“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year. The first time was an accident, now it was on purpose.

“For pleasure,” her mother joked. This time was for The Surgery, the one that had become all the rage. Thora finally had a womb. She felt her puffy new face and the ocean of bandages below. Everything in one clean chop.

In the corner, Thora’s boyfriend Eli stared out the window at the spires of Manhattan. He was probably brooding about the medical debt she was racking up to The Company. He acted like it was his burden. Her mother was probably wondering when she’d get grandchildren. Her mother’s name was Lorna. She didn’t get along with Eli.

Almost everyone supported the world becoming one big Company-owned continent. It made sense at first. Now, goods traveled faster, in bright yellow packages with dancing electric mice logos. The US had collapsed under the gig economy until The Company bought a third of the government’s debt. They became the sole media-making conglomerate. The Company made certain cartoons required viewing. A squeaky mouse began to teach kids about amoebas, drugs, love, frog anatomy, and the Lascaux cave paintings. The Company sank the idea of love.

They idolized Andy Warhol and told kids he was a straight man who lived in Disneyland. Thora sounded like a crone when she tried to tell people he was a gay man. “He was not,” they said. “Not that we care.”

Further down the dystopian tunnel they started to care. It wasn’t a good time to be alive. Not that any time was. It was ahistorical to resent one’s position in time.

*

Lorna wanted Thora to date a nice cis boy. Eli hadn’t undergone the male equivalent of The Surgery. He didn’t want to be a dad. He preferred animals. His cat, the porcupine he fostered, videos of camels and bat pups.

“Incredible what they can do these days,” Lorna said, balancing a mint tea on her knee and smoking a cigarette.

“You can’t do that here,” Thora said.

“It’s fine, baby. No one’s here but us.”

“My lung.”

“Oh. Right.”

Thora’s first surgery of the year was for a pneumothorax. Her lung had spontaneously collapsed. Now, only a few months later, she was in pain again. It was difficult to keep up. She refused to look in a mirror.

Eli was the one who called it “The Surgery.” But it was. It was The Surgery. She was getting better. He was just pessimistic. Not that she blamed him. She’d made a trade. She had a new face, a pussy, and a womb now even if she couldn’t see them yet. Eli and her mother would have to wait as she cried out the poison chemicals. It would take time to adjust, to realize what she’d given up.

Eli stood up to find gummy worms and an energy drink. He wanted to give the two of them time to talk. Unfortunately, her mother only wanted to talk about her childhood while the TV illuminated tsunamis in Alaska, car bombs in Missouri, and a new Angel Disease cropping up in Ohio that caused patients to grow thorns.

“When you were young, your father always said the plagues would come for us,” Lorna began. “He thought we strayed too far from the original plan. Men and women and kids and all that. I don’t think he was right but it does make you think about all these Angel Diseases.”

That’s what the scientists called them. Cults capitalized on the language. Thora’s mother and father had even briefly joined one. Her father passed away from the fifth Angel Disease that went around. She no longer kept track of what number they were up to.

Eli re-entered the room, tearing off a surgical gown and guzzling his silly little beverage. “I don’t know why so many trans girls write about the apocalypse,” he said. “We’re here. It doesn’t feel very trans.”

“Shut up,” Thora said, digging her nails into her arms.

Her mother tried to light another cigarette and began talking about Thora’s high school years. Everyone assumed she was going to become a teacher. Young, gentle boys are always encouraged to be domestic but authorial. In high school she worked as a babysitter for an ESL program which later helped her land her first real job at an after-school program on the Upper West Side.

She worried people would find her existence offensive. They did. She failed to hold the pieces of her life far apart from each other. She walked children to and from school and got harassed by men who called her a pedophile on the subway. She was not cut out for such simple brutality, she told herself. Besides, she showed up to work with a hickey once and her boss nearly fired her.

“I don’t care, but what if a mom saw that?”

Thora turned red, knowing it was only going to get harder. Her co-workers, largely cis straight women, told her they never received comments like that despite showing up to work high or hungover. While she became fluent in mom-friendly lingo and demeanor — and even became employee of the year — she lived with constant fear in the panopticon.

