Double Incision Diary

On the afternoon I come home from surgery, I converse with a giant snake.

*

On an evening six years before surgery, I am teaching a poorly-attended church group about Jungian theology. The wounded healer. Chiron the centaur. How to lie in the cave of Asklepius, on the couch from which clinic gets its name, and receive a vision that closes your sores. How to be the first of your kind that your praying sisters know. Jesus is grafted to the cross like an animal body, a seam between hero and beast.

*

On the day after surgery, two chickens arrive at my house. My dear friend in Austin, a woman of blunt speech and deep tenderness, has sent our family the Jewish cure-all, roast chicken and kosher pickles. We are—we were—boob twins, which gives her first dibs on my best jackets. I want to visit her new home, as she has visited mine, but Texas has made it illegal for me to pee.

*

On the day before surgery, I point a knife at my chest. Magic before me, magic behind me, magic within me. Witches keep a black-handled knife on our altar to represent Air. The power of thought become flesh. For fourteen years, I wrote letters to the man who gave me this knife as a birthday present when he was released from prison. Twenty-five to life for receiving a stolen motorcycle in the state of California. He calls me brother.

*

On one day or another, forty years before surgery, I examine the brownish-pink nubs on my chest. I can’t believe they will swell into the fleshy sacks I see on my two mothers, shirtless in our small apartment bathroom. I will be told they are my best feature, besides my eyes, veiled behind nearsighted glasses. I will be told to lead with them for marriage. Even though the mother who says this doesn’t want me to get married, would rather suckle herself on my heart.

*

On the third and fourth days after surgery, I receive gift baskets. My cousins-in-law, who are all therapists, send lox and bagels from Zabar’s. My best friend in Buffalo sends a month’s worth of fruit and chocolates. We met thirty years ago when I fell down the stairs. Harvard health services left me at the bottom of a hill with crutches and he helped me onto the bus. Every day, I pray his doctors will find the reason his joints are on fire. He says God created our painful world to grow stronger with the struggle, like a man lifting weights. Which I am not allowed to do for the next six weeks.

*

On a morning one year and eleven days before surgery, my husband drives us to meet the plastic surgeon in Longmeadow. Her office is in a white-pillared mansion with wallpaper depicting the 19th century’s idea of a jungle. She draws lines on my chest with green marker. I feel like a diagram of a pork roast. Which is to say: appetizing. A body that is ready for itself.

*

On an afternoon twenty-seven years before surgery, I play pool badly on my first date with my husband. I warned him about this in the cartoon I drew to reply to his personal ad. He buys us glass animals of our zodiac signs: his centaur, my crab. I have more hair than Brian May from the band Queen. All of my shirts show tremendous cleavage. I’m slow to understand why I attract short men. Perhaps I seem kinder than I am; perhaps they are eye level with my nipples. I’m just glad he’s taller than me.

*

On the second week after surgery, I am mad at my family. I am able to fold laundry again. My son needs help with his fifth-grade science project: whether plants can grow if you hang their pots upside-down. Am I not a magician? Can’t they see me reaching for the sun, drawing down the moon? Not literally, because I am still not allowed to raise my arms. Books about what I have done are being banned in Florida. I shouldn’t have to turn your socks right-side-out.

*

On a red-gold autumn weekend five months before surgery, I read dick jokes from my poetry collection at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Afterward, two college girls tell me how great it is to meet a trans elder. Gurl, I’m forty-nine.

*

On another weekend thirty-one years before surgery, I am flown to New York City as one of Glamour Magazine‘s Top Ten College Women. I am the only one whose parent forbids makeup and ear piercing, or the only obedient one. I experience this as a hardship. Every blouse I wear has gaps between the second and third buttons, like the pause after one of my mothers introduces the other as her sister. She throws away the videotape of my award ceremony before I can view it. I wouldn’t like how I look, she says.

*

On the second week after surgery, my friend who had their breasts removed by the same doctor takes me to the tattoo parlor for new earrings. Before anesthesia, I’d removed all metal jewelry in case they had to electrify me back to life. Wedding diamond, engagement flower ring, the sigil necklace I bought during the pandemic. I buy a dagger-shaped stud for one ear and a trans symbol for the other, because everyone knows mismatched earrings are more gay. My friend calls themself a lesbian trans man. I say I’m an MTF: mom-to-faggot. After they defend their dissertation, we’ll return for their tattoo of birds in flight.

