1997

It was kindergarten. We were sitting under a painted rainbow.

“You could change it all now, you know,” she said.

I looked at her. “Change what?” I said. My face was smudged with crayon and little-girl curiosity.

“Your life,” she said. “You could change what happens later. In a few years you won’t like it very much. Do you want to change it?”

“Why?” I asked, worried. “What happens?”

She shrugged. “Nothing much, really. Nothing horrible.”

My brow creased. Again and again, now, I watch that brow crease, watch the wrinkles appear on a smooth clear forehead.

“Well,” I said, “what’s the problem, then?” I was about to discount her, to write off her words as just another unfulfilled prophecy. I looked up to where the birds were wheeling in the sky. White on blue: you had to squint to see them.

She made her way along the ledge beneath the mural, alternating her steps, one foot on, one foot off. The concrete sparkled in the sun. She paused, adjusting her glasses, which reflected the sparkles in a way that seemed profound. She sighed. “You’ll want to be less happy.”  

High above her, the birds wheeled against the sun: sheets on a laundry line, flapping in the breeze.

***

I don’t know what she’s doing there. I didn’t know her in kindergarten. I was trying to write a story and she crept in. She tends to do that: she’s my prophet, my bard, my blind foreteller of unwanted futures.

She is more depressed than I am. Also, she eats more and weighs more and is nevertheless prettier, in a slow-moving melancholy way. She is damaged: she has the kind of minor problems that cause guys to like you, because they can sweep in like knights in shining armor to save you from yourself. I have the kind of medium-sized problems that stick out sharply at all the wrong angles and drive people away.

***

I was built for harder things. I am fragile but I was meant to wince beneath these blows: I was meant to cringe, to crumple radially inward, to be mangled and mutilated and beaten to submission on the floor before I could be left alone. I am glass, but I was meant to be splintered. I was meant to weather fiercer storms, to be battered and shaken like a willow tree in a hurricane, just barely holding on by the roots.

I was meant to withstand stronger stuff than this.

***

1998

I believe I am an alien.

At bedtime, blue evening spreads over the windows. I stare out in guileless longing, probing my fears as I brush my teeth. I wish only to get home.

2000

Standing on a playground, head bowed, waiting for the rain to fall. On me, please.

***

Build me a shelter out of sticks and stones. Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will always hurt me: build me a shelter from the words you hurl at me, these insults that strike my back with a comforting regularity. Do not stop. Do not stop. If you stop I cannot breathe easy, I cannot sleep at night. I’ve got my eyes closed, waiting for the next blow – catching my breath in preemptive hurt.

Start insulting me in three… two… one…   

Wait, where are you going?

***

2007, February

I close my eyes and whisper ordinary wishes into a pillow. My world is pink and edged with lace: it hurts my eyes.

2007, May

The Kinsey scale is unforgiving.

1 2 3 4 5 6. I watch his shoulders as he leaves the classroom. At a certain point numbers don’t matter: he is a him and there has never been a her like this.

2007, June

I look directly at the sun, and the blinding flare obliterates all else.

2007, August

I implode. Curled up on my bed in shame, shrinking in concentric circles: radially inward.

2007, October

I am in the hospital. It feels right.

My mouth is a mess of blood-filled bubbles and thick white scars. An I.V. unit is hooked to my left hand, and every few seconds its plastic tube flows a cold click of saline solution into my veins. The white floor echoes with its whirrs and beeps. Life support.

The mortality rate is five percent, fifty percent if it spreads: the promise of an ending. The worry is congenial. I smile into my pillow and dream of floating away.

***

I see her in the hallways now. She is prettier than me. I am thin, but in a way that makes me look as though I am just getting over an illness. I was getting over an illness – it left me hollow and delicate, skin stretched over bone and shoulders like a bird’s – but that should have ended months ago. Do you want to trade metabolisms? Then maybe I could expand, I could bulge – then I might feel properly heavy. Geeks are supposed to be fat and ugly and I only fulfill half of that requirement. My face looks like it’s been through a blender – that is my own doing – but I can’t change genetics and I’m not quite radical enough to start shoving cake down my throat.

The scale reads 102.5. I curse quietly, then remember that I am a person who never curses.

***

2008, May

“Haven’t you heard of that stereotype,” someone says, “that Jews have horns?”

He laughs. “You should have horns,” he says to me. “You would actually like having horns. Because you would be different from everybody, right? You would be weirder.”

I laugh too. It is not often someone states my existence aloud. “Yeah,” I say, “if anybody should have horns, it should be me.”

He shakes his head. “That’s so funny. You’re so funny.”

He is a friend, but like everyone else he lives his life hoping to belong.

2008, June

“I wish I were gay,” I say to my mother. It’s an offhand comment, meant to be forgotten.

She turns and stares at me. “What? I wouldn’t wish that on anybody!”

I ask her why, and she explains that she’s referring to the prejudice, to homophobia. “We live in New York,” I remind her. “It’s not that bad here.”

“I know,” she says, “but still. I think it’s hard. It’s very hard.”

***

I am downtown on a Saturday morning. Sun splays over the sidewalk and park, drenching green leaves with yellow, drawing sparkles out of the concrete. The Union Square farmers’ market blooms like a flower emphatically bent on life. The people are a vibrant mass of color, and I am struck by only one sensation: I do not belong here.

The phrase settles over my shoulders like a familiar warm cloak. The sun is heavy and my eyes feel numb. And I marvel at this, how I settle into this sun so easily – I have never told anyone how right this feels, this depression, this glutinous slow-moving sadness.

I move hunched over, weighed down by my backpack and unspoken apology:

life always hurt my eyes a little and sun reminds me only of endings

Whoever said endings were hard never really got close to one. At an ending, which is really like a party, everything is beautiful, but there is none of the strain of having to get up the next morning. There is a strange aliveness in death, and at present that seems to be all that I want: a world fading into the sun, where the flowers bloom ever more brightly, leaching their color from my face.

***

2008, June

I’m losing two teachers, which is like losing two limbs. The knowledge holds the promise of an ending.

I hug one of them. My goodbye disappears into the air beyond his shoulder.

I tell myself that without them I will die, I will splinter into pieces and disperse, at the mercy of the wind – I will blow away. I tell myself this, but as he retreats down the hallway, all that is left in his wake is a faint air of reproach: You know better than that.

Better than what? I ask.

I paraphrase for myself: You know better than to think you should grow horns.

Why?

He sighs. He is there again, his image remaining in the negative space he has left. Because, Anne, you don’t have horns.

2046, June

I grow horns.

2046, August

In this apartment, the Hudson River drifts outside my window. The sun gleams off the water, making little rainbows. It sears my eyes as I stare upward.

I see her in the streets sometimes. She no longer wears glasses. Once or twice I tried to convince myself I was in love with her, but it didn’t work. I wanted merely to be there in the café with them, laughing over coffee and steamed milk. After that I began avoiding her entirely. I frequent the Union Square farmers’ market, where she never goes, where bits of me fell through the cracks in the sidewalk that host little sprouts of grass, where I can catch tiny glimpses of the sky. I wander endlessly.

She is my blind prophet, but I am the one who cannot see.