Everyone at work debated whether or not they wanted to have kids. None of them asked Thora if she wanted kids. Could they still want one after having seen the process up close? The gross shit, their tantrums and fragility, the nightmare liars? But of course, there were also sweet angels like the one trans girl Thora taught. She would’ve done anything to protect that girl.

“You’re not still working at the after-school program are you?” her mother asked. “That would be hard to do while raising a kid.”

“No, I quit a while ago.”

“That’s for the best. When I had you I stopped working. Your father made enough money.” Her mother took a sip of tea and turned to Eli. “Do you make enough to support her?”

Thora was desperate for fruit. Apricots sounded absolutely heavenly. She wished Rose were still alive. Rose loved apricots.

*

One night, before The Company, before the womb was possible, Thora was tripping on acid with Rose, who wondered if she wanted to be a mother. Rose thought about “having it all.” She was asking the classic question: how much could a woman want before her desire becomes a yoke?

Rose said she thought Thora would be a good mother. They strolled to the park to stare at the trees and then took the train to Coney Island, watching the waves in the cool wind of September. Rose wandered off to get them cotton candy.

“You looked so serious staring at the waves,” Rose said.

After spitting pink clouds into the ocean, they took the train to a bookstore where Rose bought runes. She wanted to teach Thora how to be a witch. Lesbian shit. Thora saw a card that said: “Motherhood looks good on you.”

Rose had tried to get The Surgery as soon as it became available to the general public. Her surgeon fumbled it. She got some bizarre infection and died.

Thora gave a eulogy by the Atlantic.

*

Every morning her mother argued with the doctors.

“My daughter,” she emphasized.

“Is perfectly fine,” the nice man in a white coat said.

Her mother was not going to let what happened to Rose happen to her daughter. She almost told Thora it wasn’t worth the risk, but of course, breedability won out. Her mother wanted lineage. It was easier to pretend, to let others’ reasons drift in and out of her body.

Eli had started playing a game designed by The Company on his phone. A little yellow mouse ran around and stabbed other critters with a javelin. Attention diverted to the screen in his hand, his digital avatar grew more adventurous as Eli fell further into stoic daydreams and lost the web of conversation.

“If I play long enough, I could erase our debt.”

“You’d have to play for a hundred years,” Thora said.

He looked hurt. “I don’t know what else you want me to do, Thora. I’m incredibly

stressed out, I’m exhausted, and neither of us have any money coming in.”

Lorna returned from the cafeteria. “I bought donuts for me and Eli.”

Looking at her mother, Thora saw what she was becoming. She saw the life she so desperately wanted, in all its glory. And she did love her mom, she did.

And feared her, too.

*

Before the botched surgery, Rose took Thora to the hospital when her lung collapsed. She came to visit and gave Thora news of the outside world. A new Angel Disease had emerged, the third in two years. She told Rose what it was like inside the hospital, to be alone, to wonder why her parents wouldn’t visit, how scary it was to hear about people dying from steel halos growing out of their skulls.

“Just think, one day you’ll be in here for a good reason.”

“Yeah,” Thora said. She texted her mom to say she was doing okay — they were going to do a very routine procedure to repair her lung.

All the other trans girls Thora knew were separatists. She was the only one who kept dating men. Rose told her she was being stupid. Rose lived in an all-trans-girl compound. The girls walked around with their dicks swinging and their tits covered in hickies.

“He’s going to get tired of you.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

“Not as quickly.”

The more cynical the better. Rose drew Raidho as they sat in the glow of the hospital vending machine. Transformation.

*

In an effort to produce more heterosexuals, The Company began funding comprehensive sex changes. Breedable women were beloved women. This left little room for trans fags and lesbians but they worked hard to pass the het test. Pee in a cup, jack off to the right kind of porn in front of a clinician. Luckily it was easy for Thora; she was straight.

