AJJ—“People ii: The Reckoning”

A song you sang, the night I met you, about a man struggling with bipolar disorder:

There’s a bad man in everyone, no matter who we are,
there’s a rapist and a nazi living in our tiny hearts,
child pornographers and cannibals and politicians too, there’s someone in your head waiting to fucking strangle you.

Botany

You could go on a walk and identify toadflax, camellia flowers, wormwood.

One time I said, I think you care more about plants than you care about people. You laughed.

Clovers

Your favorite activity outside of using was looking for four-leaved clovers. You’d look in the grass and make two or three of them materialize in your hand. You told me the first time you ever found one was as a child and the feeling of accomplishment never left you. Four- leaved clovers, you explained, were the result of a genetic mutation, but this mutation makes them beautiful to us. It makes them sought after, important, lucky.

In a frenzy of deep longing, I did a clover-picking ritual of my own when my Birthright group was staying in a Kibbutz hotel. I stayed hunched over in the grass all evening on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee, searching for a clover to give you when I returned to Ohio. When I found it, I was sure we would be together forever.

Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified Type 1-B

In the European airport, dealing with the crushing loneliness, I felt trapped in the wrong body again and started thinking and acting differently.

As this surreal nightmare closed in around me I realized, with terrifying clarity, the reason for my anger. It was the most drawn-out, incapacitating, and insufferable mental pain I had ever experienced. I thought the dissociation would never end. I asked my tour guide if it would. She said yes.

The doctor in the Tel Aviv hospital asked me several questions, five hours after the panic attack. Had I been sexually abused as a child? No. Had I been absorbing information about the disorder, did I know about it? Not exactly. Did he really think I was faking, that I wanted to feel like this?

Do you think these personalities are inside of you? he asked. Yes.
He shook his head, brimming with false pity. Here. Take ten milligrams of benzodiazepine. You just have anxiety. Your anxiety is making it all up. There is nothing wrong with you.

Eyes

A year after you left, I decided to go on a date with a much older man. This man was similar to you in many respects, and also, superficially, to my own father. I had never, it seemed, been as attracted to a man since my experiences with you. I’d revisited an old photograph of you, one you had online. Your eyes held the same soft expression in them as this older man’s. When he and I were together, I saw him looking. His eyes, the expression in them, were damn near identical. He was almost you.

It is the look of a temptress, of a courtesan biting an apple while stealing a glance from across a table, a child trying to weasel its way out of getting punished. It is feminine and playful; there is nothing deep
or serious in it. It rings of fairytales, the mythical Pan, Puck, trickster magic. It says, I have caught you, but I do not want you. I know you are powerless in your desire for me and I delight in it.

Flowers

Before picking any plant you would always say a prayer thanking it for giving the world life and apologizing for killing it. You were so gentle that, at times, you feared stepping on grass too harshly. To this day I will say a prayer before picking flowers. One time our mutual friend caught me doing this and told me to stop mimicking you, hell-bent on preventing me from pretending you were there.

Green Bay

After the band I saw in OTR finished their set, I came up to the lead singer and very openly explained that I was attracted to him. I asked him where he was from in Wisconsin, not expecting to hear the name of your hometown. I walked away.

That is how I would have liked for it to have happened. How it actually happened was: I smiled at the association, he led me into his tour van, made out with me, and showed me his dick. I told him he was a virgin and he reacted with genuine surprise. Then he made me get out of the van because the band had to head back to Wisconsin. He let me keep a tee shirt for free.

Four years later, I called his number. We’d had half a dozen phone conversations over the years, all instigated by me during stressful or lonely periods in my life, but most of them had happened before my transition. I hadn’t had a chance to mention this fact before he remarked that I sounded like a grown woman. It certainly didn’t flatter the baritone register that testosterone had given me. I felt disgusted and dysphoric, and never called him again.

