dust bunnies

i'm a messy person. although meticulously organized spaces are aesthetically pleasing to me, i have a hard time fully appreciating it knowing that perfect neatness will go the way of the dodo in a matter of hours just by virtue of how i go through life. 

naturally, in the same way that my dresser often has an errant sock keeping the top drawer from closing and my desk is barely visible under notebooks and half-finished paint-by-numbers, my closet has its share of dust bunnies.

even though my appearance may lead people to think otherwise, i'm still not completely out of the closet. people in my hometown still know me as "danny's daughter" or "used to be the fastest girl on the otters' cross-country team". i've always seen coming out to my father and his family as the final hurdle before i can consider myself "fully out" and go through life accordingly, and that has yet to happen.

as such, i've never been in a place where i could start hormones or get top surgery or just go through life without being intensely aware of my transness and whether or not it's safe to reveal it, whether or not i'm risking this getting around to my parents or any of the other 2,000 people in my tight-knit hometown.

and it's been this way since i first realized i was trans in middle school. i'm a pretty good case study in "strict parents raise sneaky children", particularly as it comes to transness. 

so, especially in the early years of realizing i was trans, gender euphoria came in small stolen morsels. sneaky little things i could do to make myself a little happier without raising questions from my parents or peers. i've always thought of these little things i clung and occasionally still cling to as dust bunnies on the floor of the closet. i can only see them all because i'm in the closet with them. they're small, but they're soft and feel nice to hold and sit with.

in eighth grade, i found a pinterest post that explained how to make a binder from a sports bra and a tank top. i was an athlete even then; i already had everything i needed. 

my early attempts... didn't pan out. by the end of the day, the folds of the tank top had slipped down and bunched up uncomfortably around my ribs. i have a suspicion that this may be part of the reason why my ribs are still slightly flared today.

i could put on an oversized flannel and see my body become boxy and rectangular and smile at my reflection in the mirror.

one day, i finally convinced my mother to let me cut my hair to a super-short pixie cut. when i saw it in the mirror and the stylist asked how i liked it, i had to fight to keep my excitement at a level that wouldn't raise questions.

a few weeks later, i was in line at the store, and the cashier motioned to the older man in line behind me, who pointed at me and said, "oh no, he was here first". i was on cloud nine for the rest of the day, and i'm smiling just writing this. 

in the first and only production i was onstage for, i played a male ensemble character. i'd never used stage makeup before- had barely used any makeup- but my friend and pseudo-adoptive older brother gunnar taught me how to contour my face and showed me how to use a coarse black sponge to create the illusion of stubble. 

when i looked in the mirror and saw my face angular and "unshaven", i had to fight to hide my excitement. for the remaining show nights, i would show up as much as an hour before my call time and immediately get into my costume and makeup so i could spend as much time as possible parading around in my baggy carhartts and flannel and stubble and feeling correct.

not long after this, i stole an eyeshadow palette and spent hours learning how to use the two shades of brown to make my face look the way it had looked with the stage makeup before scrambling to wash it off when i heard my mother pull into the driveway.

i made trans friends- haden, who had just transferred to my school, and rex and sal- two twins that i had known since fifth grade. rex, a trans man, was on testosterone by ninth grade, and i remember the envy mixing in with joy as i watched his face change and heard his voice deepen. sal, his twin, is non-binary, but for some reason their mother wouldn't let them start hormones, even though she had been completely supportive of rex. i found comfort in their company- we were all leftists (of what particular sect i'm still not sure; haden was a little more socialist-leaning but rex and sal were either anarchists, communists, or anarcho-communists.

i loved spending lunch breaks in the lobby with them, occasionally getting into arguments with the rednecks who walked laps and hurled slurs at us. 

for a few years, i went deeper into the closet, and also into a pretty severe depressive episode. but for a while i was completely out online, using a chosen name and any pronouns on lovely tumblr dot com, where i became fairly well-known in the m*a*s*h community.

i found posts for pre-t transmascs about what foods to try and eat more of, and although i have my doubts about the scientific legitimacy of this, it brought me a great deal of comfort to incorporate these foods into meals.

on a few occasions, my friends would get the idea to send a selfie that "accidentally" included another guy to whichever dude they were talking to who'd started ignoring them or pushing his luck. every time, i would leap at the chance to bundle my now-grown-out hair into a baseball cap and throw on baggy clothes and pose in the background of a photo to piss those dudes off. was it immature? perhaps.

but seeing those photos always brought a smile and another brief morsel of feeling like myself. plus, i'm always willing to throw down for my friends, particularly where mediocre cishet men are concerned.

for a while, i palled around with a group of park skiers at killington, almost all of whom were cis men. i scored a massively oversized black-and-gray armada jacket that smelled like weed from one of them and did my best to lower my voice and mirror their mannerisms and speech patterns. and it felt great.

in retrospect, they weren't exactly the greatest people i've known, and i don't regret parting company. but a lot of the more masculine habits and mannerisms that bring me brief moments of euphoria came from them, and this story wouldn't be complete without acknowledging that.

i got to castleton and immediately connected with a group of queer and non-binary friends. there, i also met rome, and a trans man named mason, who introduced me to a level of gender envy i'd never experienced before.

