Roots don’t ask for permission.
They arrive like a whisper in the bloodstream,
then bloom into a command.

I used to live like a loose thread—
unraveling on purpose.
Years slipped past me like open windows,
and I slipped right through them—
unheld,
unpromised,
a suitcase always half-packed in my chest.

I called it freedom.
Called it oxygen.
Called it the art of leaving before the leaving could touch me.

I loved like weather—
passing through,
touching down,
never staying long enough to learn the language of permanence.

One foot in the door,
one already ghosting the hallway.

Then something ancient
rose up in my body
and said:
No.

Not loudly—
not cruelly—
just with the gravity of tides
that do not care what the moon thinks of them.

Stay.

Grow.

Become a place something can belong.

I laughed at first—
like you do when the truth sounds too much like a trap.
But you can’t outwit your own blood.
You can’t outrun the drum that built your bones.

Something deeper than thought
began planting itself in me—
threading roots through marrow,
through breath,
through the quiet spaces I used to keep empty on purpose.

And then—
I was no longer just a body moving through the world.
I was a world.

A whole universe forming
in the dark cathedral of my belly.

Month by month,
I grew heavy with it—
not just weight,
but meaning.

Roots curling through every organ,
every rib,
down my legs,
into the soft surrender of my feet,
like the earth itself had chosen me
as its temporary sky.

Until the day came—
because it always comes—

when something larger than fear
wrapped its hands around the life inside me,
the life that had rooted me
as much as I had rooted it,

and pulled.

And pulled.

And pulled.

Until I broke open—
not into pieces,
but into truth—

everything I had been
spilling forward
into everything I was becoming.

Drawing from the themes of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, we consider the ways language can both harm and liberate, asking how it constructs, distorts, and reimagines queer realities. Our discussion traces poetry not only as a form of documentation, but as a space for transformation and possibility — where new ways of being can emerge.

We also turn to the question of what it means to queer language itself, and how reworking religious imagery can become an act of resistance, survival, and re-enchantment. At its heart, this episode asks: if queerness is a way of seeing differently, how can poetry help us remake reality in its image?

This desire to transmit not just meaning but sensation has always felt in tension with the inherited architectures of story. Or perhaps not in tension, but in refusal. When I first encountered Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality by Sarah Barmak, what held me was not the subtitle, though it promised inquiry I craved, but the image of a crocheted vulva on the cover. Soft, handmade, unapologetically literal. It felt like a thesis before I even opened the book: that we have been given the wrong textures for talking about the body, especially the erotic body, especially the female one.

Inside, Barmak writes that language itself has failed to capture women’s erotic interiority, that it requires new structures, new vocabularies. I felt a recognition that was almost grief. Not only because I believed her, but because I had already been circling this absence without naming it.

Years earlier, in my MFA program, I had been tasked with teaching a craft seminar. I chose the Hero’s Journey, that enduring map of narrative made famous by Joseph Campbell: the departure, the initiation, the return. A young man leaves home, encounters trials, achieves a singular climax, and returns transformed, bearing a prize. It is elegant, persuasive, and everywhere.

I remember standing before a room of writers, arguing both for and against it. Yes, story is in our DNA, I said. Yes, we are pattern-seeking creatures, hungry for arcs that resolve. But must the arc always crest once? Must the transformation hinge on a single, decisive victory? Must the protagonist always leave, conquer, and come back?

What if a story swells instead of peaks? What if it moves like a body rather than a blade — circling, returning, building, dissolving, building again? What if it is not about conquest but about contact? Not a climax but many, not an ending but a continuation that alters the terms of beginning?

Even then, I sensed I was not just talking about narrative, but about desire. About the ways we have been taught to move through experience: linearly, efficiently, toward a goal that can be named and displayed. And the ways that other modes — slower, recursive, diffuse — are dismissed as indulgent or incoherent, when in fact they might be truer to certain kinds of lives.

What I did not say, because I did not yet know how, was that my own life was already resisting the single-arc story. It was, in fact, becoming something messier, more plural, more alive.

There was a woman in that seminar. Beautiful is too simple a word, though it was the first that came to mind. She disrupted the air around her. When she spoke — an Australian accent that seemed to carry both distance and intimacy — I felt myself lean in, not just intellectually but physically. Desire, I was learning, begins in attention.

She wore a necklace with a small vial. Later, she told me it held the ashes of her childhood best friend, a boy she had loved, a boy the world knew as Heath Ledger. The intimacy of that object — the way she carried death so close to her throat — felt like a kind of permission. To love, to lose, to refuse to tidy either.

She moved through the world with a kind of narrative excess: stories of New York and Los Angeles, of lovers and collaborators, of proximity to fame. She spoke of sleeping with Lenny Kravitz, with Lady Gaga, as if these were both ordinary and mythic encounters. I found myself amused by the absurd calculus of proximity. That through her, I was one degree removed from icons I had never expected to touch. It felt like a joke I was in on, and also not.

But what drew me was not the names she carried, but the language she used for me. Not beautiful, but radiant. Luminous. Words that suggested not surface but emission, a kind of internal light. I had been seen, before, but not like that. Or perhaps I had not allowed myself to register it.

We came together first in the compressed, heightened space of the residency, where time folds and intensifies. And then again, later, in New York, for a weekend that felt both curated and unruly. I met her friends: actors, artists, people orbiting the same glittering, unstable world. There was a looseness to the boundaries, an assumption that everything might be shared, seen, transformed.

One woman, upon meeting me, asked if she could see my vagina. The question landed somewhere between absurdity and sincerity. I laughed, instinctively deflecting, scanning the room for cues. The others did not flinch. They smiled, as if this were a known script, one I had yet to learn.

“No,” I said finally, attempting humor, “but you can ask her what it looks like,” gesturing toward my lover. It was a small act of refusal, but also of displacement — handing the question back into the network of intimacy that had already formed around me.

Later, I learned that this woman was a painter, that she spent her time looking at, photographing, rendering women’s genitals. That she identified as straight, that she was married to a man. I found myself trying to place her within a framework that would make sense of her desire, or her curiosity, or whatever lived at the intersection of the two.

But the more I sat with it, the more that framework felt insufficient. Why did I need her to declare herself to understand her interest? Why did I assume that looking must correspond to a latent identity, rather than an active, shifting engagement with the erotic?

This is where Barmak’s assertion returns to me: that our language fails us, not only in describing what we feel, but in allowing for what we might feel. If the available narratives of sexuality are narrow, then any deviation appears as confusion, repression, or transgression, rather than as possibility.

In that New York weekend, I began to sense how much of my own desire had been shaped by stories that did not belong to me. The linearity of the Hero’s Journey had taught me to look for a singular turning point, a decisive declaration. But what I was experiencing was not a turn so much as an expansion. Not a revelation that replaced what came before, but an accumulation that made previous understandings feel partial.

Desire, I was discovering, could be iterative. It could return to the same body, the same question, and find something new each time. It could hold contradiction without resolving it. It could be both specific and diffuse, directed and ambient.

And writing, if it were to be honest, would have to learn from this. It would have to abandon the demand for a single climax, a clean arc, a final meaning. It would have to risk incoherence to approach truth.

When I think now about that crocheted vulva on the cover of Closer, I see it not just as an image but as a method. Handmade, textured, slightly irregular. A refusal of sleekness in favor of something you can feel with your hands. A reminder that the body is not an abstraction, and neither is the language we use to approach it.

