A Year Without a Name

by Cyrus Grace Dunham

  The two names talked over each other, always on my mind, an etching on the inside of my eyelids, like the letters of the alphabet had been when I first learned to write. Stop signs, billboards, typewritten bulletins. Cyrus and Grace floating over everything, shrinking and growing, switching places between foreground and background. I felt if I didn’t choose one, I would cease to be.

  I didn’t know why I was doing it, stepping into this uncertain identity with no plan. When friends changed their names, it seemed clear that it was a matter of survival. Their birth names had simply stopped being livable. I held myself to different standards: Why wasn’t I strong enough to exist inside Grace? Did I hate myself? Did I hate my family? Did I wish to kill my former self and begin anew? Was I so naive as to think that a new name could shepherd me into a new existence, one that hurt less? Did I think a new name would cut the cord between me and my whiteness, my power, my access? I would always be what I’d always been, no matter what I called myself.

  Somewhere deep in my unconscious I still believed that not feeling like a woman was a personal failing. Something was wrong with me. No matter how much I read, how many people I talked to, I still believed that if I were whole, I wouldn’t have to change myself.

  I started having the dream about walking behind my childhood self again. In the dream I held Grace’s hand while she led me around. Her small hand fit perfectly inside mine. Other times I lay on my back while she read to me from a picture book and stroked my hair. She was just learning to read. She wobbled through words, asking me the meaning of unfamiliar ones. I walked around with her on my back, arms gripping my neck and legs gripping my waist. I felt like her father.

  I didn’t want to admit how betrayed I felt by my body, and how angry that betrayal made me. I tried for a long time to banish anger from my emotional vocabulary. I pushed it down until I couldn’t even recognize it. It moved to my edges: twitches in my neck, compulsive blinking, the scabs I picked on my scalp, my habit of pulling out large patches of my leg hair. What a delusional thing to feel: that my soul, somehow, ended up in the wrong container. I wasn’t entitled to anger.

  Joshua visited when they could, and I saw a handful of friends, but everything outside my own amorphousness was foggy and difficult to recall. I relied on routines and repetition to make the days feel bearable. Breathing from the inside out, like I did at the thinking spot. Rearranging the row of objects on my windowsill every day. Filling a vase with water, and nothing else, and counting how many days it took for the liquid to evaporate. Refolding all the clothes in my closet every day and piling them according to different patterns, like texture, color, or shape.

  I decided, with more resolve than ever before, not to drink. As painful as it was to be inside myself, I had an uncanny conviction that I needed to feel all the contours of this being. I couldn’t float away. I told a friend that I was scared not to take a sip of something when my heart started pounding in my chest. They told me that every time I wanted to dissociate, I should look for the color red and let it fill me up.

  As it turned out, red was always there. Lines of red neon light on the highways, drawn out into the valleys. Red bougainvillea petals on Future Street, on Isabel Street, on all the tight alleys in the neighborhood. Piles of dry red bougainvillea dust in the gutters, whipped up by the wind. The red frame around the picture above my bed that Antonia took in 2016 of my torso, cut off below the chest. My red denim jacket. Red antennae lights on the ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Red cars, red roofs, red signs. The glow around the sunset on particularly foggy days. Exit signs. Stop signs. The blood under my fingernails when I picked my head. Red reflections on the water. Red on the horizon all the time.

  It made me feel safe and calm to keep my room in perfect order. Clothes folded in squares. A shelf of eight shirts, a shelf of eight pairs of pants, and twelve hangers for jackets and button-downs. Every piece of clothing had to have singular meaning and be something I would wear in the span of two weeks; otherwise, I took it to the church thrift shop at the bottom of the hill. A suit jacket that used to be my father’s, a worn-in white T-shirt a friend had given me, the striped rugby shirt with the William Blake quote written across the front: “Bring me my bow of burning gold.” The next line of the poem is “Bring me my arrows of desire.” I told myself it was a lesson in not making other people the center. I wore the shirt so I would have to be alone with myself, to direct the arrows of my desire toward sensations, not people.

  I got through my bouts of debilitating anxiety by running up and down the stone staircase near my house until I was so out of breath I couldn’t think. If it was late in the afternoon, the sun was a little lower and a little pinker each time I got to the top of the staircase. There was always some change to track at the bottom of my descent, too: a brown caterpillar getting closer to the grape soda can wedged in the dirt on the other side of the railing; a spider hanging off a dead agave plant.

  It calmed me down to calibrate my body to the movement, however big or small, of nonhuman things. The earth was rotating, the caterpillar was inching, and I, a thing, ran, panted, and paused. When I finished the cycle—up five flights and down five flights, five times—I walked slowly back home, almost without thoughts.

  It was still warm enough to sit outside on the balcony at night. I wore shorts, no shirt, put my legs up on the railing. If I didn’t look down, I could summon the sensation of flatness where my chest was. If I couldn’t ignore my breasts, I pushed the extra flesh toward the center, to the sides, down over my ribs. I pretended it was butter, that I was spreading it thin.

