#guttertongue

My grandmother Janet is 96 years old. The last time I visited, while drinking the traditional after-dinner gin and tonics, we got to talking about the treasures lying around her house. Somehow we settled on a particular needlepoint hanging on the wall.

She asked: Who made that one, does it say?

And I said: It says "Deedee".

And she laughed: I didn't remember making that one!

My brain wasn't working as fast as my tongue that night— perhaps on account of the gin— and I said: Wait, who is Deedee?

She laughed again, and explained. It was what her parents called her, and the name that she used until she went to high school. All her best friends, everyone who knew her from back in the day, they still call her Deedee.

And then she said to me: You know, Janet is not my real name either. Nobody calls me by my real name, because nobody alive remembers it. And I'm not telling anyone now. It is just for me.

iii,

I was studying abroad in Budapest when I received a facebook message from Rob. A friend, not quite 21, from college back home, saying: I have a secret to tell you, but I do not want anyone else to know. I don't even want to write it here.

I replied, Here is my address. Write it down and mail it to me. I will read it, and then I will burn it; and he agreed.

I left the house, went all the way to the end of the metro, found a convenience store, bought a pack of matches, and sat down in the nearby park.

The three sentences at the start of the letter were: I am transgender. I am a man. My name is not [what we once called him], it is Rob.

This much is no longer a secret, but the three pages that followed are not my stories to tell.

(Have you ever tried to burn a letter? With a match. It is harder than you’d think.)

It is common now for a trans person to refer to their "old" name, the one assigned to them that they no longer use, as their deadname. Rob did not use this language in the letter, probably only because he did not know it yet.

Some of the debris from the letter made it into a trash can. But most blew away into the Hungarian landscape, white flecks scattered in the wind.

ii,

I set my father into the ground in October. He would have been 71.

It was a whirlwind of a weekend, of a week, really. Gatherings every night, friends and family buzzing in the house all day, as if the collective strength of so many silent prayers might summon him, Christ-like, into our midst.

Flying was my dad's first love. I was born near the end of his distinguished career as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. He continued flying, commercially, for as long as I lived under his roof.

A fighter's call sign is what the other fighters call them over the radio when flying together. Pragmatically it is a mask for when enemies intercept communication. But to the squadron, there is nothing secret about this identity; it is more a name than their name is. My dad's call sign is— was— Bear. At the memorial gathering, that was the name that rang long after sundown, that echoed in the still desert air. 

Bear was rowdy, gregarious, and virile. Stories about his after-work antics sprang readily to the lips of the guests. Boozy, shirtless memories of he and his fighter friends, boys who aged but never grew up. And then, after the laughs and a moment's pause, they would add sincere praise about Bear the professional. Thoughtful. Whip-smart. Straightforward. Generous. Passionate.

This man they described was familiar enough, but deeply unrecognizable. He bore little resemblance to the temperamental and stern authority of my childhood memories. Even less to the man I knew on equal footing, after several medical emergencies brought an early and unceremonious end to a lifetime in the cockpit.

I would have liked Bear, I think, but I never met him— I knew him too late.

i,

There are many stories to tell of my father, the man-who-was-not-Bear. I never know which one to start with.

I once asked my mom if I could paint my nails red. I don't remember my mother wearing colored nail polish, it must have been a neighbor who I saw, and the idea enchanted me. And yet somehow, there was the bottle, right underneath the phone. It would have been so easy. But mom said no, dad would be furious. And we both knew that was the end of that.

I liked my hair long. My parents did not. They tolerated it, in the way that one tolerates such inconsequential teenage lashings-out. But the frequency of snide remarks would increase in proportion with its length, and roughly every 6 months I would give in.

(When I was older, I discovered that my hair actually would not get much longer than that. After about 9 months, I shed.)

And if I could see you, I would see these stories fall lighter on your brow than on they lay on my psyche. And I would be suddenly tempted to strike cheap, to scowl forty-five and let sympathy roll in. But it’s too… it’s dehumanizing, and it’s not even narratively right— it doesn’t describe the heft of the uncertainty he left me with, any more than a dumbbell thrown at your face conveys the weight of a blanket.

The household I grew up in was reductivist when not mechanistic, and my childhood gave but scant framework to understand the impact of a thousand unremarkable moments. Still, human, I could not divert myself from the creation of my personal mythology, grasping at any explanation for those forces of parental nature. Nor from this private, shameful conclusion: that this love is, perhaps, conditional. Not necessarily. But the threat was there, and I, conflict-shy, colored inside the lines.

Dharys was 29 when my father died. Or maybe he was 2. (...let's not think too hard about that one.) In any case, my father never met Dharys, and for this alone I still grieve. In the dark I wonder if he ever had these feelings about Bear— this bridgeless chasm between us, etched in time. The quiet, tugging sadness that I would never know him as he was.

Perhaps he never could have, I reason, hopefully. Tieflings learn young, after all, how to hide. Perhaps Dharys can only live because not-Bear has died.

Or perhaps he knew me too early.

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((posting here a positively fantastic commission by the artist @guttertongue (twitter/website)!

lookit my big fightin DRK lady looking all angry in the middle of a battlefield I love her

Hello again @guttertongue! What a year this has been!