The essay I am always trying to write — the book, the life — is one that can hold this texture. That can move between research and experience without hierarchy. That can admit the absurdity of proximity to fame alongside the intimacy of carrying someone’s ashes. That can hold a question like “Can I see your vagina?” not as a punchline or a threat, but as an opening into the complexities of looking, wanting, making art of the body.

I want a language that can do all of this without flattening it. A structure that can accommodate multiple climaxes, or none at all. A narrative that does not resolve desire but sustains it, lets it proliferate.

Because the truth is, the most compelling stories I have lived, and the ones I most want to tell, do not end with a return home bearing a prize. They end, if they end at all, in a deepening. In a widening of what can be felt, what can be known, what can be said.

And perhaps that is the real frontier: not orgasm as an endpoint, but as a mode of attention. A way of being inside experience that is attuned to sensation, to rhythm, to the possibility that meaning is not delivered in a single, triumphant moment, but built, again and again, in the body’s ongoing conversation with the world.

Because for so many women and queer people, desire isn’t just about attraction. It’s shaped by power, by culture, by trauma, by the quiet and loud ways we’ve been taught to disconnect from our bodies or perform them for someone else. So what does it mean to come back to ourselves? To reclaim desire not as something we owe, but something we author?

I’m joined today by Sarah Barmak, a journalist and author who has spent years exploring the science, psychology, and lived experience of female sexuality. Together, we’re queering the idea that desire is fixed, linear, or even fully knowable. We talk about the myths we’ve internalized, the realities we rarely name, and the radical potential of redefining pleasure on our own terms.

This conversation is about curiosity over certainty, embodiment over performance, and the courage it takes to ask: what do I actually want when no one else is watching?

Resisting certainty is a feminist act.

Certainty is so often the costume power wears. It buttons itself into a lab coat, a clerical collar, a judicial robe. It speaks in footnotes and diagnostic codes. It drafts legislation. It publishes op-eds. It builds categories and calls them natural. It names something normal and, with a sleight of hand, calls everything else deviant.

Certainty does not announce itself as violence. It calls itself order.

But true, flesh-and-warm-blooded people resist neat categories. When known fully — when listened to past the first sentence and the first impression — they defy containment. They contradict themselves. They grow. They betray the boxes built to hold them.

In First Love, Lilly Dancyger refuses not only certainty but genre itself. The book slips between criticism and memoir, between cultural analysis and confession. It writes about first love as romance, yes — but also as addiction, ambition, art, self-destruction. It refuses to stabilize the term. The essays circle rather than march. They contradict. They implicate the narrator even as they critique the culture. In doing so, they enact a radical claim: lived experience is not ancillary to knowledge. It is knowledge.

Genre, like gender, is an authority structure. It tells us what belongs where. Memoir here. Criticism there. Objectivity above. Subjectivity below. Dancyger collapses those hierarchies. She writes criticism as someone with complicity. She writes memoir with the rigor of inquiry. Proximity does not invalidate perception — it sharpens it.

What if we understood queerness the same way? Not as deviation from the norm but as refusal of false binaries. Not as confusion but as complexity.

My oldest and dearest friend — the woman I credit with saving my life twenty-five years ago — is the child of two Holocaust survivors. Both of her parents are gone now, but I had the privilege of knowing them while they were alive.

Her father, Lesley, had the numbers tattooed on his forearm. The identity they gave him. Stripped of his name, his glasses, his clothes, even most of his bodily tissue so that all that remained were haunted eyes in hollowed sockets and skin wrapped tight around bone, the numbers were once the only proof he existed.

When I met him, he was strong again. Older. Filled back in with muscle and fat and fluid — everything organs need to stay vital. He wore button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up. The numbers visible. He touched them often. Gently. Thoughtfully. Almost reverently.

At twenty-three, I never understood that gesture. I thought survival meant leaving horror behind. I thought healing meant erasure.

Now, with a deep diagonal scar slashing across my own forearm, where my hand was torn off and later reattached, I understand.

My body is haunted by the trauma visited upon it in a near-fatal motorcycle accident 8 years ago. I still wince at the memory of the sight of my hand hanging off by skin and veins. The splintered bone jutting up in its place. I can never unsee that. My pelvis, too, the strong bowl of bones protecting the tender and miracle making organs within, the erotic organs, the orgasm-giving organs — it was crushed. My femoral nerve and artery, one giving vital feeling to my genitals and the other giving life to my whole organism — they were severed. Severed by a sharp fragment of my crushed pubic bone. And perhaps because these are miracle making organs, what followed was nothing shy of a series of miracles that repaired both vital lines named femoral, repaired my sacred bowl of bones, repaired all my injuries, including those not mentioned in this writing.

I was so repaired and so healed, in fact, that most people would never notice, by looking at me, that anything so horrific ever happened to me. And yet. These unseeable things I saw, I can never unsee them. These unspeakable levels of pain I experienced, I will always remember them. They haunt me like demons. Because of them, I fear even the smallest of physical pains. You would think my tolerance for pain would be made greater by such a torment. Not so. The opposite, in fact. This side of surviving that ordeal, I am the biggest baby about pain. And I believe it’s because of the haunting. It’s because I walk around with the ghost severed limb and the ghost dead vagina and the ghost crushed miracle-making organs and the ghost broken bowl tethered to my body. While simultaneously having a healed and stronger-than-before body that I can no more take for granted than make sprout wings and fly. Inside this paradox lies another profoundly uncomfortable and deeply feminist reality. A queer reality.

I am both broken and restored. Terrified and grateful. Haunted and healed.

I reveal my scar often. I touch it often. It stands in bold testimony: I survived something unspeakable.

One Thanksgiving half a lifetime ago with Lesley present, seated around a long table heavy with food and ritual, I made the earnest declaration of someone who still believed in singular truths.

“Love is the most powerful force in the world,” I said.

Lesley looked at me with a mix of shock and indignation.

“That’s not true,” he said evenly. “Hate is by far the most powerful force in the world.”

He punctuated the claim by touching the numbers.

Silence fell like ash. No one reached for their fork.

Chilled, I worried he was right.

Here were two realities colliding at a dinner table: mine, shaped by longing and recovery; his, shaped by genocide. Both of us were speaking from lived experience. Both of us had scars. But the worst of mine were yet to come.

Lesley’s claim about hate was not philosophical. It was empirical. He had seen the machinery of hate industrialized. He had watched institutions decide which lives counted and which did not. He had seen expertise mobilized toward extermination — doctors measuring skulls, lawyers drafting racial codes, theologians blessing the state.

Institutional knowledge has never been neutral.

The Holocaust was not an eruption of chaos; it was an organized project executed by educated men. Authority can be lethal.

And yet. I still believe in love.

Not as a sentimental force, but as a resistant and feminist one. Love is not naïve; it is insurgent. It refuses the categories that hate requires. It sees the person where the system sees a number.

But here is where paradox insists on its place at the table: hate may indeed be more efficient. More scalable. More easily weaponized. Love requires proximity, vulnerability, slowness. Hate can be standardized.

Both truths can coexist.

Queering authority means we do not rush to resolve that tension.

I am both broken and restored. Terrified and grateful. Haunted and healed.

