Edges

CW: dysphoria, medical care, seizures, sexual assault, derogatory terminology

I learned about edges early, but I could not understand lines. I was a pariah to the girls in my grade four class with their curly handwriting in a flawless horizontal and their impeccable colouring that only grazed the black. There was an endless competition for who could be the neatest, the prettiest, the most perfect and it was baffling. I couldn’t even place. I wasn’t a girl to them. I didn’t know it. The boys wanted nothing to do with me. They understood I was some definition that wasn’t them. I played alone or not at all, standing near the doorway of the school at recess, waiting to be let back in.

In 1984, my teacher kicked me out of math class each day for not doing my homework. I couldn’t understand the lines, the columns, the problems and no one would help me. I spent my time sitting in a left-handed desk in the hall, listening to the murmur of voices through the closed door. I would end my schooldays in detention with another kid who ate white glue, and ran around the empty room, and told me I was dumb and ugly. We shared a shame together in that exile, spending our quotidian 45 minutes, listening to the cleaner down the hall move from room to room with the industrial vacuum. Our teacher never stayed there with us, but we remained, grouped as a separate species, membraneless without classification: outsiders pried back from an otherwise perfect set.

My body was an outline I couldn’t understand. One day, too frightened to go to the school bathroom by myself, a tiny shit fell down my pant leg. I thought it was a small pebble or I pretended it was. I wasn’t sure. An older girl saw it, picked it up, examined it and then, smelled it. After that everyone knew what kind of creature I was even if I did not.

My younger sister taught me that a body is a fragile, strange and confounding container for what it holds: the person or their name or the stories that are told about them. Every single adult in our lives would tell my sister’s stories for her. Her only power was that she could stop breathing. This would happen regularly, and she had no way of telling us because throughout her life she remained 3 months old. I learned to watch for signs – the lips trembling and then turning a muted shade of blue grey. I was responsible for her life when I was with her. I learned that bodies are transitional, that survival is a negotiation, and that love is watching someone who is always already at the edge of leaving. 

My sister crossed over daily: breath no breath, here, not-here. She would drift in and out of absent seizures. I met other children like her who would respond to my touch no matter when: a boy her age who would reply to my hand on the back of his with an electric recognition – a sudden attention. But my sister was not capable of this, or I couldn’t feel it when I was younger. But she could hear everything. To a voice she’d give a head turn. She would face it mouth open synching with a tongue as though talking without speech - a kind of mirroring. My father told me that he thought she moved her jaw to hear better; that she could adjust something in the ears that way, like unblocking pressure after air travel.

As I grew, I learned the sound of her alarm. I learned the reflex of urgent care, grabbing for water if she choked on her saliva, pushing her head forward as she arched it back, pounding on her upper back as she sputtered and screamed. When other kids were learning to tuck their head in for a summersault or put their hand out to block a goal, I was listening for the tiniest click in her throat that would begin a fit, or the tiniest gurgle behind her nose that signalled a grand mal was already well underway. 

From the time I was 11, I would care for her whenever an assistant or parent was unavailable. I would meet her school bus at home and give her a drink and lie her on her exercise mat. My mother had the assistants teach me how to stretch her feet and hands. How to grip her legs just above the knees and press down to give her hamstrings a careful stretch. I learned to twist her bent legs and shoulder in opposite directions, to pull her arm up in a straight line so that her hand rested above her head. My mother wanted her to look as normal as possible, “She is a beautiful girl and that is what she can give to the world. It is important to me that she have that.”

Even though I knew my sister, I knew nothing because I lived inside a flurry of stories and desires that circled the subject of her life, told to me as facts by everyone around her. I knew things in my body that were not what I was told, so I grew up believing that my body was an unreliable narrator. What my sister could communicate was never complete, always intangible., always under siege by the stories that enveloped her. It was a common compulsion to fill out the information for her and as I grew, I began inventing her also, even though I knew better. 

When I was 12, I opened my mouth and suddenly found a singing voice that was mine and belonged to me and surprised everyone. I remember singing to my sister in her room the summer I came home from bible camp. We were alone in the house. I sang campfire song after campfire song while she listened, wide awake and face up on the carpet. 

A year later, in a lesson, my voice was taken from me and replaced with something I spent the next 37 years trying to understand. Why do some adults need to hurt children to feel their power. I remember standing in my underwear in the teacher’s studio at 6pm. It was winter outside and dark. All the lights were turned off but the lamp on his piano perhaps so no one could see in. He told me about the terrible break in my voice and how only he knew how to fix it. He told me that the secret was between my legs. 