*

On a day eight years before surgery, my mother’s ex drives me to a hotel for novel research. I am sick with imposter syndrome. For seven years prior, I have been writing a novel in a gay man’s voice that feels autobiographical and I don’t know why. He is a terrible slut who tells me to stop wearing frilly blouses with polka dots. The conference is called Transcending Boundaries and I am here to find out whether we can be gay and Christian. In a meditative movement workshop, we close our eyes. Take five minutes to walk as our assigned gender, one-third of the way across a small room. Five minutes in the space between. Five to the wall, as any gender not our own, or none. A warrior with a black beard emerges inside me. I am larger, freer, truer than I’ve ever known. My husband names him Belvedere, after the Looney Tunes bulldog. Oh Belvedere, come here, boy. Bel vedere: beautiful to see.

*

On the night before surgery, I drink an excess of water, afraid of being thirsty. Anticipating lack, regret, a once-loving gaze turned away. Over winter vacation we’d watched Gremlins, my son’s and my first time, my husband’s second. No food after midnight. Don’t get them wet. The Chinese sage’s instructions the same as my anesthesia prep. No one knew what creature would emerge from the unexpected pupa. What tinsel-draped destruction. What ridiculous love.

*

On the night before surgery, I refrain from tweeting Dr. Johnson’s quip, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” I cannot concentrate on anything, including sleep. My surgeon is also named Dr. Johnson.

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On the night before surgery, I meditate at my altar. I have been studying witchcraft by correspondence course for two years, like the protagonist of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I count down to enter the World Tree. I descend to meet the Master of the Forge. The blade we have crafted is ready. It is by my will that I undergo the wound.

*

On the morning of surgery, I try to understand what the hospital receptionist is asking about my gender. In my driver’s license photo, I still have hair. What bathroom do you use? The men’s room. Uh, I mean, when you pull down your pants…do you have a pee-pee or a vee-vee? Insurance needs to know.

*

On the morning of surgery, Dr. Johnson draws her final diagram on my skin. My husband takes my bra and eyeglasses. He looks at my breasts for the last time with a sad smile, like I’m putting his old dog to sleep.

*

On the morning of surgery, I descend to the Underworld. I am wearing yellow socks with grippy dots. They give me a tranquilizer through my IV before wheeling me into the OR. I sing in fake-Jamaican, “I smoke two joints in de morning, I smoke two joints at night,” even though my husband, who would get the Dr. Demento reference, is not there to hear.

*

On the afternoon of surgery, I am not dead. I wake up with a flat chest in a ruched bodice so tight it would make Marie Antoinette long for the guillotine. I am the kind of fag who uses words like “ruched bodice.” Plastic tubes drain into bulbs dangling below my armpits. My husband will help me empty them and measure the fluids twice a day. It is not as disgusting as menstruating for thirty-five years. It is not as painful as talking to my mother, which I no longer do. Everything will be all right.

*

On the afternoon of surgery, I am in the cave of Asklepius. Meditating in bed, I descend into a crevasse of black rocks. Steam rises from the stones in the underground river. I bathe in the shallow, hot water. The Ouroboros, endless serpent, coils high as the roof. It tells me not to worry about the long-lost years or the shortness of those to come. This moment’s satisfaction is infinite. Time is only time.

*

On our wedding night twenty-five years ago, we go to Fairway, the supermarket across from our Upper West Side studio: my husband in his late father’s tuxedo, me in my white veil and gown. We are leaving for Paris the next morning, we still need to figure out how to have sex, and we have nothing in the fridge for breakfast.

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On the morning I get my drains taken out, one week after surgery, my husband and I go to Costco. It’s on the way home. He took pictures of my first sight of my new chest, strutting in the doctor’s mirror. We pay our respects to each aisle, floor to ceiling stacked with towels and bread and jars of mango in syrup. The enormous strawberries smell like summer, red as a kiss.