Certainty would demand I choose one narrative. Survivor or victim. Miracle or tragedy. Strong or fragile.

But the truth is both. And neither. And shifting.

If hate is the most powerful force in the world, as Lesley claimed, then what is the role of love? If love is the most powerful force, as I once insisted, how do we account for history’s horrors? And currently unfolding ones?

Maybe the more radical move is not to choose.

Paradox is not a problem to be solved but a state of being to be inhabited.

To queer reality is to widen the circle of who gets to speak it into existence. It asks institutions to loosen their grip on certainty. It asks expertise to bow to embodiment. It asks each of us (especially those closest to power) to interrogate the pleasure we derive from being right.

Because certainty feels good. It feels stabilizing. It feels like safety. But safety built on exclusion is not safety at all.

At that Thanksgiving table, suspended between love and hate, I learned something no classroom had taught me: reality is contested terrain. It is shaped by trauma and by hope. It is inscribed on bodies. It is argued over mashed potatoes. It is revised across generations.

Who gets to know?

The one with the degree.
The one with the pulpit.
The one with the platform.

Yes.

But also the one with the scar.
The one with the tattoo.
The one whose body has been named impossible and who lives anyway.

To resist certainty is not to abandon truth. It is to refuse its monopolization.

It is to say that knowledge does not live only in journals or courtrooms or sanctuaries. It lives in forearms marked by history. In pelvises rebuilt by miracle. In queer desire that refuses correction. In scars.

People, when known fully, will always exceed the categories built to contain them.

And that excess — that unruly, embodied, contradictory excess — is not a threat to reality.

It is reality.

To queer it is simply to tell the truth about how vast it has always been.

This is a painting of Lesley. The title of the painting is “Survivors Remember” and it was painted by his daughter, Iudita Harlan. It’s part of her collection, Tracing Home.

We explore how queering reality means resisting the cultural pressure to simplify our stories, how embracing ambiguity disrupts patriarchal certainty, and why paradox might be the most honest place to begin.

Only much later — only in retrospect — could I recognize what the practice had quietly given me back then. Subtler things. A different orientation to discomfort. A way of listening. That recognition was enough to draw me back. Returning to meditation felt like returning home, though to a home I no longer moved through in the same way. I’ve never been able to sit as long as I did in my twenties — twenty minutes is usually my ceiling, if that — and silence is no longer an easy refuge. Sometimes there is rest, especially when I’ve been consistent for a while. But if I miss a few days, or sometimes even one, what greets me when I sit still and face myself is not peace but discomfort.

A few years ago, I attended a writing retreat with Corporeal Writing, where Janice Lee led a guided meditation. I don’t remember the specifics of her language or structure, but I remember going deep — dropping below thought and into something older — and coming up against uncomfortable truths embedded in my ancestral history.

In a previous essay, I wrote about my maternal grandparents, including the fact that my grandfather, Charles, who was profoundly deaf from birth, died by suicide while my mother was pregnant with me. During that meditation with Janice, I returned to that moment. Or perhaps it returned to me. I imagined it with an intimacy that startled me. It was as though I were in his body, but with a perspective only possible beyond death — like he was saying, This is what it was like, held inside a wider understanding he couldn’t access while alive. The experience was disturbing. Part of me wanted to reject it outright, to dismiss it as dark invention and move on. Instead, I felt compelled to write it down.

When I later interviewed Janice Lee for Queering Reality, we spoke at length about death and what happens after. This did not surprise me. Her thinking moves in layers far too deep to contain in a single podcast conversation, but one small pearl of her wisdom lodged itself in me. I came away believing — again — that what I experienced during that meditation was real. That the moment I imagined was not merely mine. That my grandfather was, in some way, communicating with me. That he is still with me.

Recently, my son showed me a series of sketches he’s been working on, and I was struck by a nascent, unmistakable talent. Not long before that, while cleaning out storage, I came across three drawings my grandfather had made — delicate, intricate renderings of flowers. I showed them to my son.

Years ago, I had been researching my grandfather’s life and death while navigating my son’s first audiology appointment after he failed a hearing test at school. When the audiologist asked if there was any deafness in our family, I said yes — my maternal grandfather was congenitally, profoundly deaf. The doctor told me my son’s newly discovered, mild hearing loss was most likely congenital as well. That he was probably born with it.

And just like that, in the midst of my research, Charles reached effortlessly across three generations to remind me that he is not gone. That he is here. Alive inside my son.

I had only just learned that the etymology of epigenetics means: at, on, upon, over, or beside. I thought about how he exists there and here and everywhere — how I do, too. How we all do. Each of us walking around overfull, spilling into the next.

The piece of writing that emerged from that meditation with Janice Lee — the one that follows — is something I am particularly proud of. I’ve been trying to write about my grandparents for decades, and I will keep trying. But whatever book eventually comes of that effort, I believe it will begin here. Or at least, it will contain this.

---

The circular saw whirred to life, and he heard nothing of the violence in that white, vibrating sound. He looked at the blurred blade made smooth by illusion — the illusory nature of all spinning objects in perpetual motion — and it occurred to him that this was the pattern of everything. Every single thing churned eternally around and around and round and round in a dizzying promise that one day, one moment, any moment, this pattern will abruptly halt, and death will claim everyone as sure as the sharp teeth of that circular saw spun. With reverence, he brought it slowly to his neck. Closer now, he turned his face to the cracked ceiling glutted with spiderwebs and shadows and closed his eyes. And in that final moment before the blade opened his neck and released the clean, bright blood, he regretted having as his last image in life that bleak ceiling. Just in time, he conjured a better image, crisp and full from a ready and worn memory that he had spent no less than a third of his life studying in his mind’s eye — Elouise, the subtle motion of her jaw and curious shapes her mouth made when she stood over the crib and sang to the baby, and the visceral way it felt when his silence filled with her song.

The sound current vibrating and rippling and rattling through his blood even as it left his body, inside of which he sensed the weight of the so many generations unfolding before him, starting with that baby whose able ears drank in Elouise’s song — and it didn’t concern him because it wasn’t his to carry. That colossal load would be passed along to her offspring and her offspring to bear, and they would heal all the wounds wept into the water, into the vital fluid, into the wet life, into the blood of all their veins. With curiosity he watched as this certain eventuality revealed itself to him in some phenomenon of psychic knowing available only in the moment just before death.

Also in that infinite last moment of life, he remembered reading about holocaust survivors who ended their own lives decades after suffering the severe trauma of watching their loved ones be tortured and murdered, a delayed reaction following a mostly functional and normal life lived with the expected sequence of events from building a career to falling in love and having children, only to retreat abruptly from such normalcy to this dimension where he can only respond to the trauma in his body with self-inflicted, fatal violence. And it was with that understanding that he stepped effortlessly out of the border town of space and time and glimpsed his now thirty-two-year-old daughter pregnant with a daughter crumpled in grief on her back porch holding a fifth of dry whiskey and sloshing this poisoned water into her belly where the unborn girl will use it to begin to transmute the wounds into forgiveness and healing.

His delicate skin opened just as easily as the veil parted, welcoming him home.

