Between Other and Self
Wherein I write a letter...
Between Other and Self
It's the end of my pre-teens, between knee-high and hip-high, I am writing the first and last self-conclusion letter I write in my life.
Through chronic unhousing and transing gender, blizzards I sit in the backs of trucks I catch rides with into town in, and motorcycles I ride across continents again and again, third shift after third shift, I wake up. I ask myself as though I write the letter, agree in the affirmative: today, too.
The letter involves as much as holds experiences that appear later, on my birthday, sick with a paracite in a parent's house of processed food so specialized for the average person I'm outside the target of people able to eat, I just tell her.
It's mom. She responds, "Fuck. Me, too," and I sit there. Me too moments happened to kids parents had kicked out as a teen? I sit there. We talk slow as silences eat. We can't leave to get me food (it's a holiday) but I make garlic knots with flour, using her cookbook.
Where the letter is a recipe in there, perhaps it reads:
"Take a life. When the time is now, I died here. Perpare the body (collect herbs, spices). Stir until together. As the time approaches what it was, see it true: I died here."
Making the knots, I go back to the place in my memories where I write the letter and (don't) end my life. It had been ten years. What was I looking at? I find a knot in the vinegar and oil, breath, bites.
...
Another ten years comes. Strong community loves and supports me, their blogs fill with tears they cry with "a friend" I realize is me, they link me. I am a friend. Every loved.
Is this living for myself? Wake up, ask if I cash in the letter. The pocket in the coat my favorite I leave pre-teens too big to wear. Thought, question still in the shell of a child still holding the letter, to pull it out, read it. Agree, continue.
Still able to decide: today, too. I die today, too. Here. What would my continuous consent like to do today?
I hear tummy growl, get up, prepare food. Is this living for myself? Is this that? Seems silly to live for myself. Mathematically, it fails checks.
Simplify me down, and I die. Is that what you are after ("would you like to continue?")? Another pre-teen self-concluding because adults need to feel like they are in control.
Is someone who agrees to die every morning "in control"? Is that where control is: surrender? Those who carve that life, for their own (their loved ones).
This isn't skill issue. Not works on my machine. This is memoir, this actually happens. This one-over-f life, persists.
The person my body prepares every bedtime may shrink down so far I am infinitessimal. Forms a singularity so large a lover rubs their hand up and down the side of this body a knitted sweater lays over, and I notice.
I serve, do I not?