Reflections on one year of HRT and making a homeplace of my body.

Injury is an invitation to intimacy. I think that’s why there’s always an injury episode in the dramas. While there’s obvious vulnerability on the part of the person who’s hurting, there’s also vulnerability in expressing care.

Though I'm skilled at recognizing where my reality sometimes departs from the shared perception, experiencing an unshared reality is lonely. Sometimes I wrote it off as sleep deprivation. Sometimes I thought I was going crazy,—the insidious, unhinged-student, Bell Jar crazy. And sometimes I considered the possibility that there are multiple realities, and I am caught on the cusp: living in one, sensing another.

but such signs are difficult to read when you’re driving so fast down a country road that you catch air going over hills while hay-heat smoke surges through your open windows & lifts you up to the ceiling & swallows the space between you & the seat, & you can feel spaces—every gap has a pull to it, pulls you toward all things—& you are like the smoke between them all, & you can feel far-off wildfires spiraling up cedars, licking dry bark, & you can feel the urgency of the hay balers, feel the car pulled back down to sweat-beaded pavement, & it’s only been a second, but when each second sings with the whole of the universe, how the hell are you supposed to read signs?

“Maybe my body hates me because I never wanted it.” Ibrahim stops examining our finger ratios. “Now that’s pseudoscience,” they say.

My bones are not softer than average, and their pain when broken is sharp, hard. But years of injuries have taught me that bodies are soft—softer when wounded—all the way down to the bone.