Beyond the roar and swell and spit of pain, which was a well-practiced ritual for him by then, the first thing he remembered just that side of life’s exit was something that doused him with relief so crisp and cold, it was like the slap of ice water down a parched throat — it’s not at all about surviving. The whole point was to surrender. To heal. And he relaxed, off the hook as he was with infinite chances to get it right. There was no getting it wrong, only a slow and sure evolving, a wearing away and shaping, a shedding and letting go of destructive energies in favor of creative energies like the old skin of a snake, molted. Each injury, from the superficial to the mortal, would heal with the same miraculous totality as the round and song-filled silence.

We also dive into form as a political choice: silence, gaps, and the unsayable; the tension between language as a limit and language as a portal; and how feminist consciousness can resist the commodification of mindfulness and productivity culture.

Ultimately, this conversation asks: If we are always narrating reality, how might we tell stories that make more room for difference, care, and collective liberation? And what are we each still unlearning?

I’m so grateful to share this expansive, challenging, and deeply generative conversation with Janice Lee.

When I spoke with Michelle Duster — the author, historian, and educator who is also a descendant of Ida B. Wells — I was reminded of these stories I carry in my very cells. Histories like spiral staircases winding through time, through epigenetics, through water. Some inheritances arrive as names etched into textbooks. Others arrive as scars, silences, and instincts you don’t remember learning. Most are both.

Listening to her speak about pride and pressure coexisting inside a single lineage clarified something for me: I am not only trying to remember my grandparents. I am trying to understand what it means to live inside a legacy shaped by violence disguised as care, by urgency mistaken for love, by institutions that promised salvation while extracting bodies.

My grandmother, Eloise, did not inherit deafness. It was imposed on her — first by fever, then by everyone who refused to let her remain as she was. When her mother realized Eloise could not hear, she flung her into a frenzy of cures: doctors and specialists, spiritual healers, preachers, even magicians. Her parents were not religious or superstitious, but desperation has a way of flattening belief systems into a single question: what if this works?

They took her to a slaughterhouse first. A neighbor’s preacher’s wife swore a child had once been cured by the scream of a calf echoing off warehouse walls as it was butchered. Eloise remembered only the smell. She closed her eyes through the entire thing. She could not hear the animals, but she felt them — their terror vibrating through her body until she nearly fainted. Her father collapsed before she did, his hand slipping from hers as he fell onto the blood-slick floor. Her mother, buoyant with hope, called Eloise’s name again and again on the drive home, convinced sound might arrive later, delayed but triumphant.

The next day, Eloise was taken into the sky. A small propeller plane climbed higher than she’d ever imagined possible. Pressure built in her head; fear and wonder tangled together. She was certain this would restore her hearing. As the earth fell away beneath her, something else fell away too — unease, gravity, obligation. Suspended in air, she felt curiosity bloom into vast emptiness, a quiet so expansive it felt holy. She realized, then, that what she wanted was not sound but escape.

The pilot pitched the plane into sudden drops, again and again, plunging them toward the earth before pulling back at the last moment. Her ears burned. Her jaw throbbed. Vomit bags filled. The smell drove even the pilot to land early. The sharp falls were supposed to fix her. They did not.

What followed were months of experiments that read like folklore gone feral: twigs lodged in her ears day and night, catheters forced inside, gasoline and lemon juice poured into canals already raw. Her urine was boiled and distilled, dripped back into her head as medicine. Peach pits were fried in hog lard, the oil poured in while still hot, burning her skin and leaving scars that never faded. A mystic gave her a powder she drank dissolved in water. She lost thirty-six hours of memory and returned still deaf.

Eloise’s story is one of relentless intervention — of a body treated as a site of failure to be corrected at any cost. There was no rest. No acceptance. No room for her to become herself. Deafness, for her, was not culture. It was catastrophe.

My grandfather, Charles, came from the opposite world. Deaf from birth, he belonged to a lineage that signed without apology, that understood silence not as absence but as environment. Deafness was not something to cure; it was something to live inside. But even that inheritance could not protect him from the violence of medicine.

At seventeen, Charles entered the Hopemont Sanitarium. It was presented as opportunity. Cutting-edge care. Free treatment. A small stipend. What it was, in reality, was a laboratory. Wealthy families paid to experiment on their sons. Poor families were offered survival in exchange for consent. Charles signed the contract because his family needed the money. His older brother, Lawrence, had already signed. Refusal was not an option that existed.

The surgeries came first — lungs cut, inflated, collapsed. Then gases, injections, restraints. Deaf men and boys disappeared behind doors and did not come back out the same, if at all. Charles began to understand what was happening when patients stopped returning from procedures and nurses stopped using their names.

By the time Charles woke during surgery, ether failing him, his lung exposed and bleeding, he already knew they were not trying to heal him. When the scalpel slipped and pain tore through him so violently that he split from his body, he understood something else as well: if he stayed, he would die there. Lawrence would die there. They all would.

Lawrence did die there. So did every other deaf patient at Hopemont.

Charles survived because he escaped.

This part of the story is not metaphor. He tore himself from the operating table, open-backed and half-conscious, and ran. He climbed through a window. He vanished into the night. He did not look back. He never returned.

Survival, in this lineage, is not noble. It is brutal. It is lonely. It is something you carry like a debt.

Charles lived with the knowledge that he was the only one who made it out. That his brother did not. That entire rooms of men who signed with their hands and laughed with their bodies were erased. There is no monument for them. No archive. Just this story, handed down imperfectly, like a warning.

Later — much later — Charles met Eloise. He taught her sign language, not as therapy but as belonging. He showed her a world where silence was shared, where communication did not require pain. They fell in love. They married. They had two children. One of them was my mother.

For a time, this feels like the redemptive arc history loves to tell. Trauma overcome. Love as cure. But legacy is never that clean.

Charles carried Hopemont inside him for the rest of his life. He carried Lawrence. He carried the dead. And eventually, when my mother was pregnant with me, he chose to die by suicide.

I was not meant to know him. That is how it has always felt — not as abandonment, exactly, but as design. As if survival had limits, and he had reached his.

When Michelle Duster spoke about the divide between public history and private truth, I thought of this. Of how easily stories become flattened into inspiration or tragedy, and how much is lost when we do that. My grandfather is not a cautionary tale. My grandmother is not a symbol of perseverance. They were people shaped by forces that offered no gentleness.

Eloise, at seven, sitting in a storm after running away with torn pages of fairy tales, realized she would never hear again. In rain colored red and blue and orange, she understood she could not give up the world as she saw it. She chose color. She chose presence. She chose to stop being fixed.

That choice echoes forward. It asks me what parts of this inheritance I will carry and which I will refuse. Urgency nearly destroyed them both. The insistence on cure. The belief that rest was a luxury they could not afford.

To honor them is not to mythologize their suffering or sanctify their survival. It is to tell the truth: that love can coexist with harm, that escape does not guarantee peace, that inheritance is as much about what we lay down as what we carry forward.

What I hope to leave behind is not a story of endurance alone, but one of discernment — the knowledge of when to fight and when to stop, when to remember and when to rest. My grandparents were not given that choice. I am. And that, too, is legacy.

Photo of my grandmother, Eloise (left), with a friend (right).

Photos of my grandfather, Charles, younger on the left with his brother, Lawrence (1929), and older on the right.

For a long while after, I attempted to turn lovers into letter writers like her, wanting desperately to regain that particular magic. I would buy my partners stationery and fancy pens. I would start by writing the first letter and imploring her to reply. It never worked. Blithe indifference was typical, but once, a girlfriend was bitterly angry and felt unfairly pressured to perform this service for me. That was the incident that stopped me, made me accept it was a magic I shared only with my first love.

