## The Fundamental Unhappiness of Identity

How do we remember the past? How do we remember all of those countless conversations that make up our friendships, our relationships, our enmities? How do we remember the past?

The Book of Job remembers it through just the discourses. It remembers entire conversations, entire histories of friendship, through the lens of those two weeks Job spent in the cold fire pit, covered with ashes and sores. It remembers them all through discourses and speeches and prayers. Perhaps strangest of all, though, it remembers them disjoint and out of order.

Edward L. Greenstein discusses the transpositions, interpositions, and interpolations that go into the book of Job. Take, for instance, Job's first speech. "For many reasons," he writes, "the passage 4:12-21 should be read here, right after chapter 3, as the conclusion of Job's first speech." \parencite[16]{greenstein} In that speech, Job bemoans the horrors that have befallen him and his family, spelling out in poetic detail all of the ways he wishes he'd never been born.Where, in the traditional ordering, this would lead to Eliphaz's first speech, Greenstein instead places a description of a vision that had, in those orderings, been given to Eliphaz. He provides three reasons: in similar tales, it is the complainant who receives a vision; Job, rather than his friends, receives the theophany in this story; and both Job and Eliphaz himself refer to Job's vision in later chapters.

I can't speak to the details beyond this and a few mentions in the Apocrypals episode on the Book of Job. Both describe the ways in which the original story would have been kept on leaves of papyrus, how easy it would have been for such leaves to be shuffled --- accidentally or intentionally --- by some time-forgotten redacter.

The Book of Job remembers its events out of order, and attempts to fix it, whether its addressed explicitly in the text as Greenstein does or through footnotes as Alter and the NOAB editors do, cannot be done so without addressing this fact.

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I met her through a friend, Andrew. My boyfriend at the time, actually. I'd flown down to Florida some time in 2009, I think, to visit him. A quick jaunt down to Clearwater where his ex-Scientologist mom and step-dad had set up their own business, bought some ridiculous house on the beach, and raised their only child.

So much of that trip was so fun, too, even if it was the last. We drove out to some car meet-up at a strip mall. Fast car after fast car lined up in a parking lot. Men in sunglasses. Someone, years younger than I, crouching down to try and stick his cell phone, held up on its edge, under his car and showing that it had been lowered that much. "Fucking idiot," Andrew whispered. "Speed bumps would rip the shit out of that."

He was the car nerd, not me. He was the one who had a black Dodge Dynasty with a red velour interior --- his "mob car" --- and then that terrible minivan he tried to strip and paint black by himself, and then the...was it a Passat?

That last one we drove out to Orlando where one of his friends, Jill, her family the holders of a Disney pass, had procured a hotel room somewhere on the outskirts of Walt Disney World where we could have a small party --- Andrew and I, her and her...was it her boyfriend? And Floe and Necco. A mostly quiet night of drinking and talking and more drinking. Andrew and I got drunk. Floe and Necco got drunk. Jill got drunk, and her boyfriend got truly wasted. He ran a bath, climbed in fully-clothed, and cried about how much he loved his friends. We sat on the rim of the tub, dangled our feet in the warm water, agreed earnestly.

And I did too! I loved Andrew, of course. I still do, from however far away. We haven't talked in years, but I would not be who I am without him. I love Floe --- I've worked with him on dozens of illustrations over the years. I loved Necco, even if he also fills me with loathing now. I suppose I must have loved Jill and her boyfriend, too. That sort of sticky-sweet love is infectious in a vodka-tinged haze.

After that, we went to some event. Another alcohol-fueled party. Another awkward night. Another drive back home and then the rest of our stay. It went less than stellar, and we broke up the day I returned home. It had been a long time coming, not least of which because, without telling me, he'd been dating Jill for months beforehand.

Shortly after I started to realize just how ill-suited I was to music education, I went through a change of identity online. While before I had gone by the name 'Ranna', cribbed from Garth Nix's excellent Old Kingdom series, I now began to go by the name Makyo, from a Zen Buddhist term which bears a similar meaning. Something about just how focused many of the general teacher education classes were on things other than education filled me with a sense that I might not actually be in any way helping students, but simply standing in their way. I was makyō. I was satan.
    
I, at one point, was overtaken by the need to tell my story through the frame of a conversation with an ally. I described them --- or perhaps they described themselves; the boundary between framing device and reality blurs --- as "an ally, not a friend." Towards the end of the project, we had a 'conversation' wherein I attempted to describe their inverse. Their response: "Not your enemy, but your adversary." \parencite[25]{ally-making-of}

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I know, for instance, that my conversations with my husband around transition were many and scattered. We would chat over dinner, or we would talk on that horrifyingly yellow couch that he'd inherited about the fact that I was feeling strange about all these different aspects of identity. But you know what I remember? I remember sitting on that couch and talking in well-formed sentences, in paragraphs and essays, about why it was that I felt like the body I had and the body I \emph{had} overlapped incompletely, or I remember sitting on one of the dining table chairs turned to face the living room in a skirt I had made for myself, explaining to him that I felt like a part of me died when Margaras did.

These were almost certainly conversations. They were full of filled pauses and the backtracking failures of speech that come with just plain chatting, but that's not what I remember. I remember discourses and speeches and prayers. I remember the way we constructed well-reasoned dialogues back and forth, with none of the doublings back or filler words, none of those pregnant silences that come with his speech impediment or my preemptive justifications that leave me gasping for air --- the need to be understood far outweighs the need for oxygen. 

