I’m profoundly sorry for going quiet on you. I meant to write before the wedding, and then I meant to write after the wedding, and ultimately what happened instead is that I got so consumed with existing that I didn’t write at all. I am still alive, and I am in the US, and we got married just over a month ago, on November 18th.
I don’t really know how to write about any of it yet—going back to England, arriving here, the wedding itself. Significant parts of it haven’t really bedded down in my memory yet. The flight, most especially, is a great mental smear of anxiety and want. I had a zit coming up on the front of my neck which I was absolutely convinced was the first sign of incipient skin cancer, and which I couldn’t fail to notice in the reflection of the in-flight entertainment screen every time I turned my head just so. I watched all but one episode of Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne. I waited for death, I guess? And then I stood in line at the border for forty-five minutes (an experience I had previously avoided by using Canadian airports with much shorter port-of-entry lines) clutching the envelope of immigration documents they sent me after the interview and told me not to lose.
(God, I didn’t even write about the interview on here. Someday I am going to regret that; eventually it will be far enough behind me that I might actually want to look back.)
It took me a little over a week to get over the jetlag. These days I feel blurry if I wake up before 8.30, which is lovely, at least while I’m in my mandatory No Work era. The total belief in my own imminent death is beginning to ebb, as well, though that has taken longer. (More work, too. I am, after some thrilling bureaucratic manoeuvres, on Isaac’s health insurance; as of yesterday, finally, I have a doctor again.) Tomorrow we are going to file the next tranche of immigration paperwork: the application for a green card, as well as temporary permission to work and travel. Hopefully once that’s out of my hands, the anxiety around all that will start to ease up, too.
And then I guess it will be Christmas? What the fuck, I ask. Last time I looked at a calendar, it was still November and I had like a month of good gift-acquiring time on the clock.
Things I didn’t write about from England (that aren’t the interview):
I have a literary agent again?? I am now represented by Kate McKean, who you may know from such clients as Alix E. Harrow, Jaya Saxena, and some guy named Isaac to whom I am married. Fun fact: the call with Kate happened the day after my visa interview, and I couldn’t tell you which thing made me more nervous (I mean, I could, it was the visa interview, but it was close.) Now I am revising the manuscript very gently before we broach the prospect of a submission round. I really can’t tell you how completely I thought it was all over for me professionally; this feels like a second chance and I do not intend to squander it.
I got to see some very good friends! I spent a few days with Kassie and Maz in Oxford, which was a joy; then I spent the night before the interview on Martha and Avery’s floor in London, which was just as joyous albeit a bit more overshadowed by “interview in the morning.” Their cat decided she liked me! A triumph.
On the theme of cats: my aunt’s beloved cat Silk, who I’ve known since he was a kitten, was very sick when I was living there. After I left, he passed away peacefully. He was a quiet cat, and my fondest memories of him involve hanging out in my aunt’s attic—just lying on the floor with him, not hassling him, simply vibing. I said a full goodbye to him before I left for Canada, because I knew he was getting older and I was sure I wouldn’t see him again. To have an extra month was a great gift. To have an extra month in which he took such great care of me while I was about as anxious as I’ve ever been—sitting in my lap, insisting that I pet him—is more than I could have asked. He’s at peace now, and that’s for the best.
The wedding itself is the longest consecutive stretch of time I’ve spent in the present moment in a minute. The part where other people attended a party we threw lasted about three hours. I spent all of that so completely occupied by immediacy that it barely felt like any time at all.
Here’s a clearer picture of what I wore:
If you’re asking “are those knives??” the answer is fuck yeah.
Here’s the playlist, which I hope works as an embed, and which contains a few real curveballs (“Jerusalem” by the Indelicates possibly the weirdest choice, but I’ll let you make your own judgments):
And here are my vows:
I am not a writer who writes an aspirational love story. I want to live a better life than anyone I would ever want to write about. To which end, these are the things I want to promise you, Isaac, as we move forward with the biggest collaboration of our lives.
I promise not to murder you semi-erotically for the good of the country—and that’s either of the two, England or the US. I promise not to make you complicit in an awful paramilitary vampire cult. I definitely promise not to travel back in time repeatedly to get our relationship right, although that is in significant part because we don’t have the technology yet.
I promise to be forthcoming with you about the things I want and need. I promise to work with you toward the goals we share, and to support you in your own efforts as best I can.
I promise to care for you in ways that are nourishing and sustainable for both of us. I promise to trust you and respect you, and to listen to you when you tell me what you need.
I promise to be present with you every day, and cherish all the moments we’ve worked so hard to be able to share. I promise to never take you for granted. I promise that whatever comes next, we will face it shoulder to shoulder. We don’t have to go it alone anymore. I think that’s the most beautiful thing about marriage—a commitment I freely admit I had never considered making with anyone, until you.
I think about what it took for us to be here today—the waiting, the worrying, the time and resources that could have gone literally anywhere else—and I don’t regret a thing. You’re worth all of it. I promise to be guided by that feeling, that certainty, no matter how hard it gets—because it’s already been hard, and we already came through.
There’s one last cool thing I want to tell you, and then I’ll leave this one alone.
I saw my new doctor for the first time yesterday. The first thing I told him—after his assistant had taken my vitals, quizzed me on my medical history, et cetera et cetera—was that I’m non-binary, I use they/them pronouns, and I would like a referral to the gender clinic, please.
His response? “Great! Done.”
(It wasn’t quite done. He had to ask me a few more questions and taken an “organ inventory,” which he agreed is an absolutely unhinged name for “the process of determining what your body has and doesn’t have right now.” But it basically was done. Imagine.)
This morning I got a call from the gender clinic. On Friday morning I have an intake appointment. 2024 is going to be the year I start medically transitioning. Do I know what that looks like for me right now? Not entirely! But I’m excited to find out.
I’ve known I was non-binary since 2014. For a long time, I expected to waver in that knowledge. I was also quite depressed in 2014, is the thing, and I wondered in the back of my mind if it was just another way of yearning to be nothing. I told myself that I would honour the feeling until it passed. It didn’t, of course—but it also had nowhere left to go, once I’d changed my name and told my friends my pronouns. I didn’t have the resources to pursue any further transition in the UK, where the NHS would have either left me to languish on a waiting list or laughed me out of the room.
So what do you do with any inconvenient feeling? Stuff it deep down inside and keep an eye on it.
I am not delusional. I know the for-profit healthcare system in the US is morally unconscionable, and I know that trans people in many states don’t have access to a process that works this easily. (An acquaintance recently moved away from Florida, where he’s lived all his life, because he couldn’t get his hormones there anymore.)
But I don’t have to sit on the feeling anymore. I can act on it. All else aside for a moment, it’s hard to describe how special that is.
Happy holidays, everybody. I’ll write again next year.