What I was trying to reproduce wasn’t epistolary romance so much as ontological permission. Those letters had said: this exists. They had made space for a version of myself that felt otherwise unrecognizable in the dominant world. The ache that followed me from relationship to relationship was not about paper and ink, but the feeling of being mirrored into reality. What I regret to this day — and it may be my only true life’s regret — is that I took the rather large box of letters I carried around in my closets as a young adult and gave it back to her in a big retaliatory gesture, a symbolic middle finger of sorts, when she married the young man I knew she didn’t really love.

At the time, I told myself it was an act of dignity. I told myself I was releasing us both from the weight of the past. I told myself I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hoarded relics from a lover who had chosen heterosexual legitimacy over me. But this was a lie or at least an incomplete truth. What I was really doing was destroying evidence. I was erasing the paper trail of a reality that had once existed and then been declared — by the world and eventually by her as well — to be inadmissible.

When I read the novel Beings by Ilana Masad, my regret came roaring back with unexpected force. One of the three main narrative threads in the novel is an archive of letters written by a lesbian science fiction writer from the 1960s named Phyllis. She is writing to her first love, Rosa, who also married a man she didn’t really love. Phyllis signs those letters with that same intense yet iconic promise: yours forever.

But Beings is not simply a novel about queer letters or lost loves. It is also a novel about UFOs, with abduction narratives, people who claim to have been taken — bodily, psychically, temporally — by beings that do not belong to this world. The book refuses to resolve whether these encounters are literal or metaphorical, pathological or revelatory. Instead, it asks a different question: what does it mean to feel that your experience cannot be accounted for by the dominant story of reality?

The figure of the alien in Beings operates as a parallel language for queer estrangement. To be abducted is to be removed from the normative flow of time. To be returned is not to be restored. You come back changed, marked, carrying knowledge that no one else recognizes as legitimate. Your testimony is doubted. Your body becomes suspect. Your memory is treated as fantasy.

Reading this, I felt a familiar click of recognition. Queerness, especially before it has social validation, often feels less like identity and more like visitation. Something arrives in you uninvited, undeniable, and disruptive to the life you were supposed to have. You don’t choose it. You survive it. You try to explain it to others and watch their faces close, polite and unconvinced.

This brought feelings of such bittersweet nostalgia that I had to put the book down. My body responded before my intellect could catch up: a tightening in the chest, a heat behind the eyes, the unmistakable ache of recognition. It was not just the letters themselves that moved me, but the fact of their survival. Someone had kept them. Someone had decided they mattered enough to be preserved, even when the world they described had refused to make space for them.

Queer reality, so often, is constituted by what almost didn’t happen and what did happen but wasn’t allowed to count. We live amid ghost narratives — relationships that were formative but unofficial, love affairs that shaped us but were later minimized, denied, or rewritten as phases. Like UFO abductees, we are often told that our experiences were misinterpretations, hormones, imagination, trauma. The archive becomes a site of resistance not because it is nostalgic, but because it insists on the factuality of queer feeling. We were here. This happened. It mattered.

Now I remember the reason for our nicknames, Porky and Choppy. It was because we watched the movie Groundhog Day together and there was a line in it where Phil Connors (Bill Murray) yells, “Don’t mess with me, pork chop!” at a bewildered man in a hallway after realizing it’s February 2nd again. He slams the man against the wall, shouting the insult before demanding to know the date. We laughed so hard at this and reenacted it so many times, each of us throwing the other against the wall playfully in a similar way but with erotic energy behind it. Out of that game fell our secret pet names for each other.

What strikes me is not just the tenderness of this memory, but its structure. Time looping. Repetition with difference. Desire emerging through play and violence softened into consent. Groundhog Day is itself a story about being trapped in time, about learning through repetition how to live differently inside a rigid structure. We were two girls playing at rupture inside a world that insisted on inevitability.

This is how queerness often announces itself: sideways, disguised, laughing too hard at something that cracks open a hidden door. We didn’t know yet that what we were doing had a history. That other women had pressed women against other walls and then written about it in letters signed yours forever. We thought we were inventing something entirely new, which is both the great pleasure and the great vulnerability of being young and queer in a culture that withholds its lineage from you.

In Beings, this lineage is guarded not by an omniscient narrator but by an Archivist — a figure who gathers fragments, testimonies, letters, transcripts, and arranges them without pretending to master them. The Archivist does not claim objectivity. They do not resolve contradictions. Instead, they offer a counter to traditional historical authority, which so often demands coherence, proof, and linear causality.

Queer history, like UFO history, does not behave linearly. It loops, disappears, resurfaces. It is full of gaps, redactions, and disputed claims. The Archivist’s power lies not in adjudicating truth, but in refusing erasure. In saying: this was said. This was felt. This was recorded.

In the end, just like the fictional Rosa believed it wrong and bad to be romantically intimate with Phyllis thirty years before we were, my first love believed this too and stopped seeing me, stopped speaking to me. My heart was more broken by the loss of her than it has been by any other romantic loss since. My heart bears this scar still.

There is a particular devastation that comes from being someone’s first love when they do not — or cannot — be yours in public. You are asked to hold the intensity without the recognition, the forever without the future. You become a formative secret, which is a beautiful thing until it becomes unbearable. When she married him, it felt less like rejection than annulment, as though the world had retroactively declared our love null and void.

And those letters — oh, how I wish I would have kept them or committed them to a queer archive somewhere. I imagine them now, yellowing slightly, still fragrant with the faintest trace of her perfume. I imagine a future researcher opening the box and feeling that familiar thrill: here is proof. Not of tragedy, but of devotion. Of a teenage girl writing yours forever and meaning it with her whole body. Of another girl — me — learning, line by line, how desire could be articulated, how language could carry longing across time and space.

Perhaps this is what it means to queer reality: to insist that these moments were not rehearsals for something else, not detours on the way to adulthood, but the thing itself. The letters were not juvenile. They were not excessive. They were accurate. They told the truth as we knew it then, which is the only truth anyone ever has access to.

I can’t get them back. But I can write this. I can add my testimony to this living archive, fragile but persistent, of queer love that was real even when it was unsanctioned, even when it was abandoned, even when it was returned in a box out of spite and grief.

I write for Phyllis and Rosa, for Porky and Choppy, for every abducted feeling that could not be explained away, for every promise made forever and broken not by lack of love but by the gravity of the dominant world. I understand now that yours forever is not a contract. It is a declaration of intensity.

It means: time will not undo this.

It means: what we had marked me.

It means: I am still here, remembering.

Emilly offered prompts that blurred genre and time, that refused the tyranny of linear sense-making. Write about a dream. Write a what-if imagined reality. Write without explaining yourself to an imagined reader who wants neatness, moral clarity, or catharsis on cue. Write toward what resists being written. Write toward the place you keep skirting, the place that still makes your body tense. I remember thinking: Oh. You mean there is still something here.

Around the same time, I devoted myself to Emilly’s memoir, Funeral for Flaca. I didn’t read it as a book so much as I experienced it as a rupture. The prose is raw without being careless, precise without being bloodless. It reads like a refusal — of silence, of respectability, of the idea that feminism must be palatable to be legitimate.