It was not my intention to have this note be much about me, the mod, the man behind the curtain. But it seems it was unavoidable. In our second year together (as I'm beginning to suspect will be true for many years to come) Dharys' fate and mine were closely intertwined.

Toward the beginning of 2021, as my New Year's writing resolve was fading, I received an opportunity to spend the next two years working in Prague. Of course, I said yes; things like that don't come along every day! There was a catch: I needed to lead the charge to finish up a project at my company that had been left simmering for far too long. It meant that I had to put almost everything else aside to get this thing out the door. So Dharys languished as I cut corners with both my time and my money to make that possible.

I'll spare you the details, but long story short, that wasn't a chapter of my life that I will remember fondly. I feel like I've backtracked on a lot of the progress that I made as a person last year. In Dharys' absence, in my rush to make a deadline, I've been less generous, attentive, and patient. Ultimately, Dharys is a fictional character. As much as his presence has been a positive force in my life, I don't regret setting him aside— what I do regret is letting my stress control me and mistreating some of my favorite people, here and elsewhere. At this point, unfortunately, that damage is done; all I can do is ask forgiveness and do better.

* * *

When I looked up at the world again, it was July, and many things had changed. Notable among them: an anon in my inbox, asking some questions to Dharys (which were surprisingly hard-hitting >.<). To this anon, I know it must have seemed like a simple thing, to respond to an ask game. But I can't thank you enough for reminding me that "life will always welcome you back" (—James Portnow, Extra Credits).

And so, amidst the general chaos of this summer and my specific difficulties as an expat, I started to hear our boy speaking again. It was slow, and quiet, but I knew to be patient. Hard to blame the guy for being recalcitrant.

Eventually he told me a small story, and I was able to write it down. Next month I got another ask from a longtime friend of the blog, and I've gotten a couple more recently, one of which I've finished and the other one is in progress. I've done some other writing in the meantime (which for various reasons hasn't been appropriate to post here, sorry...) and these little thought experiments have helped me kick it off.

These are small steps, and I'm looking forward to more to come.

I want to leave on a happier bit of personal news:

Last year I talked about how Dharys helped me as I waded into the exophilia community. What I don't think I've ever explicitly discussed in this space is that for almost all of my adult life I have considered myself to be an asexual. But, as I had continued becoming more open about my exophilia and meeting lovely people who felt the same way, I began questioning the assumptions that led me to that conclusion.

Today, after a lot of self-reflection and with the help of some wonderfully patient people in my life, I'm now proud to call myself pansexual.

May your days ahead be filled with laughter and light.

— | Dharys

* * *

Greetings from the frozen north, @guttertongue​!

It’s been a wild year, hasn’t it? Can’t say it was good, exactly, but I’m writing to you today from a place of joy. A year ago, I adopted a tiefling from you (barely!), and I wanted to write to say thank you because that ended up being the big journey of this year for me...

He goes by Dharys now, and as a character he’s just been kind of simmering on low heat all year. I did write about him explicitly in one of my prompt fills, where I formally came to terms with him as a self-insert; just a funky little horse boy nervously making his way in a world that isn’t quite sure what to do with him. There’s a bit more backstory in scattered private messages and discarded drafts, and I think 2021 will be a real character development year for the boy ^.^

(The horse is named Vincenzo and your boy loves him very much~)

More than that, though, he’s been a wonderful persona for me to inhabit on this side of the internet. It seems so obvious now, but it was more or less a coincidence; I adopted him on a whim. (I mean, there was a reason, but it’s convoluted and doesn’t make a lot of sense.) At that time, I had already decided that I was going to try to get back into writing for fun, but I was still undecided about how exactly I would do that. Well, one thing led to another and I decided to start this blog, and since he was already around, I decided to make him my icon.

I’m not sure when exactly I started associating the name Dharys, which I was using for this side of my internet self, with the tiefling. But it was definitely sometime before April, when I ended up taking the dive into the exophilia community. That has been a truly rewarding experience, and if that had been all I’d gotten from this whole thing, it alone would have been more than enough.

But Dharys as persona has also lent me a lot of confidence. This takes a bit of explaining. Dharys was many firsts for me: the first time I had purchased from an artist online, certainly my first character adopt, my first *ahem*SFW*ahem* monster-related purchase. He was an early step in my ongoing process of learning to spend money on myself. As Dharys I purchased my first commissions, and made my first donations to the arts. As Dharys I’ve been able to recognize “spending money on myself” as a way that I can support artists I love. (And I’d like to think those were stepping stones in my willingness to evaluate my priorities and loosen my purse strings epsecially re: COVID and BLM— Shoutout to the Black COVID Relief Fund.)

In the back half of the year I’ve been less active on this side of the internet for work reasons. During that time, Dharys morphed into a muse and a sort of fictional second mod for this blog.

He’s a little bit immature in that role— mod!Dharys spends most of his time running around to my favorite artists for glamor shots. But he’s not totally absent; he does help me brainstorm, and even comments sometimes, mostly in the tags.

I could go on, but the point is— I feel so blessed that I’ve gotten to know your little tiefling boy, and our time together has truly been a highlight of my year ^.^

I hope that this note finds you well, and here’s to better days ahead!

— | Dharys

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