Eli and Thora tried to wait out the rocky recovery with small talk. But it hung above them with butterfly wings and peach-colored mobiles. He did not want a child. He couldn’t afford anything he promised he’d pay for, much less something he didn’t want. Thora wasn’t sure she could afford it either, but felt it coming like an inevitable, cerulean task.

They joked about wanting to visit Disneyland. It’d been bought out by The Company and divided into parks based on the stages of economic theory. They tried to mask that with cute little characters — mice of different varieties. The electric mouse that Eli liked so much, a pink mouse with fairy wings that Thora joked she would get a tattoo of — they all symbolized some sort of participation in use-value.

To save up for this imagined trip, Thora started fixing other girls’ bikes. Rose teased her it was a short drop to being a gold-star lesbian.

“First you’ll fix a girl’s bike, then you’ll fix her sink and then…”

“As hot as that is, I’m not nearly as handy as Eli.”

“I don’t believe that.”

It was half true.

Rose only met Eli twice before she died. Both times they all got drunk together. The second time Rose had tried to kiss Thora in the bathroom.

Eli was handier with some things than others. He was tired. He shouldered phantom responsibility and let the weight split him. She didn’t need to go to Disneyland with him, even if she thought it would be like being broken open in front of everyone, like rose petals flying. She wanted a public romance. Maybe that’s why trans girls liked the apocalypse. It was the only setting where it made sense for trans girls to fall in love forever. It didn’t have to last that long.

*

“Your mom’s a little kooky,” Eli said, fluffing Thora’s stale hospital pillow. He could tell when Thora was drifting.

“I tried to warn you,” she said, sipping the electric-blue drink everyone told her would make her feel better.

“I just wasn’t expecting it. She’s like…weird.”

Eli didn’t look up from his game. If she were a different girl she would’ve smashed his phone against the wall. Or dropped it out the window. Or sold it online for coffee money. But he loved her and she loved him even if they couldn’t always make sense of the edges.

“She’s been in and out of cults her whole life,” Thora said.

“Was she in one when you were growing up?”

“No. Well. Just the church.”

“Do you consider that a cult?”

It wasn’t like the people at her church were deranged — if anything they were far too normal. A lot of them bought stock in The Company when it first became available. They thought The Company would reinstate serious moral values. When the electric mouse started teaching about the Lascaux cave paintings and disavowing gay men, they were ecstatic. But even then the churchgoers hadn’t brought out any Kool-Aid or advocated for a Second Coming. It was all brick-and-mortar, meat-and-potatoes spirituality. Until her mother started flirting with other

denominations. Cult Mommy.

Eli scooted his chair closer to her bed. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“When we go home I’m going to set up a little canopy above our bed. And I’ll string up those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars you’re always going on about.”

“I’d like that,” she said quietly.

*

The surgeries would sink her if she wasn’t careful. Eli was only tied to her monetarily in the sense that they shared rent and food. Overall, his grumbling about money was for show. She didn’t ask him for surgery money. She was still paying off the first one even after asking for money online. The Company subsidized The Surgery but not enough; Thora had four credit cards. One of the cards was covered in blue mice wielding tacky lavender swords.

The night she got home from her lung surgery, after spending almost a month in the hospital, she sat in the tub and cried until Rose came over. Rose crawled into the tub alongside her and held Thora against her chest as she sobbed.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”

It was as okay as it would ever get. They didn’t say anything the rest of the night. Rose made mint tea and they watched the cartoon about the electric mice they’d both seen a hundred times. The comfort of numb repetition. She sat on the couch feeling her lungs contract and expand. They told her it could happen again. She would never be immune.

Rose got up and made popcorn. Thora rummaged through the cabinet for valerian root. The doctor hadn’t given her enough pain meds to use for sleep. They were running low on everything. She met Eli at the Value Plus Company Drug Store two weeks later. He was looking for lube and she clocked him.

“I’m Eli,” he said. “Do you currently have an ugly trans guy or are applications open?”

“My name’s Thora,” she said, eyeing the candy aisle. “What do you mean?”

“Every hot trans girl has an ugly trans guy boyfriend.”

