Bright lips, thin brows, plump lashes, foundation in the lightest shade on the market. She had the art form down pat, just a few moments needed before sunrise to put her face on. I only rarely saw my mother without a full face of makeup, and never in the full force of natural daylight. I know for a fact she would’ve been happier with a daughter, but we get what we get, and she got me. I sometimes wondered if my mother would’ve been happier with a mirror for a daughter. When you go too long without putting on makeup, it’s like you lose sight of who you really are.” My mother once told me, “You are your true self when you’re on a date with a boy. There, she is a better person than me.Īnd she’s better at being trans than me.
In my worst nightmares, my father transitions. I stand, stone-faced, and grant her no reprieve. Her humility is palpable, as is her beauty. Through lips painted by artists, she begs for my forgiveness, admitting in the same breath that she could never earn it. Gentle and contrite, she apologizes for calling me a cross-dresser, a dyke, a homosexual, a gender-bender, a transvestite. She apologizes for all the vitriol she ever flung at me, crying thick tears through false eyelashes. She holds my hands with nails lacquered violet. She kneels before me, her shimmering skirt unwrinkled by the movement. Even her five o’clock shadow has been put to rest. A hairline I once watched recede is handily buried beneath luscious curls, voluminous as mine were before I hacked them off. The perfect shade of foundation blends the sun-scarred skin of her forehead into her cheeks. She moves with supreme Black elegance, each gesture power incarnate. In these dreams, her beauty is effortless. The fiery drama of the fallout of our nuclear family has long since cooled to ash, long held shouting matches stretched into years of silence. He has made his feelings on my ‘gender deviance’ clear. In life, we are many years estranged, per his wishes. We’re almost there! Please give what you can today. We’ve set a goal of raising $10,000 by the end of June. Electric Literature recently launched a new creative nonfiction program, and received 500 submissions in just 36 hours! Now we need your help to grow our team, carefully and efficiently review submitted work, and further establish EL as a home for artful and urgent nonfiction.
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