Aware

That morning, I woke up aware.

The first ten years of my life were spent in blissful ignorance and comfort. That all changed when my eyes fluttered open to see the usual dim, foggy lights of the passing cars. They flashed over my window every morning like a disruptive prequel to the sunrise. The early days of spring were still quite chilly here, and the sound of the heater vibrating to life was enough to cause me to stir further from my slumber.

I rolled over to my right side. My eyes were glued to the door. The strip of light at the bottom of it was particularly interesting for some reason, and I felt myself zoning out while staring at it. The shadow of my father's footsteps interrupted my meditation, and I blinked for the first time in what felt like several minutes.

I really didn't want to get out of bed. No kid really wanted to go to school, but today seemed to be rather heavy with lethargy that I was experiencing for the first time in my life. There was a weight pressing a body down into a bed, and the simple act of rolling over had been strenuous enough to mentally exhaust me. To go beyond that, to stand, the effort involved made me release a sigh, then a yawn, and finally a stretch.

The rest of the morning was relatively routine. I had breakfast, brushed my teeth and waited at the bus stop. I always sat next to the same friend on that bus every morning, and we would talk about cards or TV shows or whatever else was important to us at the time. Today, however, the seat that my friend usually sat in not only lacked his presence, but it had two other kids sitting in it.

I was forced to find somewhere else to sit. My routine was interrupted, and I had to look around the bus at all the other people I didn’t normally need to acknowledge. The awareness, the heaviness, whatever had filled me that morning was making this more difficult than it needed to be. There were no empty seats, only places to sit next to some other kid I would then have to meet. Worse still, everyone on that bus was definitely judging me and knew something about me that I still hadn’t figured out.

I could see it on their faces and in the way they would look at me. They could tell there was something wrong with me. They could tell that I was different.

I finally picked a seat towards the back next to someone I thought looked the least upset about whatever was going on inside my mind, and upon sitting down, I could hear the laughter and conversation of the other children resume. They were happy. I envied them.

I wanted so badly to be happy like them again, but something was nagging at me. While the judgemental looks were gone for now, I couldn’t help but start to notice something else. My eyes were drawn to certain aspects of each of the other passengers. Not just their faces or eyes, and not all of them caught my attention the same way. I would see a hairstyle, a shirt or a pair of jeans and could feel a strange jealousy building up. Wanting to have what the other kids have, wanting to be like them so that they will like you, it’s perfectly normal. It wasn’t anything new to me, but there was a problem:

Everything I wanted to emulate, participate in, wear; it all belonged to the girls, and I was a boy.

I knew it was wrong. I knew it was a problem. It wasn’t an instinct to recognize it as such an issue, no, it was something learned from TV, movies, overheard conversations, and I started to realize what they were judging me for. If they found out that I was having these thoughts, then I would be ridiculed like all those that I had seen or heard of.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I was putting up walls. I had made barriers that would keep the real me from surfacing for years, and the negative perception that I had generated drove me deeper into my mind. I was so scared of what they would think of me, and within that fear I developed a hatred of not only them but myself along the way. I hated everything about what they might find.

They must never learn the truth.

It was my mission from then on to smile, create a mask, find ways to frown without them knowing what’s truly wrong, hide and disguise every negative or embarrassing or wrong thought. I hid. Walls were built. Words were never uttered.

No one would ever know what was going through my head every waking moment for the next 12 years. I wished and wished that I could just be like them. I just wanted to be happy. I just wanted to be born the way that I should’ve been. My wishes, prayers, spells, rituals; none of them worked, and nothing made me happy for longer than some fleeting moment.

I ate. I grew lazy. I found myself incapable of concentration as my only thoughts when I wasn’t occupied with video games or food were, “I wish I were a girl.” A mantra on loop forever within me.

College was an opportunity to find myself and my people. Yet, even in an environment where I could be free, the walls only grew taller. I spent days in my room eating, watching TV, playing games, and I had no reason to go anywhere. If I went out to classes, I found myself distracted and losing point after point. I started failing.

I started not going. The coffee bar was more attractive. I could sit and talk and drink sugary drinks for free with my friends that managed the place. Yet, even still, the few social outlets I engaged in with them and anyone else I met there were all only through a mask. They never saw what was underneath, they only saw what I wanted them to perceive of me, and they never really knew who I was. Because of this, I had developed some form of social anxiety or paranoia that made me believe nobody truly wanted to be around me.

