“For now, all I want to say is that I’m extremely worried about you. And about Jamie. And I’m saying that because I love you.”

Learning to say goodbye to my first car is also, at least for the moment, about saying goodbye to the city I grew up in and the people and experiences that shaped me.

The tires turned left into the driveway, just as my mind turned right. I never thought that I would have to pull up to another house, or rather facility, with luggage in the back of my car, ready to be unpacked into The Perfectly White Dresser. The Perfectly White Dresser recycled by dozens of girls with one thing in common: a parasite that has driven them far enough into misery that they must stay locked up in its drawers, subdued, away from the harmful society that is primarily to blame for their destructive race to perfection.

NOLA Pride Week 2018 was my first large pride event, and I was determined to get comfortable with my androgynous aesthetic ideals. My partner and I planned to meet up with a few of our queer friends and ride the streetcar to the Quarter to attend a fem party at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Getting dressed was an exhausting undertaking. I fought off a spell of dysphoria triggered by my depression weight loss.

The word quarantined—when I hear it, I can’t not think of you. You were confined to your room for two years because of your illness, waiting. First for a miracle. Then for my visits, which were never frequent enough. Finally, to die. When you tired of waiting for death, you made death happen, by refusing to eat or drink. You didn’t believe in a god or a heaven, which made this final act even braver.

Taking the stage as a drag queen is ultimately what influenced me to dominate in the dungeon. Transformation, among many other facets, is what connects the two. However, I can positively say that I do not change as a person when I embody either archetype; I simply reveal parts of myself that are not always accessible.

“You want me to put that where?” was my first response when my pelvic floor therapist handed me a three-inch piece of plastic connected to a cord, which she plugged into a computer. It was a sensor used to measure muscle strength that we were going to use to test out my vagina muscles. “Ohhhh…kay, well here goes nothing.”

The heavy wooden sailboat bobs aimlessly in the crystal coldness of the lake. Once again, the wind that propelled us down the lake two hours before has deserted us for our return trip.

When I was a teenager, I learned from a Chinese calendar placemat in a restaurant that my birth year made me a rat. I was on a hot date in China Palace with Keith, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, and there it was, plain as day, on the placemat…I even moved the bottle of soy sauce to make sure I was reading it correctly and it was indeed clear: 1984, Rat.

That late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.

I grew up watching my mother and grandmother cook, internalizing how they yellowed the rice, when to taste the broth. I took their lessons with me to college, and charmed my first boyfriend with homemade chicken stews and lasagnas. When I turned twenty-five, the box of wonders in my head tipped over, spilling out erratic energy.

We leave behind our new house in America just as the weather turns cooler. An Airbnb on the Malvern Hills, a few miles from the city where I grew up, will be our base for the next three months. The bedroom faces a Victorian graveyard, the tombstones are cracked and sunken. Everything is covered in dead leaves and moss, the lives beneath forgotten.

When I was younger my mom called me Skinny Minnie. I’m not sure what she meant by this or why she called me it, but I know that I was confused. Even at a young age, I thought it was weird to have a nickname revolving around my weight -- especially because I wasn’t even particularly skinny; I was completely average.

All the colors I most cherish drifted by as I floated down the Grand Canal. Rich but worn shades of orange, pink, golden yellow and blues meandered by, one after another.

I’m always sweating. I get on the subway—I’m sweating. I clock in at work—I’m sweating. I’m asking the server where the bathroom is—and woohoo, I’m sweating.

Suddenly desperate to push beyond yourself, you commit to give back in some way in-between all the blood donations. A catalyst to thrust you from your daily grind.

You want to return to the womb. Maybe then everything will be quiet and safe again. But of course, you think about the children. The people, all of them, alone in their homes and schools and prisons and countries.

This was where my family had recently settled after we became refugees for a second time during the 1974 war. On the 13th, one day before I departed for the US for my higher education under a private sponsorship, I packed my suitcase. Then, I carefully selected a few photographs of my family and of myself to take with me to America. The same day I was packing, my mother gave me a few gifts. These gifts became my most valued possessions, and I am proud to say I still have them.

In Starvation Mode, all I thought or dreamt about was food, even though eating terrified me more than anything. I didn’t care about anyone or anything except losing weight. It was like the line between human and animal had become so thin it collapsed. I was gone. I was starving. I was addicted to starving myself. I went feral for a little while.

I began losing my eyesight when I was three – a result of poor genetics and squinting at the television too often. My sight worsened until I was nineteen; by then, I was nearly legally blind and opted to have my vision corrected through surgery. Until that point, losing my eyesight afforded me both a gift and a curse – the gift of insight and the curse of knowledge. I saw the world in layers of truths and half-truths, of what people thought they knew and what actually happened behind closed doors.