Antennae Twitching with Precision by Remi Recchia

Bright lights girl-not-girl examined by nurse in clean clean clean. Looking for cuts, looking for bruises, looking for something unseen.

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When I was sixteen, I dreamed of invasion. Bigger, stronger people opening me. Bigger, stronger people with belts. Bigger, stronger people with friends. In my dreams, when violated, I was a boy.

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In fifth grade, my school put on a play. A musical. I do not remember what it was called. I do not remember what we sang. I only remember: the boys were army ants, the girls lady bugs. Upon learning that I could not be an army ant, I cried for a ten-year-old’s forever. I have carried this grudge in my heart ever since.

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I was hungry for years, side effects of pills pulling me from starving to binging. It started with loss of appetite and crescendoed into full-blown anorexia by the age of fourteen. A skeleton smiles up at me from old photo albums. I do not share these indictments with anyone but my wife.

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I read Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted two years before learning my correct diagnosis. I read her memoir and knew her, as if we were two branches on the same tree covered in the same heavy sap. That was when I could not stop trying to kill myself.

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I am still occasionally hungry.

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The funny thing about having a body is that not only is it yours, but it has to be yours. You cannot give your body to someone else. I gave my college boyfriend blowjobs, but when my head came up, it was still intact each time.

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I did not know any other boys like me growing up. From what I could tell, being a boy meant having extra skin between your legs and shouting very loud. Still, something nudged me at the back of my mind. At fourteen, when I told my therapist I thought I might feel happier as a boy, she gasped and said being trans would make my life much harder. So I took it back. So I told her I was probably wrong. I did not want her to worry.

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When my own invasion happened—four years after the nightmares began—it was so quiet I did not yet have the words to understand. Is it still assault if he doesn’t penetrate? The answer, I know now, is yes.

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For years sharp objects did not trust me. Knives shuffled to the side when I set the table. I learned to shave with Nair instead of a razor. I finally set the blade down in 2012, the relief sweet and shameful.

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In college I stealthed like a carp, invading one pool after another. Freshman year, I ate lunch with the engineers. Sophomore year, I dipped into the queer community. By the time I was a Junior, I knew I was lost, but I couldn’t come back because I didn’t know where “back” was. Head always spinning. Bed always occupied. When I finally made it out, I’d left fathoms of friends behind.

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I can’t claim certain happiness had I been born with a penis, but I can say that seeing a trans man on TV would have at least let me see myself. Just one trans actor could have been my light. Just one.

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Now I’m just a boy and I have never been happier to be “just” anything. A stringent course of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy rewired my mind and made the fourth visit to the E.R. my last. Still sometimes I embody her, the girl everyone assumed. I tell my family, my friends, I’m the same person they’ve always known, but I’m not: I’m healthier now, and stronger.

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The daily meltdowns and one-night stands are left behind. The last time I blacked out was not this year. It is amazing what one hormone can do.

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At night when my wife rises for a glass of water, I reach for her arm instinctively. Abandonment issues run deep, a January snow in Michigan. But always she smiles, cups my cheek. She always comes back.

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The invasion in college happened; I can’t change that. One day I won’t think about it so often, but for now, I work my own body into exhaustion, into sweat, into something more capable than I’d thought possible. I am in charge of my own body, my antennae twitching with precision.

Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Eboni