After all, they were all pretending just as I was. They were only hanging out with a version of me. The one that dwelled beneath would’ve driven them away.

Working was a fine distraction for a time. It kept me occupied, but it also took up time that could’ve been spent studying if I wasn’t constantly interrupted by that same repeating wish that followed me from grade school. I quit jobs that didn’t fulfill me, I struggled to survive.

I found an excuse to leave.

When he was elected, red states became all the more terrifying to be in. If I felt I was somehow secretly being judged before, the idea of people being more open about it only threw me into a more rapid spiral. I feared I would miss my chance to change if what he wanted to happen happened. I had to act quickly.

I had to run away.

I lied to everyone I knew about what I was doing, where I was going, and I did my best to make sure no one could talk me out of it. I posted online trying to find someone that would take me in when I moved to a blue state. Anyone, anywhere, any opportunity for the voice in my head to become reality in some capacity. Desperation had led me to trust a stranger.

That stranger took me in.

He opened the door to his roach-infested bedroom that he rented along with a few other colorful characters. We hardly ever interacted with them. We kept to ourselves, and I continued to enjoy the company of a singular individual to the best of my ability. He was the only one I could trust here, even now, and I felt a different barrier start to be built around me. Isolation, TV, video games. It was no different than before besides the clothes and pills.

Where before I had kept my identity a secret and presented an air of masculinity, here I had to keep my identity a secret while trying to present as femininely as possible. I was still in danger of ridicule and violence, but now I was at least dressing the part of what my mind had screamed at me to become for the past decade or more. This stranger had accepted me, but he wanted to shape me into something of his own design.

Clothes were purchased with his tastes in mind. Phrases I had used most of my life were labeled ‘masculine’ or ‘not very feminine’, and I was told not to use them. Time spent in his bed at night was uncomfortable and unwelcoming. I had to be a certain way, and I had to work full time to pay our rent. Having recently lost his job, he claimed to be studying in college and being supported by his father. I didn’t bother to ask why he was in a roach-infested and tiny bedroom if that was the case, no, I was too wrapped up in the idea of him freeing me from the nightmare that was my life up until this point.

I told myself that I felt free. I told myself that he had liberated me, saved me, and that things would get better down the road. Insurance was paying for prescriptions at this stage, but 12 hours of my life a day, 5 days a week, sometimes 6, were spent traveling or working, and all of my money went to rent, him, and food. I would get close to surgery, but there would always be some new thing that came up, and it would always be on me to fix it.

Even while struggling to survive, we got ‘lucky’ enough to get a new apartment. We were working better jobs, things seemed to be looking up, but rug-pull after rug-pull kept me from ever getting the surgery that was the end-goal of all of this. He had car accidents, health emergencies, lost jobs, needed deposits, needed rent, needed bills paid, needed grocery money, needed everything that I could provide while he sat in the living room playing his video games and eating food all day long.

He was a reflection of my college self that I grew out of to support him.

I was a hundred pounds heavier than when I left Idaho.

After years of ridicule from everyone I would meet on the street, at work, on subways, in stores; just for trying to be myself, I was growing bitter and hateful again. I knew that anyone smiling and welcoming me was lying. I knew that anyone treating me as a woman was lying. If everyone else saw through it enough to belittle me, then those that treated me so kindly were only wearing another version of a mask.

And there were days I would come home from working another long shift, riding the bus for another hour and a half, and I would see him with our ‘friends’ eating from an empty pizza box sitting open on our dining room table. Here they all stood, all the people that I thought I had grown to trust here, and he was at the center laughing with them. Never mind that I was hungry. Never mind that I wasn’t invited or informed that it was happening in an apartment I had paid for. They didn’t need me to have fun. I wasn’t really a part of it. Many of my fears were rapidly being confirmed by this party, and he didn’t seem to care even an ounce.

I didn’t want to live. He didn’t treat me much better, and the sexual assault, financial abuse, and absolute lack of any real care for me finally caused me to snap.

I woke up aware.

I saw him for what he was. I saw the bars around me.

I wanted to leave so badly, but I was trapped in a financial prison. I couldn’t leave until the lease was up, and since I could barely afford rent, bills and everything else going on with my paycheck, there was no way I could possibly get a deposit to go anywhere.

He continued to do what he did, and I continued to go to work.

I cried. I begged. The wish had changed.

I wished for death until I escaped.