Or, to put it another way, it felt like a feminist manifesto written from the body outward, from grief and memory and lineage, rather than theory. It made me want to be braver on the page. It made me want to stop protecting the people who had not protected me. It made me want to tell the truth in a way that didn’t tidy itself up afterward.

That is how I wrote, for the first time, about my estranged brother.

Sometimes I have recurring dreams where you show up at some family event, sometimes alone or sometimes with your wife and kids, and you act like no time has passed at all. It’s like you never left. In one of the dreams, the most vivid, there was a big party where many people were gathered, more than just our family. It was not long after my motorcycle accident, and I wanted you to see my scars, to feel alarm and concern in response, to ask me what happened, if I was OK.

In the dream, I joined a circle of people you were speaking to. I inserted myself into the conversation, chiming in with my experience or thoughts or maybe my opinion, and flamboyantly waved around my reattached hand while speaking, flashing the worst scar where a deep seam cuts violently across my forearm and the back of my wrist bulges, a humpback of the wrist, from the bone callouses that grew over the artificial bone graft used to attach the hand to the new metal arm bones. You noticed, but you didn’t ask. You didn’t seem to care.

Writing this in class, I could feel my body react before my mind did. My shoulders crept upward. My jaw clenched. There was a familiar humiliation in the scene: look at what happened to me, look at what it cost, look at how I survived — and still, nothing. The dream was not subtle. It did not need interpretation. It was doing what dreams do best: staging the emotional truth without apology.

During the dream I realized I was dreaming, and that changed everything. No need to behave. No need to save face. I made a beeline to you, took your face in my hands, and earnestly asked, “What do I have to do, what words do I have to say to get through to you and make you come to your senses and come back?”

You looked sad and replied, “There’s nothing you can say or do. I’m gone. Just let me go.”

This is where the speculative turn matters. This is where the prompt becomes a portal. Because what the dream offered — what the class allowed — was not reconciliation, but clarity. The answer was devastating precisely because it was clean. No argument. No misunderstanding. No secret combination of words I had failed to discover. Just absence, chosen and maintained.

Then I heard a commotion behind me and looked back. Everyone was gone. The room was empty. When I looked back at you, you were a child. About the same age as my son, the nephew you’ve never met. You reached for me; I held you in my arms. Then I woke up.

In Funeral for Flaca, Emilly writes grief without sentimentalizing it. She does not rush toward forgiveness as a moral endpoint. She allows love and rage to coexist without forcing them to resolve. That mattered to me as I sat with this dream on the page. Because I do not forgive you. And I am tired of pretending that forgiveness is the only proof of emotional maturity available to me.

Although I don’t forgive you, although part of me wants to shout at you and scream things like fuck you and I hate you, although the only real question I have from the wounded place inside my inner twelve-year-old is how could you? — I know that if I ever spoke to you again, I would not actually behave that way.

There was a subsequent prompt: the what-if imagined reality.

What if I picked up the phone. What if your voice answered on the other end of the line, a voice I still know by heart. What if I didn’t perform anger or righteousness or moral superiority. What if I asked you if you’re happy?

What if I asked what your typical day looks like. What time do you wake. What do you eat for breakfast. What are the first thoughts crowding into your mind at dawn, each beginning disguised as ordinary?

This is not weakness but curiosity as resistance. This is refusing the flattening narrative that estrangement demands, where someone must be fully villain or fully absolved. Feminism, at least the kind that has saved me, makes room for complexity. It insists that care and accountability are not opposites. It insists that my longing does not invalidate my boundaries.

I imagine asking about my niece and nephew, yes, but mostly I imagine wanting to know about you — how you inhabit your life, your days, your nights, the quiet spaces where ideology loosens its grip and a person is left alone with themselves.

What would you ask about me? Would I tell you about your nephew, the beautiful and magnificent child I grew in my queer womb? Or would I tell you about the memories he has with my other siblings, the ones who stayed.

The siblings who placed unconditional love at the center, who made disowning impossible even when it would have been easier. They love me. They love my son. They have lived memories with him — shared holidays, inside jokes, small rituals — that return joy to our bodies when we recount them. Perhaps I would tell you about those memories not to punish you, but to mark the cost of your absence. To say: this is what you relinquished.

Perhaps you would hang up. Perhaps you would express remorse. Perhaps nothing would change. But I would feel unburdened to have spoken without contorting myself into something smaller.

This is what speculative nonfiction gave me: not closure, but space. A way to write toward truth without demanding it behave. A way to hold the child version of you in my arms without inviting the adult version back into my life. A way to honor my grief without betraying myself.

Reading Funeral for Flaca alongside writing these pieces felt like being given a map, then being told I could redraw it. Emilly’s work models what it looks like to be ferociously honest and tender at the same time. To write from a feminist place that understands the body as archive, the family as both wound and teacher, and storytelling as an act of survival.

In that class, I didn’t learn how to fix anything. I learned how to stop lying to myself about what still hurts. I learned that queering reality sometimes means refusing the script altogether — refusing reconciliation narratives, refusing forgiveness-as-demand, refusing the idea that the most loving thing to do is always to let someone back in.

Sometimes the most loving thing is to write the dream down. To imagine the impossible conversation. To hold the child. To wake up.

///

After my hand was torn off, vascular surgeons worked meticulously for hours overnight piecing back together each tendon, ligament, vein. I picture them sometimes, backs bent, magnifying glass over one eye, bright light illuminating the violent red under my skin. I can see it so clearly, it’s almost as if I’m there. As if they could pause, look up at me, and I could see their faces. Their careful work was purposeful. They worked with the intention of restoring the feeling, functionality, and dexterity to my right hand. Later, with a cast over my arm and my fingers poking out from the top, I worked with an occupational therapist named Tina. She massaged my numb fingers and thumb for a while then gave me tasks to perform with my injured hand. Place pegs in holes, squeeze things, hold various objects. The hardest task was to touch each finger in succession to the tip of my thumb.

My thumb felt dead. No feeling, no ability to move it. If I tried and strained very hard, I might see a twitch. Otherwise, it was unresponsive and insensitive. I moved each finger as far as I could, and I couldn’t reach even my pointer to touch my thumb. Day after day, I tried, and one day, it suddenly happened. I could touch the first couple fingers to my thumb. Then all four. The day I first touched all four fingers to my thumb was the first time I remember feeling deep, round, palpable hope. I’d been afraid I wouldn’t be able to use my hand ever again. But this gave me hope I would have full use of my hand again someday, even if not full feeling.

///

Perhaps there is a wisdom in seeing the hand’s design as purposeful. Perhaps labeling “grasping” as negative or as an undesirable action is faulty. When I was a new human, smaller and made up of 100% distinct cells (because they die and are reborn, making the body an ever-changing entity), I grasped my mother’s finger, her breast, her pant leg. I grasped objects and put them into my mouth. Hands and mouths are for exploration and discovery. All new humans instinctually know this. It is this primal knowing we lose along the way. We are taught, as we grow, what to question, what not to, how to behave, what is right, and what is not done. These rules of socialization replace the primal knowing and we stop grasping. We stop using our hands and mouths for exploration and discovery. And although I no longer want to discover more about a centipede by grasping it with my hand and placing it in my mouth as I did when I was a new human, I want to discover more about her that way — the woman who has captured my attention and drawn me into her mind. Or more, her metaphysical heart. Perhaps her soul. This force of attraction I feel makes me want to use my hands and my mouth to explore and discover, uncover what more is there. What sensations. What experiences. Depths perhaps previously unknown to me. Perhaps I was designed to grasp, and I should trust my instincts and my primal knowing more than I trust my cautious, mannered thinking. Perhaps I am meant to grasp and let go, grasp and let go, grasp and let go. This closing and opening of the hand is the natural rhythm of things, of a body falling through space alongside other bodies falling through space.

