A decade more; it comes

Dear you,


I don't believe in ghosts. At least, I don't think I do. But if I did, trauma would be a ghost. A specter. The kind of thing that you feel but don't see. It's in your bedroom when you can't sleep. Sometimes you think it's romantic. Other times it swallows you when you blink. That's trauma.

I think time is the same way.



I still don't really understand it; it still haunts me. It still hurts. I still think about it too much. (I think about everything too much.) I think about who I am and who I was and everyone I was in between, about who I'll be tomorrow, and the day after that.

There's so much disconnect to him.

Nearly everyone from that time in my life is gone; they've dissapeared in the fog. Soon enough, no one will remember.

My bones ache with the weight of it. Sometimes I think he's haunting me. My eternal specter. I wonder if he reads my words, hears my thoughts and breathes my breath. I can't figure out whether or not that would be comforting. Is anyone ever really gone?


Don't forget, don't remember, don't think,
don't breathe 

This. This stays here, in this decade.

***

The first girl I came out to was quite nearly my last. It was July, and we were sitting in the dirt next to the covered bridge in the mostly forgotten park down the street from my home. The same park where years earlier, I had snuck out of church to come and sit, anxiously looking around for anyone who might realize what I'd done. That was when the stream still ran.

'I feel like I'd be happier if...'
'I don't always feel like...'

I didn't know how to say it. In fact, I didn't say it. I cried a lot and told her she was 'different' than me. The word transgender was never said aloud- I didn't even know what that really meant.

Months later, she put it together. At first she said she believed me. She said that maybe God put me in this body as a 'trial'. I wasn't sure if God was even real, but in front of me was the only person in the whole world who accepted me. So, I agreed. I agreed to a lot of things.

The next Spring, she told me she'd spoken to her Bishop about me. She had 'changed her mind'.

I didn't realize it then, like I do now. But losing everyone from that time in my life - it was inevitable. They all grew up, they all got married to handsome men as white as the sun. If it was loving me, or their entire way of life, they were going to choose the later. And they have.

Today, I'm left only with my blurred memories from that pivotal time in my life. Sometimes it feels like it didn't even happen. A story I made up. Was Ethan ever even real?

It's nearly 2020, and functionally, the answer is 'no.'

My drivers license doesn't mention him, nor my birth certificate. I haven't heard his name in over a year. My coworkers haven't the slightest idea he ever existed. All I know for sure is that I'm not him. No, I'm a girl. Whatever the hell that means. I just- I know that.

Ethan never even made it to two decades. He won't be in the 2020's. It's over. It has been for a while now.

I know that time is arbitrary. New Years will come and pass and in that second Erin and I's tree in Liberty Park won't have changed. But I can't help but indulge the fantasy that the whole world takes a breath all at once, and shutters as she breathes out. Another decade over. Still here. Still alive.

This New Years Eve, as the clock strikes midnight, take a breath for me. Could you do that?


With love,

Solstice Everston