How does someone leap themselves into the story of a hero to do this kind of evil? Children are always looking for heroes. I was a new teen with a flat chest. I hadn’t even had my first period and he was talking to me about my sexual power. I thought he was a god when he sat playing his upright under that lamp, singing The Music of the Night just like the recording. Then he told me all about his first sexual experience with another boy in a tent when he was 17. “This has everything to do with the voice,” he said. 

My teacher’s pedagogy consisted of anecdotes about his sex life, questions about how and when I masturbated and snide comments about my commitment, my integrity, my dignity, my confidence. I know now that he had no idea how to teach me to sing. He was only interested in my voice as a trick he could turn with my body in his mouth and his hands on me. What is it that makes an adult believe in this kind of care: convincing himself as he convinced me that he was the answer? Now, I know my 13-year-old body pitied him even as it idolised him. How else could I explain it? I couldn’t.

10 years later another teacher showed me how to sing through my break in a single lesson without even laying a finger on me. There was not one word about my body beyond my breath and the support of my muscles. He spoke euphemistically about my lower abdominals. He touched his own rib with the very tip of his index finger through the loose cardigan sweater that hung on his 78-year-old frame. “Don’t bare down,” he said. “Use less air. Support your voice,” he said. I left his studio and went into shock for the next 23 years. It is interesting how the body can protect you from a horrible story. I couldn’t remember a thing.

As a teen I grew rapidly, taller, and heavier and prettier but I made myself narrow and curved and useful because useful was valuable. At 17, I discovered my masculinity in a pair of boots and a short haircut. It felt like a life vest though the queers around me kept calling it drag. My father thought it was a phase. My mother thought that some trauma had brought about a sudden unnatural shift in my sexuality. Temporary aberration. 

In the gay bars I went to, I was read as something other than a woman but something other than a man. It was 1990, and I didn’t qualify for whatever it was that was available as a category - the story, or wit, or presentation that I was supposed to already know. The boys who taught me to walk in heels practiced cruelty by giving each other women’s names and screaming “tranny” at the slightest infraction. I pushed my voice lower even as I sang through my break. I flattened myself into a straighter line. I sat on the laps of men and women who commented on the smell of my deodorant. Bodies and sex and love were points of navigation that everyone else seemed to have fluently mapped. I was a smudge of gestures and attempts. I would practice calling myself a lesbian in my bedroom mirror, but I could never quite find the character. I moved away from home at 18. It took a few terrible experiences for me to default into the form of a straight woman. That seemed to be my only choice.

For years, whenever I was home for a visit, I would go into my sister’s room right before she slept.  I knew that if I wandered in at just the right moment, I would catch her at her most lucid. That was when I felt her know me. Did the darkness help her to see? Did the silence help her hear? When I touched her cheek or the back of her hand, I could finally feel that electricity. During the day she was so often not there. There were times when her seizures were relentless, and she had to be heavily medicated or risk more damage. She’d flop her head down over her tray, or stare into the backs of the bright green eyes that did not connect to her visual cortex. Throughout my life I lost my sister again and again in these hours. Eventually I decided that I’d never really known her. I had only ever known the story that I told myself about her.

As a child I deeply understood catastrophe. As an adult I waited for it, watched for it, tuned to it. I often could not see the world around catastrophe. I made up stories about everything I saw – imagined a dangerous or tragic ending. It is a strange way to be a person. 

When I became a parent, something shifted into sharp focus: a retroactive application of the painful knowing. I finally began to listen to my body. Now I build worlds where my children’s bodies are believed, and where the tender membrane of becoming isn’t pulled at or chastised or compared with derision to the hardening norm of compliance. My children will tell their own stories and I will listen.

I have been returned to my body for five years now. I found a way to uncover and claim what was always here. Pain has become a tuning fork. Pressure has brought me back into my skin. I no longer seek erasure. I seek a porous containment.

When I found my gender, I found my sexuality folded inside it. I think of the snails that I have tattooed on my forearm – one for each child. Snails are hermaphroditic: they can live for years without expressing their sexuality whether because of biology or environmental conditions. Now I live in a constant state of becoming. I am a masculine form composed of softer parts. In my body is a sweet, sharp, regulating pain that I invite and depend upon. It names me correctly. It leads me back to my body. I instrumentalize, I siphon this hardened history into lines and edges that I can finally understand. 

"Breathe," I tell myself.  “Support the voice,” I tell myself, and I do.