No one she dated had ever called her a “hot girl.”

They spent that summer wandering the rot of Central Park and fucking in the Rambles. Sometimes he stole her peaches from the market by the docks. He would show up grinning and ask which hand she wanted.

That was the Eli she needed. The one who took her to dinner and strung up twinkle lights. But she had to admit, he was not the kind of man who would make a good father. Their straight shelter in the apocalypse was fragile. Passing meant she could walk around without the fear. When she used to walk around with Rose she always felt angular shards in her lung, worried someone would clock them.

*

Thora let her mom talk to the doctors. The inane questions Thora needed to ask were funneled through a haze of polite chitchat.

“Will her vagina be self-lubricating?” (Thora knew the answer to that one, of course.)

“Will she have to take any special probiotics?” (She had already researched the best probiotics for neo-vaginas.)

“Will she have to dilate forever?” (This one she didn’t really want her mother to ask.)

“For her face…how long until it…?” (Until it what? Thora wanted to ask.)

“How long until she could have a child?” (The womb was the biggest source of stress. It carried the greatest risk of complications.)

“Could he impregnate her?” (Eli would never get her pregnant. She already tried telling her mother this.)

A fly buzzed near the bathroom. Eli was still playing that stupid game, cursing loudly every few minutes. The pain made it hard to stay conscious. All the pain meds were going to patients with Angel Diseases. She had to make do with what they gave her no matter how many times she rang the bell.

Her body felt like fog. She wondered if Rose had ever felt like that. A girl was less a body of water than a gradual evaporation.

“Are you alright, honey? How do you feel?”

Bad. She felt raw. She knew her mother was going to start asking about grandchildren soon. She knew Eli was going to leave her. She knew she wanted to raise a kid and read The Giving Tree with funny voices and tell her child she thought Shel Silverstein was hot.

Her father read her stories when she was young. He got really into it, making Sherlock Holmes sound like a clueless cuckold. Her mother never listened, she was always in the bathroom fussing with something.

“I feel fine,” Thora said. “I’m just a little thirsty.”

“Alright sweetie. Eli, why don’t you go get our girl some cream soda?”

Eli got up, shot her mom a poisonous look, and stumbled out of the icy hospital room. When he opened the door she could hear a monitor crash and screaming. Another Angel Disease victim flew by on a stretcher, someone growing thorns all over their body.

*

Before Thora could start estrogen she was asked if she wanted to freeze her sperm. Her response was immediate. No. It was one of the few times in her life someone asked her directly if she wanted kids — perhaps the only time someone asked her if she wanted biological ones. The message was clear: infertility should haunt her, she should want the magical trans uterus. She should do anything for The Company-approved womb since she could afford it. Sort of. She could put it on credit and pay it off for the rest of her life. She wondered if motherhood had to be expected of you in order for you to develop any feelings around it.

She thought about all the MILFs out there. All the times she told someone to fuck her like a woman, to make her afraid of getting pregnant, to all the men she confessed she wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother but she wanted to have an abortion.

Now motherhood was something people could expect of her.

*

Raspberry sunset pooled against Eli’s legs. She wanted him to come closer so she could touch him. She wanted to curl up next to a body. Desperation only made people angrier; they knew you weren’t internalizing anything they said. Thora wasn’t sure what caused his newest mood shift — sometimes he needed a piss-party afternoon. Involuntarily she smiled. He snapped.

“I know you think it’s stupid but I’m trying to provide for you.”

“This is a way to do that?”

Thora meant it sincerely but it came across like an insult. Like she knew better.

“I’m sorry,” Thora said, not entirely sure why she was saying sorry this time. “I just wish you were more present.”

“I can’t be present when we’re falling apart financially. My mom isn’t coming to take care of us.”

“My mom’s going to leave soon. And then I’ll be back at square one. She’s not rich.”

“She’s not rich but she talks to you. My mom and I haven’t spoken in years. Your mom could help. She could do something if you asked her to but you’re too weak to ask.”

“Shut up. It’s not like that,” she said.

