--- date: 2019-11-01 weight: 8 fit: true ---

    What can I say of healing? Of life after change?
    I got used to it, bit by bit. I slowly learned my range,
    the extent of my new body. Proprioception caught up immediately,
    and there were no phantom sensations, and the immediacy
    was startling at first, but I got used to it, to my new form.
    Over the next weeks and months, I slowly learned my new norm.
    I learned by regaining feeling. I learned with every muscular flex.
    I learned by dilating. I learned by masturbating. I learned by sex.
    While I refused to let my happiness hinge on such a thing,
    a part of me hoped it'd make me more comfortable get in the swing
    of sex, and while it helped, I still was still largely okay without.
    My body was still my own. Whole and entire. My life played out,
    and I became more myself.
    This isn't going how you pictured it, this bit of writing.
    You were going to talk more about healing, about fighting
    for permission to change, about your $76,000 bill.
    And here you talk of trees and growth. Did you not get your fill?
    Do you still need this outlet?
    Apparently.
          Apparently I still need to revel in the newness.
    Apparently, what I need out of this project isn't the trueness
    of the concrete. We should really have expected nothing less.
    This is a project to dig for truth, a project to confess.
    It is not a project for describing stitches stabbing me in the clit.
    It is not for telling about each successive dilator testing the fit
    of my new depths. Could I have gone into that? Yes. Perhaps.
    Perhaps I still will. Later. For now, I still need to run laps,
    to circle around some dark core and discern its edges.
    Perhaps if I know that shape, if I peek over enough hedges,
    I'll somehow know myself better. I don't know. It feels unlikely.
    Maybe there is no knowing the self. Still, I have to try, rightly
    or not.
    Fair enough. Still, at some point, discuss the concrete.
    So many have asked you to, and perhaps you'd feel complete.
    Perhaps that, too, would be of use to you. Not everything demands
    such thorough introspection. Not everything fits in the wetlands
    of your subconscious
    Of course not. I know this. You know I know this.
    I'm not deflecting, just focusing on this part of the abyss.
    The concrete aspects are for writing with clarity,
    not with verse. They're for writing with the sincerity
    borne of experience, so that perhaps others can benefit.
    Of this, only I need benefit. There is an etiquette
    to writing for others. Here, there is only an ally.
    This is for me and you. Your role is to hear my lie,
    to call it out, to force me to correct myself, my words.
    My role is to keep on writing, be it about surgery or birds,
    and to learn from our discussions. To learn? To suffer?
    Perhaps more the latter. To hurt, and grow tougher
    by hurting.
    You have been called on that, yes, writing to suffer.
    And it's not wrong. You sit at your laptop and fill the buffer
    with sentences and lines and paragraphs of memories and pain.
    Do you really grow tougher? Is it masochisim, or do you gain
    real insight from this?
    I think I do. It's therapeutic to try and understand myself better.
    is it not? With every paragraph and line and word and letter,
    I think I reduce the borders of that abyss. Or if not reduce,
    I spraypaint a red line five feet from them, so that I can deduce
    my roughest edges. I'm often say that it's easy to discern boundaries
    by crossing them. I've crossed them here, with you. Foundries
    of thought and emotion are within me, ceaselessly toiling.
    I want to tour them all. I want to see them boiling.
    I feel them. I house them. I smell them and taste them.
    I just also want to understand them. There's no chaste hem
    to the subconscious, so I have to map it, map these crude sources.
    Then I can experience thisness --- I hope --- when buffeted by forces
    internal.
    If you say so, I suppose. Do you think it'll work, though?
    Aren't such works unknowable by definition? They grow,
    they wane. You can sense them by their effects and emissions,
    but isn't seeing them, truly seeing, knowing their positions,
    reserved for dreams?