Remembering you is a reconciliation with myself – pieces of me that I have lost and recollections of memories that come back through the voices & storytelling of others who have held my hand through this lifetime. It hasn’t been so long since I’ve been with you either. I was ‘little me’ for a long time and for countless good times and for so many bad, aching times. More than anything I remember the way you walked through the world. You were small but never oblivious to yourself or the world around you. You smiled & danced your way around every adversity even when it was hard as hell in your tiny little wheelchair. Your heart was in a perpetual state of open and you frequently felt things that you didn’t have the words for so you were the type of child to make a language through tears and what you already knew. You weren’t afraid of anyone. Well maybe you were actually – but it never ever translated. You were really graceful that way. You knew of things like anime and blogs and video games… Things that I sadly know barely anything of now. You were dead set on being a cartoonist but you transitioned to be an author. As an author you made a transition in regards to gender, somewhere right before that memoir of yours was released. You did so much as ‘little me’, it kind of blows my mind but I kind of remember it all too. I know you probably never saw a modelling career coming but we never really saw anything coming, did we, little me? It feels so good to remember you and to love you. I’m sorry that losing you was an incomprehensibly traumatic, painful, drugged out year in a hospital bed far upstate somewhere in New York. I remember you in that bed.
And I remember a single moment of peace.
A burning fire blazes behind my left eye as I lay on top of my bed in silence & stare at the fluorescent light hovering above me. The tension built up in both my lower & upper back slowly starts to dissipate over the course of a minute or two – I feel my left shoulder melt itself into a warm cloud of nothingness. Soon enough my whole body is a warm, fluffy cloud of nothingness. It’s bliss. It’s rare for me to even feel comfort in my body but I do, for 4 minutes of nothing more but just silently letting go of my new normal – the raw bloody tenderness deep in my hips, all throughout my nerves and screaming in every single one of my bones.
This is my love letter to you. I promised to never let you go, and I think I kept that promise after all.
