The Ghosts Will Try to Find You
Kesha, crying, and dissolving the barrier of natural vs. artificial
More than once, I’ve broken down crying as I listened to “Rainbow” by Kesha. The specifics of which lines have snagged my brain and caused it to unravel are mostly lost on me, but the most recent bout of weeping was brought on by Kesha singing that our scars make us who we are. Fresh from top surgery, I took scars more literally than I previously might have, stitches still short of dissolving into my skin. Fresh from top surgery, I was crying more easily than I had in a long time. Every bright burst of feeling went from heart-shaped helium balloon to just-pricked water balloon in a transformative, seconds-quick shift. Any gooey positive sentiment about the trans experience, in particular, cost me tears to read. After a decade of repressing the shape I needed my body to take, I was taking it. The surgeon had dismantled that dam. My powerful, my life-filled, my wet, flowed where it wanted to, where it had longed to for so long.
Three months later, the crying hasn’t ceased. Of course it hasn’t—there’s still no dam. I still flow where feels natural, and increasingly more each day. “Your boytitties are really coming in,” my boyfriend says to me as we sit on a mostly empty beach, as my flesh relaxes into its new shape instead of holding itself taut, flat and smooth as the water’s washed the sand where tide tongues high. My nipples, too, begin to unfurl from their compacted state—I think of those little sponge animals or superheroes you can buy at a dollar store or science museum gift shop, that inflate in the bath. I think of the sponge dinosaur Bart Simpson bought, that he dreamed would grow into a full-sized monstrous creature that could chew his sister up. His dream did not come to fruition. Mine has. Prickly white stitches dissolved, leaving smooth, ropey red skin that I have to say looks hot. I skimp on the scar-vanishing silicon products, hearing Kesha’s words, no desire to vanish who I am from my surface.
My first time shirtless in public was at a Pride Weekend rave, where I sweat freely, torso covered only by the slender black pleather strap of a cross-body bag, scars brightly on display. Through dancing and through having scars—flowing naturally. I didn’t quite cry, but I felt immense love, and immense love has been one of the things that makes me cry, in this re-shaped, un-dammed way of being.
In the couple months since then, my torso’s changed again. Less dramatically this time, but meaningfully, still. Taken from my boyfriend’s sketchbook and etched into my chest by his careful hands: a bouquet of hearts, red & pink, leaves/stems lavender & seafoam, rising from a plain black pot. I think of “Rainbow,” of emerging from the quiet dark into a riot of color. Perfect: to mark where my dam was dismantled with something that reminds me of the free-flow of tears. Now, I consider an even more overt move, adding in an arc (like a rainbow’s motion) above the hearts, black text excerpting lyrics. I listen, listen again, listen again, listing—
· hold tight, sweetheart
· playful eyes wide and wild
· still made of gold
· you gotta learn to let go
· our scars make us what we are
—but leaning toward the first with a magnetic pull. Hold tight, the perfect opposite of you gotta learn to let go, though not if you place them in a chronology. I held tight for a decade. White-knuckled, dammed up. Until it was time for the beavers to clear their work-stations, and in came the scalpel. Out came my flesh and blood. Unblocking, returning to a form that felt livable, breathable, weepable.
Immediately post-surgery, my blood pressure surged, and so they kept me for four hours, hanging out and talking with my roommate and a nurse. Hanging out beside us in the little surgery room was a massive clear container of my blood, taking a different shape than it used to, mirroring me but in reverse—contained so that I didn’t have to be. The nurse told us that when she moved into her new home, everything in one of the rooms was violently pink. Even the hardwood floors—stained pink. For her, this was a problem, undoing a necessary project. For me, this sounds dreamy. I imagine moving into that home and re-staining the floors pink. How it sounds so unnatural, not how things were meant to be, but in my eyes it would be reverting to the truest should be, a stripping back, stripping off. Reimagining the natural. Raving shirtless, crying to Kesha, as she invites us, come and paint the world with me tonight.