you ever remember all the first times you realized you were butch? i cant remember who i was but i have a memory of being half my current height, hair braided tight to my skull, looking in the wall wide mirror of my dance studio and vaguely thinking that i looked like an avatar of a trickster deity, then feeling something bloom in me because i looked like a little boy
and i remember the detached way i understood my gender as a childthing, dont remember exactly who i was but i have handfuls of memories where id think “i am one of my parents girls but i am not one of their girlchildren”, id think “when i grow up and im a boy i’ll ___”, id think “i am my fathers only son”
and i remember pocketing words like scruffy and tomboy and rakish, wearing them loose around my neck to contrast the stifling tight noose of all the things my mother planned for me. dont remember exactly who i was but i have pages of poetry where i clung to the word ragged like a dying man; something in the fragmental state of it
and i remember the drawn and quartered feeling of my gender identity versus the way i feel when im surrounded by women (my writing camp and my sisters and sitting cross legged on the floor while my mothers friends are over) dont remember exactly all the names of the people i became behind my ribcage, but i have the contrasting memories of myself in solitude; genderless like moonlight and just as gossamer; and myself in the company of women; warm to my roots, grown into everyone like ivy and budding flowers at the corners of my mouth
and i remember who i was, barista with a bad haircut, art student with hot glue singed hands, when i heard a thespian sing me the concept of butch. and i remember who i was, weary call center worker sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the afternoon bus home, when i read leslie fernberg describe, in technicolor heartache, the concept of butch
and i understood like a gunshot wound the camaraderie that the past can give, the way you can reach back through decades and touch hands to someone else who understands
what it means to only feel like a woman in the company of other women, what it means to define your womanhood in the whooping laughter and acrylics against your skin. what it means to push up out the dirt as a whole different beast than the thing that dropped your seeds. the duality of it. the specificity of the vagueness of your masculinity, and the kaleidoscope strange wildness of your femininity