“Then what is it like, babe?”

The AC kicked on.

“I’ll ask her if that’s what you want,” Thora said. She didn’t think about the time as a kid when her mom, Sister Lorna then, came home from prayer service with a “holy adornment.” Thora didn't think about the time Sister Lorna took her to the cult meeting and made her child stand in the middle of the congregation to face judgment. She didn’t think about the time her father explained what demons were by saying, “The thing that’s inside you.”

“No, it's fine. Just read your runes,” Eli spat. “I’m sure they’ll say the apocalypse can be averted. They’ll say it’s fine; we just need to love each other.”

Thora watched him leave, clutching his phone tightly by his side. She tried to imagine him in the hospital courtyard, trying to hum one of his favorite punk songs. It was good for him to have a break.

She realized she was dry heaving. Her face felt hot even though she knew in reality there was no way she could be feeling anything other than pain. She was crying, the kind that made her body fight gravity. Her hands wouldn’t move, wouldn’t wipe the water trapped in her face bandages. It was summer. It was supposed to be a happy time. If she could, she would call Rose and cry into the speaker, but Rose would’ve just said, “I told you so.”

Humid light sifted through the window. Flies continued to collect on the sill. If everything went well, she would only stay in the hospital for four more days.

When her mom came in, she tried to stop the flow of tears. She was mildly successful, turning the flood into a noiseless trickle, but it wouldn’t stop completely.

“Honey,” her mom said, setting down her mint tea and pulling up a chair. “Is it the pain?”

Thora nodded.

“Okay sweetie. Okay. Okay, okay, it’s okay.”

Her mom set her hand on Thora’s, the two intertwining tightly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come last time, but this time I’m here, sweetpea. I’m here.”

She nodded through the tears. They were getting bigger again. Louder. She was gasping.

“It’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop.”

“Oh baby.”

They fumbled like this for a few minutes until her mother held up her hand with an idea.

“Why don’t you read my fortune. With your little runes. Did you bring them?”

“You — hate — them —”

“Will you read my fortune?”

The culty side of her mom was winning out.

Thora nodded through the tears and inched closer to the side of the bed. She fumbled with the menagerie on her bedside table. Pudding cups, decaying lilacs, books, an old issue of Vogue, and her little bag of runes carved into beans. Her mom smiled. She needed someone to hold her even if trust felt like a wobbly tune. It was better just to let it happen.

“I’ll do a three-rune spread.”

Thora took a deep breath and searched the bag for a more certain future. Before she took anything out of the bag, though, Lorna grabbed her hand.

“Do you really want kids? Is that why you’re doing this?”

She realized something about living on two sides of a thicket. In fact, she realized the thicket was less of a concrete divide than a small, porous stream.

“If someone else really wanted one,” Thora said, fiddling with the bag.

It would be different, she thought. It would be so different.

She wished someone wanted her to want one.

adapted from notes and participation in panel “This Writer’s Work: The Trans* Poetics of Labor,” AWP 2023

We come to life in spaces of encounter

Our kingdom to whoever gets our name right

Retell a wisdom —
The highway system worksbecause of loveor,
I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america

It’s a very literal metaphor — money, bodies, elapsing time
Money / bodies without heads / hot bodies / america runs on —
how we walk down the streetwetlike hustle

Any other year, I would slide / into yr muscle memory /
but here / in the anticipation / I tended only to the rupture /
nourished it / committed to it fully / to its wreckage /
Prefigured our impending separation

(from “Annihilation Suite,” originally published in Peach Magazine)

To prepare for a panel at the intersection of identity and work, I’d been digging through my poems and resumé alike, trying to solve a nagging question: why is it that the more transsexual I get, the more employable I feel?

*

A relic of someone else’s politics

A Deer dragging a corpse uphill I
make a home in my tantrum

Circulate wage labor thirst traps

Who will pay for this new body ?

