part one
I slowly eased onto the coolness of the laminate countertop, bracing myself for the feeling on my bare skin. Sitting there in the corner emphasized the emptiness of the boy’s kitchen, of his whole apartment. There were no table, chairs, or couch, all personal belongings were packed up to be moved. The counters, fridge, and sink were against the far wall, opposite the front door. It was like everything important in the space was pushed against the wall there, compact and out of the way. The open space in the middle was the boy’s dance floor. He played his music while I would watch him dance from my perch on the counter. I’d been told to wait while he cooked dinner; he always refused my help. This is one of those moments where I don’t know what to do. In nervousness, I shift my legs, slowly peeling them away from the laminate where they’ve stuck from my sweat.
Next to me his shaky hands chopped peppers and onions and tomatoes. I watch him do this intently--I’m always curious to see how other people cut their fruits and vegetables. Sometimes he wouldn’t use a cutting board, tomato in hand, the knife precariously close to flesh. I could only watch with horror and fascination. Somehow it seems I know a lot of people who are bad at cutting fruit though I mean no judgement by this. I take a lot of enjoyment form the methodical way my mother taught me to handle fruits and vegetables. Take an apple for example. The clunk as its set upright on the cutting board. Rotating it to find the best angle, and in one motion cutting clean through the middle. The halves are laid on their backs, finger and thumb on either side creating an opening for the knife. Quarters. Each one individually cared for, the stem, seeds, and base removed. Up, down, rotate, repeat. Careful not to cut too far through to your hand. I never imagined this other way of doing it—removing the flesh as it comes.
Permanently burned into my brain is the memory of an old friend, sitting at the kitchen table, apples, cutting board, and knife in front of her. After she cuts the apple (green) in half, she attempts to slice the half in half still in that upright position. Her hand wobbles back and forth trying to hold steady. It’s impossible to cut anything without a sturdy base yet miraculously she has never hurt herself doing this.
Though I’ve never seen the boy cut an apple (I don’t know if he even likes apples), I’d imagine he’d cut around the apple core 1, 2, 3, 4 times, cutting the two bigger pieces in thirds. Four center pieces and four corners. Somehow and apple always divides into eight pieces. I’m fascinated by this geometry.
At some point in high school I started eating apples whole, usually as a snack when I came home. This was something my family never did, and still doesn’t. Apples were always prepared by my mother, perfectly evenly sliced the way she taught me, placed on a plate and shared between the four of us at lunch. During the week, in my lunch, would be the slices of half an apple, the other half to be found in my sister’s lunch. As a snack, they’d be left on the cutting board on the kitchen counter, and the message delivered by my mother to everyone in their respective rooms.
“There’s some apple in the kitchen if you want some.”
Often this would incite running, as if the allotted two slices would be taken by someone else. As a rule, extra slices were only to be eaten if they were not claimed within several hours of the initial call.
Sometimes my father would come in and ask,
“There’s some apple in the kitchen for you, are you going to eat it?”
This mostly happened when I was older, often times lying in bed in the dark engrossed in my computer.
I never asked to eat the extra slices.
There was always something about possession there, especially when I started eating my own apple.
I wonder if we had stayed in California, would my mother have made the trek upstairs to alert us of the freshly sliced apple, or would the obstacle have inspired yelling in an all too quiet (stairless) household? I often mourn for a lost Californian childhood, imagining growing up on the hills of San Francisco. How different it would be--could be—from the flat deserts of the southwest. Though the whole state of California has not broken off and floated into the ocean like the movies of my childhood, the idea I have of this place might as well have.
part two
My first serious relationship began the summer after I graduated high school. I was away from home working at an all-girls summer camp where I had chosen to spend the last three months before college away from my family.
For the past year, I had called myself Oliver. At summer camp I was Pan, as in Peter Pan. “Camp names” are a tradition from a time when it was improper to call an adult by their first name and “miss” was too formal. The new name symbolized the opportunity to escape the pressure to live up to an ideal image of masculinity, to “pass.” Camp was the ideal environment to do this: in an all-girls camp where everyone is assumed to be the same gender, the need to define yourself through gendered norms fades (at least a little).
I liked the girl because she liked me, and I grew to like her (even love her), admire her, and learn so much from her. But because the relationship was founded on my “girl” camp self, there were fundamental things she did not understand about me and about my way of being in this world.
Yet again, I fell into the trap of needing to live up to the image I’d made of myself.
Looking back, I still feel conflicted about the choice I made to keep my gender identity to myself. Audre Lorde chose not to share her sexuality to a co-worker who exclaimed “I thought you was gay!” after finding out Audre is pregnant. (1) Someone recently pointed out to me that in doing so she claimed power over when and how she defined herself. I had not thought about it like that before, or how my own actions spoke to a personal need for space to discover myself.
After being in a lesbian relationship for so long (two years which feels like forever at nineteen), I found it hard to own up to being non-binary even though I was surer than ever about the label—choosing one identity felt like abandoning the other, which I had a deeply personal connection to. I’ve been told before by other non-binary trans folk that you can’t be both lesbian and non-binary, and anyone who is both is dismissed as confused over the difference between gender expression and identity (though that difference isn’t necessarily cut and dry).
“Rather than wanting to change the whole model, many of us want to be at the center.” (2)
This is the kind of attitude which re-centers and prioritizes one trans experience over another which in a way reinforces cis-het ideals of gender. For example, the above kind of thinking plays into the stereotype which equates trans-masculine people to butch lesbian. People who actually identify similarly, such as non-binary lesbians, are seen as a threat to those who are trying to change the assumptions made about trans people. Even as they are breaking away from the power of cis het rules, they make their own rules, repeating the same abuse of power. (3) The reality of the situation is that the experience of gender is not monolithic or binary—it is necessary to acknowledge the multitude of experiences. (4) For a long time, I perceived my way of slicing apples as correct, as the monolith. It took “the sharing of joy” with those who are different to accept that difference into my definition of correct. (5)
(1) Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (Berkley: Crossing Press, 2011), 108.
(2) Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987): 61, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354255.
(3) Christian, “The Race for Theory,” 60-61.
(4) Christian, “The Race for Theory,” 59.
(5) Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches (Berkley: Ten Speed Press, 2016), 56.
Bibliography
Christian, Barbara. "The Race for Theory." Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987): 51-63. Accessed May
17, 2020. doi:10.2307/1354255.
Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider Essays and
Speeches, 53-59. Berkley: Ten Speed Press, 2016.
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography. Berkley: Crossing Press,
2011.
Comments