JAMIE
We are what we are.
Waiting for Triple A.
Out on the East Bend of Nowhere. Emanon.
To change a flat tire.
I’m talking to you … me actually, for posterity.
For the book I’m going to write someday.
Maybe I should have learned to change a tire myself,
but Dad always told me that lug nuts are impossible.
Too tight for any mortal without a cheater wrench.
Which I don’t happen to have with me.
Sorry, Dad.
So, here I am, waiting for a tow truck, talking to the birds of my next chapter.
Look at me.
I never realized it, when I was a kid, how surreal it all can be,
when you’re trans, like me, even out here.
I’m a mess.
My hips and shoulders hardly mesh with these tits.
My neck’s too muscular.
Face it.
I’m a woman who can’t match my sex.
I’m a woman with maleness lingering from before I had a thing to do about it.
I’m a woman continually told if I am, I’m wrong.
Continually told my identity’s wrong.
I’m a woman continually told my sex is on pathologically backwards.
What’s wrong with this world?
Some people claim I need to be cured.
Or put away somewhere.
A weird breed of sexual predator.
Me!
Who am I, really, when my love and soul are boiled down to the whispering?
Are genitals all that love is about?
Is that all a soul is?
Genitals?
The genitals we’re born with?
Who am I, really, when they want me to be a man?
And I won’t.
Because I’m lovesick, longing to be the woman I am.