transit/ion
09:38am (AEST): Thank you for being my first subscribers – I feel so cool (and appropriately pretentious enough) to have been able to start this. I’m writing this on my first flight home in four years, I’ve not left ‘Australian soil’ since the start of Melbourne’s first lockdowns. Liberation is ringing profoundly in my ears right now, although that might just be the altitude pressure punch. (Sky time): I got a whole row of seats to myself on a 16hr long flight, and ’m writing and reading rather frantically, and the flight attendant has brought me three black coffees/little sugar. I’m wearing all-black clothes – I’m a Melbournian through-and-through, wherever I go.
10:52am (AEST, but the sky is no time, and all time): I’ve had a year of the most absolute devastation. Every morning over the past year, sleepily, I watched my loved ones put their shoes on. I flinched when he buckled his pants. I stared when she tied her shoes. In each place, they are preparing to leave. I take ages to leave. I put off packing for every trip. When I moved out of my home that I shared with my ex, I sat on the floor drinking soda and he put all my stuff into boxes, taped them shut, and drove me to my new place. It doesn’t even matter how excited I am for the trip, I put off packing. I’m not a tidy person, either, except perhaps at my work desk. I let the dust settle and keep things strewn around in ways I can always find them. I must keep bits of myself tucked into the world, to be found later. If I don’t leave anything behind, this will have all been for nothing.
What feels like the afternoon, sky time:
Like the curated chaos of an antique shop,
to be loved as pre-loved, and now given away.
Sky time: I’ve been solely reading work by trans and gender diverse authors over the past month. In this marathon has been a much needed re-reading of Paul B. Preciado’s Can The Monster Speak?, experiencing the devastation and euphoria of Elliot Page’s gut-wrenching memoir Pageboy, annotating Preciado’s Testo Junkie, and finally, absolutely racing through Soula Emmanuel’s debut novel, Wild Geese (yes, like the Mary Oliver poem). Much of this work is diverse in nature, each different in format, in style, and also in size. I finished Emmanuel’s novel in a three hour beach picnic, while Pageboy took me a month to read because I kept sobbing through it and needed to take breaks. Much of the reading, however, gave me a similar sense as my tryst with packing my bags. Nearly all of the writing is highly detailed, and observant – and I don’t know if I have that feeling purely in the sense of literary technique, or because trans writing observes me deeply and passionately in ways that other writing doesn’t. (1hr07m left of the flight): Noticing the dew in every petal, the dust on the couch, the flare of a contact lens – seeing, and being seen with the practice of conditioned hypervigilance that shapes the trans experience, but with so much more kindness than is extended to us.
Much of the work is also a chronicle of time – Testo Junkie and Wild Geese both happen to have time stamps in very short intervals – almost a minuted play-by-play of the observation of a trans narrator. Pageboy, which is a memoir, is written more as episodic streams of consciousness, it does not unfurl chronologically, and instead relates multiple life-changing incidents of acute isolation, all rolled into one chapter, as Page is recounting them. It jumps through time, flings you to a lone childhood bedroom right after the paparazzi blinds you with intrusive flashes, all asking one question – “Who are you, really, and why are you different?” Much has been said of queer temporality, of the fragmentation of queer time and feeling, of the transcience and permanence of bodies and feelings that are fleeting. Trans time, for those of us who’ve always been one person with unending metamorphosis (the butterfly kind or the Kafka kind), for those of us whose lives didn’t really begin before we told someone, for those of us who write about our boyhoods that were so terribly marked by the girlhood we were given, has been an experience so very fragmented, it almost feels like science fiction. So much science fiction is about re-imagining a relationship with the body, its assemblages, and time — H. G. Well’s The Time Machine, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and of course, the gospel of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For me, trans time often feels like the bit of the Doctor Strange movies where he runs through time in search of the love of his, compresses through different dimensions, and still doesn’t get to keep her. He lives all of this love, in so many different dimensions — while being music, art, food, 2-dimensional, and also what can perhaps only be described as blue/green sludge.
adrienne maree-browne, in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, said “all good organising is science fiction — that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.” For trans people, this science fiction implies a reimagining of our own futures, our bodies and minds and reflections, as well as a future we have with and among others. Instead of pushing through time, drudging through identities that don’t often find a home, it pushes time through our personhood — look at me. I’ve been here, I’ve been before and I’m after. I’m a story and a possibility, nowhere, now, and here.
Airports/airplanes are such funny places. Flying internationally across both places you call home, is weird. I promise I’m an articulate person, but ‘weird’ is actually the best word I can find for it. You gain time and lose time and my childhood love’s older sister once told me that no one ever enters an airport the same person they leave it. In The Age of Disruption, Bernard Steigler, in much more profound words, identified that we live in a “pre-defeated epoch.” An over-surveillant, gamified digital economy that is commodifying rest and leisure and vacations all at once is presenting a libidinal logic of time – all of your time is now desired by your boss/your bank account/your ever-collecting debt/the hopelessness of a mortgage you will probably never qualify for anyway. You can’t win, although unionising is probably your best bet. You’re split in half, your insides are full of proverbial soot, and your non-profit boss is telling you this is an “easy-going workplace” because you can do therapy from the meeting room on company time, trapped in a glass room while people watch on. In a 16hr long flight, I have drunk 4 cups of coffee, read half a book, and written – this is most myself I’ve felt in MONTHS. Travelling as a disabled trans person with a global South passport is a humiliating paperwork-ridden nightmare, but after all the documentation was done, I have spent all this while sitting on the flight, getting to feel my feelings, exerting some control over the logic of my own time. Disabled, fatigued, ADHD, trans – fast and slow and liminal, time. Airplane time.
Redtape my personhood – send me from here to there to now/here with names and nationalities and questions. Steal my facewash at customs like you have stolen my dreams.
(fell asleep, woke up because of turbulence, turbulent time) I’ve always said that there is nowhere for longing to go if you are already holding hands. B used to trace his fingers on mine when we held hands. He always said there was space for ‘more touch.’ The liminality of gaining 4hr30m when I land – it feels like I have more time. More time with my father – whose life in the labourforce has never given us any time, but has bought me time to live my dreams – capitalism’s perversion of the technics of time. I also got him a great bottle of scotch – this is his first time meeting his son.
My suitcase, which I packed in the last hour before leaving for the airport, despite Kraanti’s best tries to make me do it earlier, has some un-laundered clothes. This is because, and I’m not joking, my mum wanted to experience what it is like to have a kid who can come home for laundry. Ma has watched me go through insurmountable heartbreak (ONLY second to insurmountable piles of laundry, or dishes), and I never got to go home to wash them. If I leave some clothes strewn across the bed, maybe it means I’m going to come back home, whatever that means, and whatever home grows to become.
This is it for this time, if you got this far, thank you for reading. The next one will be about being home – of joy and grief and childhood sweethearts and school visits. It will also feature my famous dahl recipe, courtesy of a request from my mentor. I will also put in some photos so y’all don’t think I’m boring.
Please also feel free to write back to me, I’d love your thoughts (or prayers. Or emojis, even).
Love,
Srish.