  In the evenings, music drifted up the hillside from backyard parties at people’s houses. The sound filled the neighborhood. Joshua and I slept with my door to the porch open at night, so that we could hear the music, dogs barking, horns from the train tracks by the river. It calmed me down to feel like earth was one big room. If I could hear everything in the room all at once, then I existed as simply a part of it, and I was okay. I wanted every particle to be its own center such that I felt held in the world, no matter where I was.

  The objects of my desire seemed smaller and less grandiose than ever before. I fantasized about walking down the hill in my neighborhood in a T-shirt, with a flat chest and nothing binding my breasts, the wind pressing the fabric against my skin. I fantasized about pulling my shirt off from the collar, instead of from the bottom seam, like men in movies did. I fantasized about sleeping on my stomach, without breasts between me and the mattress. I fantasized about driving down the mountain in a convertible, top down, leaning back in the driver’s seat, open to the world instead of hunched over in hiding, like the teenage boys in tank tops who lived by the lake where we spent the summer. In the fantasies I was euphoric but calm, not at all lonely even though I was alone.

  I saw him in glimpses. When I walked by a mirror and caught sight of shoulders that were broader than hips, a face with a sharp jaw and thick brows. When I saw my hands on the steering wheel of my car, veins swelling as I turned. When I squatted to lift heavy things and bounced back up with ease. In quotidian moments I saw him, someone I admired, even lusted after.

  But these moments of alignment made the misalignment that much more unbearable.

  7

  H​OW DO I CHRONICLE a year during which, for the most part, I was waiting? Waiting to correct my aberrated condition. How do I turn waiting, its fits and starts, into a narrative of self-realization?

  Much of how I spent the year was managing waiting with control. I measured my food, the perfect ratio of carbs, protein, and lipids. Thirteen grams of fat per meal, thirty-five grams of protein, thirty-five grams of carbs. Often, these stats were met by a giant bowl of oatmeal and Greek yogurt, with no toppings, that I shoveled into my mouth with a spoon until I felt sick. If I couldn’t finish it, I put the bowl back in the fridge and returned to it as soon as I had an appetite again. Eating to build muscle mass required force-feeding. I had to eat past fullness, past disgust, swallow down bland bites e
ven though I’d trained myself to think that the more I ate the more I’d look like a woman. But the force-feeding worked, in a way. I couldn’t see myself changing, but other people told me I was getting bigger, more angular, standing up taller.

  In attempting to change my body, I could impose the possibility of a narrative onto what felt otherwise unnarrativizable. I went to the gym every other day and split my workouts into push-push-pull and pull-pull-push routines. I watched large men pull their entire bodies up and down, relying only on their shoulder, chest, and back muscles, in sets of twelve, each muscle visibly rippling. Watching them maneuver their bodies was the only thing I let make me furious. I could lift my body if I jumped up to the bar. Otherwise, I just hung there, rendered immovable by gravity. All I wanted was to be able to pull myself up, release, and pull again. That, to have a six-pack, and to have no breasts. It was a type of longing I knew only from romance.

  When I got home from the gym, I held my iPhone at different angles in order to take selfies on my bed or in the bathroom mirror, looking for a vertical line down my abdomen, two or three horizontal ones. I couldn’t tell in real life if the horizontal lines were muscle or just shadows between rolls of skin. I preferred to look at myself in the photos on my iPhone. I hearted my favorite ones so that I could look through them before going to sleep. Dozens of the same pose, examining the slightest differences. Vanity, sure, but also forensic examination. Looking for evidence, compulsively, for proof that I was changing.

  I stopped looking at pictures of other people and stopped wanting to have sex, too preoccupied by my own body to be able to focus on someone else’s. If I watched porn, it was just to compare my own form to that of the men in the videos.

  Soon I became fixated on getting a convertible. I decided it was the only thing that would make me happy. I don’t need to expound on how the convertible represents masculinity and virility in American culture, whether for a bachelor having a midlife crisis or a sixteen-year-old boy in search of a hand job. Everyone already knows that. My fixation could have been easily read as overcompensation. But the desire went beyond that: I imagined that a convertible would let me feel unencumbered, open to the outside world, like the boys who sped up the dirt road in tank tops at the house where we spent the summer when I was a kid. The convertible felt like a roomier metonym than a new name.

  I kept two tabs open in Safari: one for convertibles; one for before-and-after pictures of “chest masculinizing” double mastectomies on different plastic surgeons’ websites. Convertibles and flat chests. The two melted together. Top down. Top surgery. I started spending exorbitant amounts of time on Craigslist browsing convertibles. A Miata in Tujunga. A 2006 Mercedes Benz SLK in Glendale. A 2004 Mustang in Carson. I lay on my back with my laptop on my chest, burning the skin red, doing comparative analyses.

  THIS MUSTANG IS GOOD AS NEW AND HOT HOT HOT!!! Cruising with the top down in this convertible will allow turn every drive into a sublime experience, making you feel one with road. 6-Spd SelectShift. DO NOT CONTACT UNLESS FOR REAL!!!