But what about those sea creatures? All the dark and bright water. The depths to the shallows to the unknowable deep. Its creatures arrive and depart without hands. Slipping through time and space — creatures like scallops, whelks, oysters, clams, mollusks — they never grasp.

///

On my right arm, on the underside of my forearm, there is a neat seam from wrist to elbow pit wherein titanium rods were fitted to replace bones and connect my severed hand back to the soft tissues keeping it alive. The skin of this re-attached hand is thinner and more fragile, easily cut or rubbed off. Perhaps it’s a compromised blood supply, or merely the life drained from the skin when it was separated from its source. The shape of the hand, too, is different. My palm is narrower, the muscles in it less defined. Nevertheless, it functions. It senses. A hand resurrected from death, total numbness, complete paralysis. Facilitated by the interventions of the best medical technology, talents, and minds, my body worked its magic and repaired. Skin grew back together and closed. Nerves regenerated or forged new pathways. With the conditions optimized, my body did what nearly all bodies do unprompted: healed. The seam on that underside of my forearm has always reminded me of a power line, subtly curved as though from gravity, as though with the slight weight of birds. Birds perched. At rest yet alert and ready. Their whole countenance vibrating with the imminence of liftoff, of flight. Skyward, up, up, and gone.

///

When I was small, under the age of ten, and my hands were about half the size of hers, we made the sign for I love you with our two hands stacked. Mine palm side up on hers, middle and ring fingers folded in, hers beneath mine, same fingers folded over. We had our hands photographed this way, captured in black and white. Around the edges, a gathering darkness makes our bright hands look triumphant. Like we’d overcome something together, or like we’d won, and this was our victory grasp.

Now, a few decades later, I can make the same photograph with my children. Preemptively claim a similar victory with them — our love shaped hands chasing back the darkness. Perhaps my mom did it with her parents when she was small, in a time before photographs were easy to take. Her father would have wrapped her small hand in that way, and they would have smiled. And my mom would have thought them triumphant, thought they had won, even well before the game was played out, but the end would come too soon and with defeat. A few decades later, when I was growing in her womb, in her fragile bowl, her father died by suicide. He gripped an electric circular saw and pushed it to his neck. The trigger of the saw is similar to that of a gun — you press with your index finger while gripping the handle to make it work. And when the saw made contact with his neck, his dexterity would have left him finally. His hand would have opened, dropping the saw. He used his own hands to take his own life. He gave his body over to his hands.

But perhaps that doesn’t equate to defeat. Perhaps the gathering darkness around our love and light-filled hands is as friendly and unmenacing as its counterpart. What if both the dark and the light are brimming with gifts?

Sometimes, I look at the photograph of our glowing hands filled with light and I feel it inside me still. Like hope.

Illustration by Nicole Roberts from “Death, and After” in Little Deaths All in a Row, Essays on Sex and Death

We also talk about the moment she came to my rescue after my near-fatal car accident, and how that care opened the door to a conversation that felt like a gift — unexpected, healing, and rare.

Not long after we recorded this, my mom had a series of serious falls and injuries, and I got to drop everything and fly to be with her, to care for her the way she once cared for me. In that way, the story came full circle — quietly, beautifully.

This episode is a reminder that tragedy often arrives carrying life’s greatest gifts, and these have a way of queering time, roles, and expectations — if we let them.

The first flash was unforgettable. I was seated at my kitchen table with my son. The inside of my body grew so hot, so fast, I wondered if I’d been hit with sudden and violent food poisoning. I took my son’s plate away with alarm and, fork midway to his mouth said, “don’t eat that!”

I looked down at my food as sweat trickled down the small of my back. I jumped up to open windows and tear off layers of clothing and deduced that, after only a few bites, it’s not likely the meal. Also, no nausea hit, only the steady increase of temperature of my body as though someone reached in and maxed out the dial on the thermostat. As though my body had become a furnace. As though my presence in the room could easily stand in for a space heater.

Finally I knew that this was, in fact, a hot flash, It all clicked: I had perimenopause. And of course, it’s not an illness or disease, but mainstream misogyny certainly sees it that way, and so we are all programmed to see it that way. To resist it. To detest it.

The fact that I was still getting my period every 26 days like a clock at the time really confused me. Weren’t these symptoms reserved for when that cycle begins to falter? I did some research and found the truth: it’s different for everyone. I picked up the book by Heather Corinna that made me laugh out loud to see, an image of flames on the cover with the title: WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You.

I found so much comfort in her pages. Her inclusion of the queer and not-so-feminine person hitting this stage of life and our particular struggles warmed my heart. Because here’s the thing: no one told me this part of life could feel like a psychedelic initiation. No one said that as the body sheds its fertile rhythm, the self might also begin to shed its inherited forms. The version of woman I had been trained to be — accommodating, fertile, useful — began to molt. I was left in the doorway between who I had been and who I was becoming.

Heather Corinna’s humor and frankness gave me permission to treat this time not as an affliction, but as a queer rite of passage. Not just the end of something, but a queer becoming — the way only queerness knows how to make the end of one story the beginning of another.

Because what is queerness if not a continuous metamorphosis; a refusal to settle into the shape that culture demands of us? And what is menopause if not the body’s own declaration: I will not perform in this old way anymore.

For so long, femininity was tethered to reproduction — the sacred cow of patriarchal imagination. The womb as productivity machine. But what happens when that machine winds down, powers off, begins to emit strange noises and wild bursts of heat? What happens is that we meet our own power stripped of its utility.

We meet ourselves as beings whose worth is no longer measurable by what we can give, make, or produce. This is the paradox — the liberation embedded within the loss. The death of fertility brings with it the birth of something untamed, something that doesn’t need to be sweet.

There’s a cultural silence around menopause that feels eerily similar to the one around queerness. Both are marked by invisibility — things that are supposed to happen quietly, behind closed doors. In both cases, we are taught to self-regulate our bodies and our narratives, to not make others uncomfortable. Don’t talk about the hot flash in the middle of the meeting. Don’t mention the sex that doesn’t conform to heterosexual scripts. Don’t say the words that would make this world too real, too embodied, too uncontainable.

But queering menopause means breaking that silence. It means letting the heat come, letting the sweat bead and drip, letting the mess of transformation take up space. It means speaking about the way desire shifts — not necessarily lessening, but changing its shape, its object, its urgency.

I think of Audre Lorde, who wrote that caring for oneself is not self-indulgence, but self-preservation — and that self-preservation is an act of political warfare. In menopause, that feels truer than ever. When I take a midday nap instead of pushing through exhaustion, when I let my body rest instead of forcing it into productivity, I am participating in that same warfare. I am saying: I am not a machine. I am a living organism in flux.

The patriarchal gaze frames menopause as decline, a vanishing. But queerness has always been about vanishing from systems that harm us — and then reappearing in our own forms. The disappearance isn’t death; it’s transformation.