Heroin

Fed up with your moodiness and abundantly apparent immaturity, our mutual friend revealed your habit to me. She told me the second day we all hung out you’d dropped a needle in a trashcan and it had fallen onto the concrete. She said you’d told her your first instinct was to lie about it.

Israel

Sometimes you don’t realize that you have built your home inside a person until you are very far away from them. Sometimes you can never find your way back.

Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin was found dead in her hotel room at the age of twenty-seven in 1970. The cause of her death was a heroin overdose. Although this is still considered tragic, the phenomenon is not unusual today. In 2021, seventy-one thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight people died from opioid-related overdoses. The epidemic continues to rise as fentanyl and other unregulated substances infiltrate the drug supply. It is why becoming a traveling kid is like being handed a death sentence.

Among the traveling homeless, rates of drug use are higher than in the general population. Most of them have mental health issues. Some were raised in the foster care system, have severe traumas, or can’t assimilate well into “normal” society. They hop trains. They sleep rough. They don’t have medical insurance. Many are addicted to alcohol or other drugs. Some rack up minor offenses in several states and flee to avoid jail time. Some steal. Most don’t shower often. They often have piercings and tattoos and make money busking or flying signs. Traveling, homeless, hungry. Anything helps. They probably won’t stay in your city for more than a few days. They probably won’t stay on this earth for more than a few years after you say goodbye. It is one of many reasons there can be ten different sirens at ten different moments coming from ten different ambulances in your city today.

I am scared that when I relapse and call you again, I will only be met with silence.

Kissing

Three hours after I met you, you ran away. Depression, some wave of sadness, had come over you, and you disappeared for several minutes. When you came back, you looked visibly changed. Your face was sullen, your gait slowed. You looked aged, distant, as if looking internally upon some unnameable anguish.

I was so full of tenderness for you, at that moment. I reached out my arm to draw you closer to me. You were so fragile, it seemed, so needing care. I took your face in mine and kissed you on the right temple. We looked at each other for a moment, registering the invitation. Then, slowly, with a deliberateness I had never known possible, our faces drew nearer.

The first thing I noticed about the kiss was its softness. It surprised me, the lack of aggression or hard passion in it. To this day, I have not met a man who kisses in this way. There was hardly any pressure, any enmeshment of our mouths, and yet it was the first kiss that told me a story: I am giving this to you, and you alone. It was the first kiss I had ever been given in which there was time to register, to realize, yes, this is a moment of intimacy, this is a moment of recognition. It imprinted on me a kind of magic, an ancient spell.

Everything rushed around me, suddenly real, suddenly worth living for. I squeezed your hand tightly. You squeezed it back.

Letter-writing

After months of pestering you on the phone, I finally found one in the mail. A cathartic burst of sobbing followed. The letter was the only thing, in my mind, that I’d needed to let you go. I wanted to prove to people that I had actually known you.

Minutes

They were limited on your phone plan. We could rarely speak for more than ten minutes at a time. I quickly learned a strategy, though: keep all salient talking points for future calls at the ready. Weeks or even a month could go by, but when you did pick up, I’d try to mention as many of them as possible. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. The phone would ring; I would spring to life; I would rise.

These calls defined my existence. For a few minutes, I was normal. For a few minutes, I was reunited with the sole object of my joy. And then, predictably, there would be silence. I would walk very slowly to school. I would go back to the bench where we sat the night we first met. I would lay in bed and cry. I would think about your voice, the particular drugged mumble to it, the expressive way it would crack at just the right place to make it seem as though your heart were breaking from the very utterance, your very being straining beneath the weight of it: I love you.

New York

I made a hitchhiking sign that said this once, spurred on by your urgings to visit you. Someone you knew told me I would be disappointed, that I should hitchhike to see the country for myself, not a boy. I never used it.

Obama Phone

One time you told me you’d found five hundred dollars on the street in New York and didn’t know what to do with it. I suggested getting a better phone. You laughed and said you probably should. But, I heard, invisibly. You know...

