Your Body, You, and the Sadness of This

For the drive to the cemetery I keep Tavi’s new old camera between my thighs so it stays warm while the car takes its sweet time to heat up. She wants to photograph the lichen speckled headstones and the stark, bare trees against the clear sky. I want a change of scenery and lungs full of cold air. We walk the gentle hills and valleys of the dead until close, the cold radiating out from the stones through our canvas and wool layers until our femurs are chilled and we’re blowing air like horses, great billows of breath. Back in the car, teeth chattering, I try to impress her with my vast lyrical knowledge, belting out every word to every song that comes on the oldies station until she’s weeping with laughter at my sincerity.

The next day I spot the long lusted after Hawk in the Spruce out back. I’ve made a habit of scanning the branches with such frequency that I’ve grown casual about it, so my glance lands on the stout being eyeballing me from above for a few seconds before I realize what I’m seeing and when it sinks in I forget if I’m inhaling or exhaling and gasp painfully into full lungs. Sam, the neighbor’s bro of a dog, hears me struggling and starts shouting through the fence, pulling me from my reverie. I’m late, I can’t stay and watch the hawk. My reluctant steps towards the garage and Sam’s loud nonsense perturb our haughty watcher who, maintaining eye contact, shifts from foot to foot before diving off the branch and soaring out under the branches and over the block. At the alley gate Sam stands huffily, all consumed by hating the fence between us as I unlock the garage and coo hi baby dog, hey boo boo, you sure are a lousy birdwatcher, but thanks for bearing witness with me. I follow the hawk’s path with the car as far as I can and wish, for the twelve hundredth time, that I was not so very grounded.

As the -TQIA are removed from government sites and efforts are made to define and enforce gender as a binary I feel stubbornly embodied, so very much here. Resistance by existence. I’ve been wearing my black boots nonstop for a few weeks, the latest hand-me-downs in a long line of not-quite shit kickers. They perform exactly as every punk has ever advertised and make me feel large and in charge. I practice walking the blocks home from the bus stop like I’m turning the earth with each step, the effort of which strains my calves and engages the arches and balls of my feet. I stomp up the stairs as if I’ve got something to say even though current events have knocked me wordless. I unlace my boots in the frigid hallway, trying to keep the weekend’s cemetery dirt out of the kitchen. As I step the one inch down onto the smooth wooden floor I can feel all of the uneven ways in which my feet are different from the previous wearer’s. I walk back to myself in sweaty wool socks across the kitchen and peer out into the Spruce. No hawk medicine today, just Sam pacing the hard-packed dirt yard and the smelly man smoking in the alley while I soar above, barefoot and wingless.

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Grace