The story of identity, the story of coming to terms with existing in some particular way, is as a much an interpolation into the whole of us as anything. I am trans, yes, but that is not the story; that is the identity. I am who I am specifically because I did what I did, I learned what I learned, I changed how I changed. No amount of flowery language will change that, no overanalysis of this or that will make me be anything else.
That date, September 6th, had nothing in particular to do with gender. The answer was no, after all. Madison was born some two intercalary years later. Matthew's death had nothing to do with gender — he died when his friend died, when Margaras hit that barricade at fifty miles an hour.
In reply to asking myself that, I say, "If Matthew died on September of that year, then he was sick long before. This was part of his long, slow death rattle."
He'd been sick for months. He'd contracted something terminal, been infected with some terrible, memetic illness earlier that year.
Stories are as bound to time as we are, and all we can do is steal back a bit of that memory through however many words. All we can do with these memories pinned in place is regard them from a second level of distance and make guesses. All I can do now is make guesses as to the meaning of however many conversations — those very real words lost to the whims of technology — that lead to the slow and not always but often painful death of who I was.
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The framing device for my own choice of Job is as follows.
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 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 attempt to describe their inverse. Their response: "Not your enemy, but your adversary." \parencite[25]{ally-making-of}
