of you?
I think you're beautiful, is my point.
Love,
Annik
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