( “Annihilation Suite”)

*

Even on this side of the “trans tipping point,” this sense of increasing employability opposes all conventional wisdom about life as a trans person. It runs counter to trans employment statistics, which say that trans workers are twice as likely as cis workers to be un- or under- employed and four times more likely to live in poverty, and counter to the virulent anti-trans sentiment expanding like a noxious gas from the swamps of DeSantis’s legislative vendettas to the unimpeachable pages of the New York Times.

Granted, I am both white and transmasculine, so, although I have no interest in being stealth, if I were to change my mind (and if no one noticed my small feet, or chest scar, or aggressively trans paper trail) I could potentially pass as a white male — a famously employable type of person.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my concept of “employability” was not at all based on how closely I outwardly resembled the criteria of what I or anyone else believed to be an employable person, but rather on a sense of self-possession that had evaded me most of my life.

I first encountered the significance of this absence during my post-undergrad job hunt, in 2011. I’d worked consistently throughout the last four years, but this was different: the next job was supposed to mark the end of part-time placeholder work and the beginning of a Meaningful Career. I just had to make it past the interviews.

Any competence I conveyed on paper fell apart in person. I had only just learned the term “genderqueer” but immediately knew that behind this clunker was a semantic world able to hold the relentlessness of gender incongruence I felt. But this didn’t actually help with my immediate material problems. I had no idea what femme professionalism looked like. As a baby egg I’d regularly arrive at interviews for an editorial internship at some B-list Pitchfork, dressed in some ridiculous polyester business-casual Lord & Taylor blouse — my best approximation of what women wore to work. For years I’d get the interview, but never the job. Surely there are countless reasons for this, but I assume not least among them were (1) how clearly uncomfortable I was, my attention monopolized by a not-yet-articulated but already deafening dysphoria, and (2) my body language, caught tragicomically between “how do you do, fellow cisgenders” and “I would rather fall through the floor than spend another second being perceived.”

All that plus a recession, and I was working in the service industry.

•

The tobacco store had been there for over a hundred years: an unspoiled monument to antique kitsch.

Each morning at 8:45am, I sweep the sidewalk, wash the windows. There is a pleasure to routine. I check the messages. I stuff massive ziploc bags full of tobacco, pressing out the air.

Everything has a texture, a smell. Thick, wet clumps of cavendish: strawberry, cherry. Handfuls of airy gold shag and mossy, pubic dutch shag. I want to stick my face in all of it & inhale deep.

I do my best to match the shop aesthetic. Vintage femme: polka dot dress & denim vest. The boss hires tattooed college kids, convinced we can appeal to the broadest range of people. Our job is to hand things to people, but also, to handle people. To provide an experience. I learn to smile agreeably, lean into every interaction. Do you live around here? Do you go to school? What a cool thing to study. Good customer service is about giving someone a positive experience on a garbage day. Every day is a garbage day for someone.

Cigars are the heart of the business. I’ve never smoked one but I learn the language. How would you describe this one? Leather & cedar notes. Perfect for after dinner.

Dinner cigars. Bachelor party cigars. Birthday cigars. There are so many rituals, so many masculinities I don’t understand.

We don’t carry dutchies, only cigarillos. A not-so-subtle hint: we’re not that kind of a place. Anyway, the men who come in aren’t cigarillo men. They want them thicker, bullet-shaped. They want the cool ten-minute smokes.

When Harvard men come in — stiff rulers of the world in pristine sweater-blazer combos — they nod at us, and we escort them to a special humidifier in the back.

The men love you so much. You are so charming, acquiescent. They ask, Where are you from? Who are you when you aren’t here? You become so interesting, so mysterious. A young thing to be picked & picked apart. They come to you, hands on the wallets bulging in their pockets. You smile demurely, make them think you want it.

(from SERVICE originally published by Bottlecap Press)

*

Where my awkward attempts at delivering white collar femininity had failed, performing service industry femininity was way more straightforward. After years of searching for something to like about womanhood, on the assumption that I was stuck with it forever, I settled on a reassuringly practical feature: its transactional value. Despite all my squirming discomfort with the Russian gender norms which my family and culture tried unsuccessfully to instill in me, I hadn’t missed the lesson that an ostentatious, almost pornographic femininity was one’s best, if not only, tool for economic survival. It might not have translated to the American professional class, but, in retail or hospitality, it was a slam dunk.

