Home On The Dangle/Finally Sturdy/Strength

I’ve been more existential than

I usually am, even by my standards

I’ve been wondering

Why it is

That I’ve been so preoccupied with death see

Before I had top surgery I was hanging

On a thread, and

I hung out there

For so long

For decades

I kept

Dangling

I built a home

On the dangle! It’s fucking

Cozy sometimes I even make

Pies and stew and read books aloud

Talking to myself the way I always imagined

Great actors with great voices bellowed and bantered—

All while keeping one fist clenched—

All while holding my whole body’s weight

On a slippery thread.

I fucking loved life, despite the dangle

Not because of it, but rather

As a sort of

“Fuck all y’all I’m dangling and I’m proud”

I’d be like

“10 tips to be genderqueer—

Backbone.”

Now that I’m recovering quickly and

Feeling healthy and loving

Every single step I take in my new, masculinized body

I feel as if

Some buff person came along and

Helped me up, like the time I

Paddle boarded and fell

Or the time I went white water rafting, fell out

And got saved by some other nature saint.

I think —

When you’re dangling

Even when you get saved, you still feel

Endangered. You still feel

The floor fall out you still feel

The rush of life all around you battering you helplessly and

For me, I feel

With each step

As if my top surgeon

Held out a helping hand.

I feel helped by everyone and everything

I am surrounded by a network of love and passion and dedication, not one that I

“Always could’ve had” but because I didn’t

I chose to be who I want to be, not because I wasn’t able to, but because I was imprisoned—

With the help of some nice surgeon lady—

I made myself free

By asking for help, and for receiving it

Sometimes love is sex, sometimes love is

Lust, sometimes love is bullshit,

Sometimes love isn’t patient or kind,

Sometimes love doesn’t rhyme

Sometimes love is health insurance,

sometimes love is a friendship—

Sometimes love is the thing you wish you hadn’t.

Sometimes love moves through you ice cold, a ghost of a habit

For me

I experienced love unconditionally

When I met someone who safely removed

My goddamn beautiful titties.

If I had sex with a woman with

My old pre-transition body I would shed tears of breathless ecstasy and yet

Now when I look in the mirror

And touch my chest

I say what a man what a man what a man.

I have never been more excited

To talk to other people

To go places

To do things, I am excited about

What I’m capable of

Now that I’m on my own two feet, finally

Off the dangle, finally sturdy.

All jokes aside I am

Bizarrely the opposite of suicidal I am

Excited to live—

But no doubt

Now that I’ve made myself at home in this body

I can relax, because when I die

I won’t need to explain much. They’ll see me

As a man, and if they don’t

That’s okay— I’m fucking non-binary you goddamn idiots —

I made a home for myself on the dangle

And all this strength came with it