i got to uvm and met my first friends here, a gay guy named skye; his roommate, a trans man named easton; and a funny, outgoing trans woman named amber. slowly our group grew to ten or so trans and queer people who lived in the same dorm. our group chat was named "gayvis" in honor of davis hall, where we lived.

one night in october, i borrowed easton's beard trimmer and buzzed my then-shoulder-length hair off. standing in front of the mirror on my door, looking at the pile of off-brown hair surrounding me, my head felt five pounds lighter. 

i started using they/them pronouns at work and with friends the following spring, but still carefully kept this hidden from my parents. 

going to middlebury was a surprisingly massive relief. i had my own room in a co-ed building, and even in the emails about my pay that were forwarded to me, people were still diligent about calling me "they". even though my room was sweltering at best with all three fans running, i was happy to be somewhere my gender was almost never even brought up. 

i understand just enough french to hear the difference between masculine (il), feminine (elle) and neutral (the less-common iel). because this was a job at a language school and i worked closely with the french department, i listened closely to hear what they called me. every time i caught an "il" or "iel" when the directors turned away to converse in french, i would be almost skipping through the rest of the day. i didn't quite understand enough to know if they were referring to me, but even the possibility that they were made me almost giddy.

i glowed as i watched my arms become toned and muscular and allowed my legs and underarms to grow unshaven, knowing my parents were in another county and couldn't say shit.

when i returned to uvm, i started to notice the hairs on my chin and upper lip becoming slightly coarser and darker than the surrounding fuzz. i refused point-black to shave or cut or pluck them; i welcomed their presence and it's still not uncommon to see me doing the pretentious beard-stroke with all four of the hairs on my chin. 

sometimes, i would (and still do) even get out that same stolen eyeshadow palette and use the darker brown pigment to delicately add more color to the hairs on my upper lip. by cis standards, it would barely count as a mustache, but i could see the difference, and i would always feel better afterwards.

that october, i bought my first binder. the first time i looked in the mirror, it took me several minutes to fully adjust to the differences in my silhouette. i've worn that thing to hell and back, even when it bunches up around my stomach and is plainly visible under cropped shirts. 

i started to feel like myself in houses packed full of people like me, where no one gave me a second glance if i showed up wearing my binder as if it was just a particularly form-fitting shirt. i felt understood, welcomed, even if i knew my being sober still unintentionally functioned as a partition between myself and everyone else in the house. those evenings let me feel at home, in good company and good about myself. i've never felt the slightest inclination to hide my queerness at these parties.

not so long ago, i went out on a date (a good few dates, actually) with another trans person for the first time. i'd only dated one person before- a cishet man that i was only out to as bisexual and who once asked me, "i know you're bi, but we're dating, so that means you're straight now, right?" among far more offensive things. 

i'm notoriously reserved about relationships and feelings in general. i feel strange discussing them with people outside my very closest circle of friends, and even then i'll often delay giving updates for weeks or even months after the fact if they don't come up naturally in conversation or if i'm not asked directly.

but this couldn't have possibly been more different from my first relationship, and for that i'll forever be grateful. 

the feeling of looking across a table and knowing that the person on the other side saw me as exactly what i am, even as we drew stares from other people in the restaurant, was a feeling i'll never forget.

later that night, we ended up making out, and at some point they leaned in and whispered in my ear that i was "so handsome". 

i'm a big enough person to admit that brought me dangerously close to fainting.

thus far, every trans person i've made out and/or hooked up with has called me handsome at least once, and the thrill of hearing that has yet to fade. 

when i go back to my parents' house and i have to hear "daughter" and "girl" and "woman" and "she", those memories become a lifeline until i can return to my beloved bubble where i can make jokes about being trans and call myself a guy and a person and a creature and hear others do the same. i do my best to shut out what i'm hearing and reconstruct the memories of those voices.

recently, amber gave me a bunch of her old pre-transition clothes: a soft brown winter jacket with a fleece collar, a baggy flannel with pockets i could hide a tank in, and a cozy woven sweater. they're some of my favorite clothing articles.

more recently, rome and i went to the mount zion zen gardens in rural hubbardton. i had my beloved skin-tone(ish) binder on, and since the gardens were nearly vacant except for us, i took the liberty of tossing my shirt onto one of the scattered adirondack chairs, kicking off my shoes, and going for a climb.

even if i wasn't fully shirtless, i felt like i might as well have been, and in most of the pictures rome took, i look like i could be. even just feeling the wind on my chest and doing the "dude thing" of climbing sans shirt brought me unbelievable joy.

each of these little morsels of gender euphoria feels like another dust bunny in the closet with me. although i'll always wonder how my life may have been different if i had come out and "really transitioned" years ago, like rex did, these tiny scraps formed a story uniquely mine. i look back on them not only for reassurance on the bad days but also to see how far i've come. 

someday, maybe i'll have more than dust bunnies to cling to. maybe i'll gather all those little scraps and morsels up and let them spill out of the closet with me. who knows?

but i can say with certainty that those tiny memories shaped my coming-out story, and that they will always remain sacred to me. they're welcome to pile up in the nooks and corners of the closet for as long as i'm in here with them.