Panic Attacks

My fear of losing control is rooted in trauma. Everyone has some. Mine happened young and caused me to routinely obsess over what I had control over in the situation, in order to protect myself. A therapist I once had called this future-thinking.

A panic attack is falling through quicksand. A panic attack is god’s hand flinging you into space.

Quotes

I’d give him an O.T.P.H.J.—What’s that?—An over-the-pants handjob.
I consider myself a witch.
If I was born a girl I would still be into girls.
I think we’re friends who are romantic sometimes. Like... casual lovers.

I got kind of upset when you called me childish the other day. No... childlike? What did you mean by that? Did you mean that I’m like... a rogue? Well, I wasn’t upset at you, just at the words, and actually, I wasn’t upset at the words... and actually, I wasn’t really upset.

Racecars

Months after you left, I found out that you had smashed up a racecar belonging to a gang on the first day you got to my town, livid that your car had broken down. You had told me you’d been threatened with violence by a gang for no reason and had to leave. I’d suspected foul play, but not like that. I couldn’t believe you’d done something that thoughtless, that childish.

Later, you confirmed the story’s accuracy, albeit reluctantly. This doesn’t mean you didn’t lie; it simply means you knew what you were doing. I appreciated these lies because it was excruciating to know the truth. Eventually, the weight of what you had done took such a toll
on me that I quit my job. I thought of your misdeeds randomly, like a stabbing pain. I was in mourning for who I thought you were. I would try not to cry in the pauses between customers going to my register. You were an inescapable pain.

St. Something-Or-Other Cemetery

We went on the last day I saw you. We walked among the headstones and you stopped to pick clovers in the grass. We went into a gazebo and I sat on your lap, your head buried in my chest. We held hands and had a small kiss by the flowers. Then you said, I like you.

I will still say this to people I want to woo, in the same way you delivered the line, because of the way it sat so sweet and easy in your mouth. I like you. At the time it dropped down, pat and obvious, into my lap. I had wanted to hear so much more. Now I know that people say lots of things.

Tea Rose

Tea Rose was a maroon Ford Bronco 4x4. It was not special, but you made it special by naming it. Early on, I noticed this penchant of yours for naming inanimate objects. When you invoked these names, you claimed a kind of intimacy with them; they joined your sentimental hoard.

The day I first met you, I asked if I could name your guitar, and did. Months later, over the phone, you invoked the name I’d given. You did not have any real connection to the name, as you had no real connection to me; yet it seemed like you remembered it on purpose, just to give me the illusion that you cared.

This, above all, sickened me.

Uncles, Great

[redacted].
Later, though, he denied ever saying these things to me.

“Virginity”

I still had mine when I met you. You offered to take it from me once, it but I shyly told you no. Actually, you said something dirty in a boyish and silly way and I shyly answered yes.

Wormwood

“Absinthe” comes from the Greek apsinthos, referring to the plant “wormwood” in English. As a spirit, absinthe has been described as hallucinogenic, although no scientific study has ever found this to be true. The idea was furthered by its popularity with bohemian drinkers: Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Of this notorious liquor, Oscar Wilde reportedly said:

After the first glass... you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

Xenization

A 19th-century term that means the act of traveling as a stranger. Strangely enough, even when I first met you, I never for a moment felt as though you were one. You appeared, fully formed, a living shadow reanimated from a reality I’d only ever imagined in my deepest longings. You appeared as if waiting to reunite with me.

Yuppie

A person who doesn’t beg on the side of the street to make money; someone with more than five hundred dollars to their name; a frequenter of Starbucks.

Zounds—“Dirty Squatters”

Some dirty squatters moved into my street

With their non-sexist haircuts, dirty feet...

They look quite harmless sitting out in the sun

But I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one.

On a walk, listening through cheap earbuds, I will hear those particular lines and smile, and wonder, but then I will forget about it, and then I won’t smile, and the smile will turn into nothing, and I will continue walking.