There is something gloriously queer about no longer being beholden to anyone’s timeline — not the body’s, not the culture’s. I find myself, now, listening to rhythms that have nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with intuition. My energy comes in waves that don’t align with lunar cycles anymore, but they do align with creativity, with rest, with honesty.

I used to fear losing touch with that part of myself that bled with the moon, that ancient synchrony with other women. Now I see that I haven’t lost it; it’s simply changed frequency. I am still part of the web — but my thread hums at a different pitch.

The body teaches us everything we need to know about impermanence, if we’re willing to listen. In my twenties, I learned it through heartbreak. In my thirties, through motherhood. Now, in my forties, it arrives through heat — this molten clarity that burns away illusion.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when I wake drenched in sweat, I feel like I’m being rewritten from the inside out. My skin prickles, my thoughts blur, and then something shifts — an old grief releases, or a new truth dawns. Maybe this is what the mystics meant when they spoke of purification by fire.

Perimenopause isn’t a disease. It’s an initiation. It asks us to let die what no longer serves: people-pleasing, invisibility, the relentless drive to prove our worth. It asks us to befriend the body as it changes shape and function. It asks us to see that what we are losing — the ability to conceive, the smoothness of skin, the illusion of permanence — was never the source of our power anyway.

Our power lies in our consciousness. In our capacity to adapt. In our willingness to keep becoming. So when I think about this “disease,” I laugh. I laugh because the culture has it backward. The real illness is the belief that our value ends when our fertility does. The cure is the heat itself — the internal combustion that clears the fog and reveals the truth.

And maybe that’s what the hot flash really is: not a malfunction, but a flare. A signal fire. The body saying, Wake up. You are not dying. You are evolving.

Photo Credit: Nicole Roberts

She rolls her eyes and flips her hair before turning her back, walking away, disappearing behind you. And when you turn back to get one more good look at her, she’s gone, leaving you wondering, was she ever even there?

To complicate things, she is a shapeshifter.

She shows up as a German woman with tattoos and piercings and a big laugh who wants to dance with me. I’m excited but also shy.

Next she’s a devotee, small in stature, dressed in robes with a shaved head and she’s giving me a profound lesson in a riddle of circular language I can’t quite puzzle out.

Then she’s a morning dove, waking me, reminding me of the best moments of my childhood, the quiet moments feeling cozy in a room with my siblings, safe and tucked in, waking to another bright day when this human condition felt new and wrapped in a bow, filled with promise.

Now she’s a fierce lion baring teeth. She wants to bite my head off. Or she’s death, here to take me by the hands and walk me through the veil.

But wait, no. Now she’s a middle-aged white man saying he’s a doctor and saving my life. Right here at the cliff’s edge between life and death, she’s pulling me back and turning formless. A force, a phenomenon we have no word for but one that comes close is miracle.

She is the blood of deeply generous strangers fed into my veins in the ambulance. She is the skilled hands of surgeons restoring the integrity of my broken body. She is the pain and the reward, both.

I spent so much time, money, energy, and life force in service to escaping Reality. Brief trips away were all I sometimes managed, and other times, expecting to get that slight reprieve, I got pressed right up against her naked in a dark room where I could feel her heart beating in time with mine, smell her breath in my face.

This bad bitch, this queer phenomenon Reality is a superhero villain star. Doesn’t it make you feel almost offended then when entertainment producers pair this word with television?

Reality television is about as far from reality as pain is from pleasure. And of course, the paradox is, these are one, and reality television is also Reality. My use of it as an anesthetizer is Reality. My practice of projecting my judgements, hopes, fears onto the characters while knowing that how they’re being portrayed is a fiction is Reality.

Before I tell you about how I met my favorite reality television characters in real life, I have to tell you about the time I met some dolphins.

I was in Hawaii snorkeling off a boat in the deep ocean. The water became a cool blanket over my back, tucking me into the vastness below. In that touchpoint between two boundless spaces — the sky over and the sea under — I, too, felt unbounded. I suddenly realized, the world is so much bigger than what I’d ever perceived. And with this realization, this humbling experience, I expanded — it was as though my very body spread into mutinous molecules less moored, uncontained — a cloud in the shape of me, floating in the water. I believe it was that energetic shift that attracted the magical creatures I next encountered.

Suddenly there, out in front of me, a pod of seven very large dolphins approached. I glided toward them, and they paused, looking at me. I continued toward them, arms outstretched before me, full-face snorkel mask, flippered feet, almost to where I was about to touch one of them, and I stopped. They weren’t moving away and they didn’t seem afraid, only curious, but I was afraid that they would mistake my reverence for an attack and fight back, so I kept a respectful but small distance. Seeming to lose interest in me then, they gathered in a circle facing one another, as though conferencing. Two of them were in the center playing or wrestling or mating, connected while tumbling and twirling. Then the two connected dolphins twirl down, descending into the depths and disappearing there. The other five dive after the two, down and down and gone.

Later, I was walking in an airport looking at the sea of other people moving all around me and I remembered that touchpoint between the unending sky and the depths of the ocean. I remembered that colossal unknowableness. Walking, I looked around at the other people, each a whole world, and I saw how trapped we all are. We’re trapped inside ourselves, buried beneath flesh and blood, limited by senses — everything we perceive is filtered through them. There’s nothing we can ever experience directly.

Time is something we made up — it doesn’t really exist. We transmit and we receive and there’s so much static between the signals, it’s a wonder anything gets through. What we know is what we’re told. What we know is what we read. What we know is what we see, smell, taste, hear, and touch with the skin of our fingertips, those numbest of instruments. What we know is nothing. We are trapped; so lost.

When I met my favorite reality television characters in real life — AJ and Britney from Season 2 of The Ultimatum Queer Edition — they leapt outside of those edited versions of themselves to tell me about who they really are, the parts that fell to the cutting room floor lest the dramatic tension be lost. The way AJ was portrayed as womanizing at best, toxic at worst, injured her to see because it’s not how she is; it was all out of context. The words Britney spoke about AJ were curated to serve the narrative of the edited version, the character, the fiction. And yet, they emerged, in the end, together, and they walked through the aftermath stronger for the experience.

After meeting and talking with them, I can see how reality television is an apt metaphor for the strangeness of Reality, of how trapped inside ourselves we are, although sometimes, unexpectedly, we transcend. In the wildest, most fleeting moments, these are perhaps glimpses of what real reality is; the kind we might encounter when we shed these bodies.

And maybe that’s the truth of it — Reality is not what happens to us, but what happens through us. She comes as wound and wonder, television screen and pulsebeat, lover and surgeon and storm. She drags us through our own fictions until the static clears and, for a breath, we see.

For a breath, we are dolphins cutting through saltwater, skin to sky, knowing without language that everything is one great unending body — her body.

Then we forget again. We go back to our channels, our small selves, our tiny knowing. But she never leaves. She hums underneath, waiting for us to remember her name — that name too big for the mouth, too fluid for grammar.

And when we do remember, when we stop running and let her fold us in, she whispers the only truth she ever had. You and I are the same thing.

Or, I am you, dreaming myself awake.

Photo Credit: Nicole Roberts

This conversation blurs the line between the philosophical and the personal, between the real and the represented — because maybe reality isn’t fixed at all, but a story we keep rewriting in real time.