Two Millimeters In

Doing her mascara, Ashley more than poked her left eye. The applicator went two millimeters in. A yellow fluid came out and Ashley gagged. Her name had become Ashley only recently. You could poke through the helixes in her cells, unspool her intestines, invert and splay her lungs, lay out every inch of her veins, and you wouldn’t find her name printed on any of it. Ashley existed as a legal construct approved by a judge and announced in a newspaper, an arcane legal requirement of changing your name for the pre-internet debt collectors.

And when the applicator went two millimeters into her eye she had sworn like a man, loudly, gutturally, because she was alone and her guard was down. Then she swore more quietly, more softly, more weakly, more hopefully.

Transitioning is these little kenshos, these moments of clarity into how little of your identity is secure, how many selves you have left behind. In this case, her left eye was not her. It was spilling out onto the tile floor.

In her mind she could hear a sneeze echoing. She had left the window open last night and pollen had come in. She had been so absorbed in her eye makeup that she hadn’t sensed the itch in her nose, and now she was seeing scraggly and fractured in half of her field of view. She didn’t need this, she already had glaucoma.

“At least I still have two boobs,” she thought. And then she remembered that she had electrolysis tomorrow and she would have to cancel. Or could she go get this treated, then go get her beard zapped? The hardest part of this was clinging to a sense of self. The whole outside of your body changed, and if it went well, people recognized that. It was your guts, and pieces like your eyes, that stayed the same. But even her eyes had changed, the skin around them had grown softer, looser, more translucent. The wrinkles were less obvious. And here she was, clutching one of them, retching, and seeing fragments.

She thought of the doctor she wanted. Of the nurses she wanted. Of the hospital that would respect her gender. None of it compared to competent care. To get fixed properly regardless of pronouns. Maybe there was that doctor at the urgent care who could fix this, who could undo the sneeze and give Ashley her sight back, who had skill and craft, who wouldn’t misgender her, which was a petty worry to have at this time.

But the petty worries of life did not stop adding up. You put all your effort into Doing the Thing, into passing, into vocal femme, into endless titrations of fashion, and then life continues. You get long COVID, a fire on the floor below makes your apartment smoky, you realize that your left foot is one size larger than your right and buying shoes is going to be even harder. You find yourself calling an Uber to urgent care with your makeup half done and no bra.

Maybe “20/20” was just another identity she would abandon. Another slimy drop of self on the snail trail of personhood she was leaving behind her. Should she shave before electrolysis tomorrow? Did it matter? Was she going to get misgendered either way? Six months had passed since her last physical, and then she got 50/50 sir and ma’am. She had changed a lot since then.

Pain. There wasn’t any pain. Half her vision was fucked, but there wasn’t any pain. Was that good or bad? She reached up to grasp her eye, wondering how much time had passed since impact. If it mattered.

Ashley thought about boymoding on the ride. A pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. Drop the whole gender thing. Hope the MyChart scribes make sense of it. Hope the insurance company doesn’t reject claims on the basis that Ashley the woman was a completely different person from Ashley the man. Dissolve the question of what gender bathroom she ought to use and just take a good piss in the urinal before walking to urgent care. How confused doctors get when stopping to spend half their brainpower to use the right pronouns, getting that right, then sending the script to the wrong pharmacy.

More yellow fluid dripped from her eye onto the tile. Her hand was still mostly covering up her field of vision. She felt deep down that she was reparable. That she wouldn’t get 20/20 back but that they had machines and special kinds of stitches to fix this. She just had to get to the urgent care and trust. And then cancel electrolysis. And then remember she is a woman. And then make sure insurance is billing her as a woman. And then remember she is a woman. For all of this, she still had only a tiny little beard stubble left. In three months she would be finished with electrolysis. That felt more important than her eye, and she knew why, but didn’t feel proud of it.