transition

my body is not the same as it was last week. this has been going on for quite some time, since the day i was born. at a molecular level, structure has collapsed and renewed, every 24 hours. inhale clean air, exhale dirty air. birth goes in, death goes out. i'm a transitioner. no big deal.

my body came into the world from womb on a particular day, of a certain week, a friday. it had never felt cold air before, or seen dad's face before, or smelled mom's scent before, so within an hour, the body had downloaded basic me 1.0, then i went to sleep.

when i came to, i discovered a stinky brother and other people who i did not need or like. on that day i was named and pronounced and a telegram went out from honduras to israel "a girl". 

i didn't know about any of this until one year later. when the planet had returned to the same point on it's ellipsis and honduras was facing the same direction where the sun set on a curved horizon. the caribbean was hot. i weighed close to ten pounds at birth, i didn't have to grow much that year, and by that time, me 2.0 was already an asshole. 

a female genetic representation of all my western european ancestors. binary meant mom or dad, but never colin. that dude was sneaky, angry and on fire. he could make me laugh until i felt terrified, and he'd do it on purpose just to rile my chill. by two, i could walk, dance and hit back, but he could spit and run faster. 

fearing for my life, every single day was part of being adored as the second born. mom and dad had made colin the pilot, i was, the whole series. the family of 4 was a complete unit. mom had spawned hers and dad had spawned his. 2.364 would stay the same forever and always. 

until the next day. version 3.0 could count to 12. months went on and became familiar, so many names and faces. i'd had two full years of breast, banana, mango, rice and beans and chewable baby aspirin for fevers when i had growth spurts. i knew the alphabet, song. 

change is the only consistency life has to offer. stay the same but learn new tricks. my family spoke english. all the other families around us, spanish. i could fight colin in english, and fight him harder in spanish. as siblings we were both perfect and awful. 

when mom and dad divorced and remarried and had other children in all their other versions, the binary of boy girl remained. but we were transitioning, becoming both easier and harder on each other as we added words to our language to describe our adversarial yet interdependent experiences of life.

all family ancestors come from generations of horny people who love the sun. some stayed up across the dark nights to observe other planets advancing through space. maps were drawn and signifiers for those planets were recorded. done throughout millennia the asian civilizations coded cycles of elements and animals to describe times and peoples born in those times.

colin was born in pontiac michigan, february 28, 1966. he weight just under 7 pounds, mom labored for 24 hours, the nurses, doctors and dads were smokers, he was circumcised on arrival and instead of breast to soothe his trauma, our grandma reassured my mom that a bottle of formula out of a rubber nozzle, was better. colin in his 1.0 was a fire horse. he could walk just under the 8th month and already needed braces.

i never wanted to be a boy.