  I went to Van Nuys to test-drive a white Toyota Solara. The seller was an extremely thin Polish woman. Stone statues of Jesus filled her front yard. Her children watched us through a slit in the doorway. I drove the car around the block. It was big and clunky. It shook when I accelerated. Another appendage, it was exactly the opposite of what I needed. I hated it.

  I test-drove a Honda S2000 in Hawthorne, accelerating in circles around the flat suburban streets. The leather upholstery was dirty; the car was too low to the ground. The seller was an older man. He thought I was a girl and, being a girl, I felt guilty for not wanting to buy his car.

  When I test-drove the cars, I said my name was Grace. I didn’t want to watch the sellers struggle with confusion that a name, Cyrus, didn’t match my “female” body.

  I felt angry every time I had to drive somewhere, even the post office or the gas station, in my dad’s old gray Camry. It was dull and unwieldy, even dysphoric. If it sounds like I let a commodity become a proxy for my identity, that’s because I did.

  Mitsubishi had manufactured a midmarket two-door, five-seat convertible, the Eclipse Spyder. It wasn’t fancy or horse-powered enough to be in any of the “top ten hot convertibles” lists in Men’s Journal and the like, but for me, it looked the part. Streamlined, aerodynamic, with a bubble butt and rounded headlights like the eyes of a frog. Not quite a proxy, but an object of longing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t personify the car as femme.

  I messaged a seller with the name of an ancient Greek warrior and she told me to meet her outside a 7-Eleven in East Hollywood. The word “Spyder” was engraved in paint-splash font on the floor mats. The stitching on the leather steering wheel and gearshift looked like the swooping incision lines in the post-op chest masculinization pictures, skin pulled taut at the seam.

  Driving in my convertible made me feel joy again. I left the house more, not to see anyone or go anywhere in particular—just to drive around the mountain in the morning before the sun was too bright, or drive the length of the 2 Freeway late at night. I leaned back in my seat, my right hand guiding the steering wheel, my left arm draped out the window. It was a cinematic imitation—a young man drives toward his future—but it made me delight in who I was. When I was in my convertible I was of earth, a part of it, connected to the shared, miraculous impermanence of everything.

  It was in my convertible on San Fernando Road, at the stoplight by Cazador Street, that I decided to contact two of the surgeons whose websites I’d kept open as tabs for two months. I wanted to wear a loose shirt in my car, hold my shoulders all the way back, feel the wind against my chest under the fabric. I cried at the relief of granting myself permission. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, full of adoration for my Spyder and the permission it—she—had made possible.

  Joshua wanted to come with me to San Francisco for my surgical consultations, but I told them I needed to go alone. I couldn’t think when I woke up next to them. I just needed to be, without translation. I had no energy for the work of explanation. My own feelings about the surgery were too convoluted for communication, a lust I didn’t have words for, yet.

  My story isn’t resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it’s my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

  But it’s not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacophony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender; if I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory; the surgery itself is born from a legacy of mainlining gender-deviant people into having bodies that conform to white, colonial myths of manhood and womanhood; the surgery was developed from a legacy of medical experimentation on the bodies of intersex and gender-nonconforming children; the fact that I can access the surgery is dependent on my ability to perform the mental “capacity” to prove that I am sane enough to get it; those unable to perform “health” are excluded from the very same surgery.

  So proceeds my monologue, bolstered by compulsive research and information consumption, because I cannot face the immensity of my own longing.

  What can I say? I want it. Is wanting enough? I need it. Is needing enough? Perhaps if I levy a strong enough critique, I can argue myself out of wanting and/or needing it.

  I went to see Zack, my best and oldest friend alongside Jessica. They live in Riverside, with a spotted cat named Jynx, in a backhouse, on a dirt road, near the base of Mount R
ubidoux, which looks like a pile of tan boulders stacked precariously by a giant. Zack and I are the same height, but they’re lankier, a long, willowy person. I have always envied the way they dive into water, a slice through the surface, then bounce back up as if they are going to fly away entirely.

  We’d called each other “brother” for a while, long before either of us had admitted, or even manifested, that we might have been something other than women. Somehow, the word made what was unknowable about our future seem less scary. They were the only person I’d ever called brother, the only person I’d ever felt that way toward.

  That afternoon we walked to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, where a white stone crucifix casts a shadow over the mountain. Sitting on some rocks near the top, Zack told me about a dream they’d had the week before. They didn’t want to say the dream out loud because of how much it scared them. I probed. This was part of our dynamic. I like to think that they have taught me to respect the natural pace of emergence, and I have taught them how to put change in motion by speaking. I like to think that, for these reasons and more, we need each other.

  Finally they revealed that, in the dream, they had looked in a mirror and seen a man staring back at them. They’d woken up wishing they could unsee him.

  “I don’t want this,” they said.

  “I don’t want it either,” I said.

  We walked back down the mountain together, mostly silent.

  The following week I drove up to San Francisco with Zack and Jessica for the surgical consultation. The night before the consultation, at a party, I saw someone I thought was hot and decided I would walk up to them and introduce myself, unprompted.