When I was 17, I got in my first car accident. The roads in Boulder are beholden to its landscape, the shape of the hills upon which they were built defining the curves. The entirety of the town huddles up against the feet of the Rockies, crowding against the Flatirons. Broadway, the main drag through town, carves a gentle curve steadily closer to heading truly north from its initial gentle westward bent. At one point, a sort of surface-level slip road ducks off to merge with 28th, the street on which my friend lived.

Driving him home after a February rehearsal, icy and disgusting, that gentle curve of slip road relinquished its grip on the truck and we seemed to float a few inches above the pavement. It was an almost gentle sensation as we bumped against the truck beside us.

Beyond that, it was all boring. Get out, exchange information, go our separate ways. I don't remember much more than that, only that I had to call my dad once I got home and tell him what happened. I don't even remember what I said to him, only that he stopped me, laughing, and told me to stop talking like a lawyer, that he wasn't suing me. My justifications for every second of that accident had to be airtight. My need for air came second.

I don't imagine the same was actually true of my conversations with JD about gender. We probably just slouched on that horrifyingly yellow couch and talked about how I was feeling, how every time he got close, it felt like he was getting close to the wrong me.

But that's not how I remember it. I remember it as a story. There is a linear progression from 2010 to 2015, complete with an arc, with a beginning, middle, and end, with a supporting characters and with an antagonist.

Similarly, the story I remember of Jill comes with a beginning, middle, and end. I met her through Andrew, we grew close, there was that snippy message, a sudden silence, and then that final exchange, and we haven't spoken sense. Acts one through five, all told in order: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, catastrophe.

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Andrew and I met all the way back in 2000.

He went by Miro, then, a name cribbed from the surrealist painter Juan Miró. I later learned, though far before that 2009 visit, that his parents actually owned an original Miró, and that's where he'd thought of the name. This was before I was going by Makyo, too. Before I was Makyo, I was Ranna, a name stolen from Garth Nix's *Sabriel*. "Ranna the sleepbringer, the sweet, low sound that brought silence in its wake." \parencite[80]{sabriel}

We bonded over being young --- we were both young, once, and dumb --- and the fact that we'd both stolen our names from elsewhere. We bonded over being gay. We bonded over being furry. It was a perfect match for early romance, for the first time we dated.

I say "first time", as we eventually drifted apart in the young-love fashion: we got frustrated with the fact that we were growing into different people than then ones we'd fallen in love with.

We fell into love, fell out, and then, years later, as he moved to Colorado, some strange triangle --- or perhaps quadrilateral --- formed between us.

He moved to Denver while I was up in Fort Collins, working on my bachelor's at CSU, and I spent the occasional weekend with him, whether that was him driving up to our place or me heading down to visit him and Kinematics. I thought he was dating Kine, he thought I was dating my now husband, JD, and JD thought I was dating him.

It wasn't until he moved out of state --- this time off to Carlsbad, CA to get a degree in gemology --- that we actually sat down to have that conversation. I hadn't started dating JD yet. He and Kine had never dated. The us who we had become fell back into love, found some new way to exist together without driving each other nuts. Not yet, at least.

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"Memory is playing tricks on me" is a phrase I'm never sure how to parse.

Tricks? Is it tricking me? Is it fooling me? Is it hiding a smirk as I dig and dig to try and remember dates?

I don't quite remember when this all went down. I think we had a lot of these conversations back when I was in the house on Maple Street, the one that caught fire in my housemate's room, which means that must have happened before moving out in 2006. I remember living in the apartment on Remington Street and flying out to Carlsbad to visit Andrew, to meet his friends Toni and Wish, which means that must have happened sometime before 2009, back before we moved to the house on Andrea Street.

Memory plays tricks on me, and perhaps that's just in us remembering through transpositions, interpositions, interpolations. That's me remembering those times with Kine and then those times we were dating in Colorado before remembering that, between those, he'd gone to school out in California.

And perhaps it's just the ways in which *this* is pushed out to make way for *that*. What year did I visit Carlsbad? I don't remember. I do, however, remember --- vividly --- Toni and Wish sleeping on the floor. I remember talking about all those people we knew together in #sanefurs and #nonfurs, IRC channels of snarky assholes two steps away from the Burned Furs movement. I don't remember when we had those conversations about relationship quadrilaterals, but I do remember sitting on the floor with JD, there with the gray, plush carpet, which must mean that it was in the Maple street house, given the Berber carpet in the Remington apartment. I don't remember what house it was that I lived in when Andrew and I broke up, though I suppose it must have been before JD and I moved in together.

There is an order to the events that happen in our lives, but that does not mean that we remember them that way. Perhaps it is that we remember things in the order in which they are most important to us. I remember that break-up conversation in one very clear way: I was on AIM and in the Denver airport. I had not yet gotten home. I remember that being such a low point in life, and yet it neared the top of the list in terms of importance --- at least when it comes to this particular story. I remember visiting Andrew and Kinematics in Denver, but all I remember out of that was Kine doing a burnout in his car, laughing about how "the tires have a flat spot on them, better smooth that out. Smoke blossomed behind the car, then, and I clutched at my seat, pretending to laugh, pretending to care.

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Above all, I remember the past in fragments of identity. I remember my various selves. I remember the me who was gung-ho about music composition, just as I remember the ways in which I fell out of love with writing music. I remember the Matthew who dove into working in tech, just as I remember the Matthew who, so burnt by work, tried to kill himself. I remember the me who loved Andrew and yet I also remember the me couldn't figure out how to actually mesh with him.

I remember, of course, the me who struggled with being me, the Matthew who did not want to be Matthew. The Matthew who did not want to exist.