Then, it’s 2014. I’m bartending at a gay bar in Brooklyn, and it’s a good thing I practiced all that ~feminine charm~ back in Boston because most of my tips still come from flirting with straight men. Statistically, it figures — there are so many of them, and they have the most disposable income — but it is increasingly exhausting. The dysphoria is now unbearable.
It’s 2015. I am in my peak Bieber lookalike era, long past any lingering attempts at femme presentation, but am still only ever “she/her”’d and “miss”’d. It’s 2016, 2017, 2018; the new generation of young queers asserts their right to “they/them” pronouns and so I do as well, but I’m still terrified to take any material steps toward medical transition, convinced I would lose what I’d come to accept was my main earning quality.

•

Every part of my body hurts & I'm drinking too much

This dude in a Pharrell hat wants to hook me up with his roommate. “You’re a lesbian, right?” He keeps calling me “girl” & “beautiful” & putting his hand on me & asking for my number like we're friends. I want to fight him

The more I want to fight people the more I regress into being this angry fuckboy caricature

I want to leave but True Romance is on & S. moves to hold my hand

I want to leave but C.A.'s shoulder brushes my shoulder & I want to see where this goes (nowhere)

I want to leave but B. says his foot is getting amputated & this could be the last time i hang out with him while he has a foot

It's raining & stupid & I want to fight the moon

(from Good Leather for Bad Weather)

*

The closer I got to 30, the harder it was to work more than a subsistence level of shifts. But I couldn’t bring myself to apply to writing or editing jobs.

Careers are built on “making a name for yourself” — but how could I do that when it was a name I knew I’d someday change? (I may be writing in the time of Elliot Page, but this spiral was before the writer Daniel Lavery, the first public figure I had seen do so, transitioned while already widely published.) Even outside of the publishing and media industries, finding and keeping white-collar jobs depended at least in part on a well-maintained, always-already gendered personal brand. With service jobs, I only had to perform an ill-fitting gender while on the clock. That made sense to me, especially since so much of the job was already based on performance — artificial knowledge, artificial friendliness, etc. It was another thing entirely not only to have a treacherously gendered data double on the loose, but to have to regularly fortify her with a “sense of authenticity,” like some haunted Neopet.

•

There are things you can’t control
like the weatheror what you are.

I feel about this how sea creatures must
feel about rain: the everyday made sudden
(this is how you learn to thirst)

For example,
it’s December,

I’m no longer sure of my name
so I stop introducing myself.

It’s vacant / loaded / lonely / it’s electric
& it’s slimy. & there’s nothing that can hold us.

Isn’t that beautiful? Doesn’t that make it cold?

The ghost story is that your girl once lived here
& the secret is,
I miss her too. That is to say, I also dreamed her up.

But I’ve been living in the balance of a question
where body / is tied to empire / tied to discourse / where
yr body is the villain
is the selling point
is this thing for you to just get over
is capitulation
is an insult
is a letting down
of everyone you’ve ever known / & still
you yourself are never let down from the ledge.

So you build a castle on the ledge —
you tell yourself how you’ve always loved ledges
how unique the climate is

& isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that really cold?

It’s like a cat: it’s always vanished when you try to get a look at it
I mean, it’s like this cat / sat on my chest last night / a heavy one
Today I’ve got it by the scruff.

& none of this is okay (despite the forecast)
& all your freezing lonely nights in empty downtowns
are snowglobes / in somebody else’s living room.

(from "Eleven")

*

It’s 2023. I am once again looking for “career-oriented” jobs post-graduation, this time after grad school, and while the results are still a mixed bag, it no longer feels outside the realm of possibility. And, for me at least, this feeling is directly related to having taken tangible steps toward physical transition.

Revisiting this archive, I realize now that when I say that transitioning finally makes me feel employable, I actually just mean that I am starting to feel like a person in the world. But, since I have been working my entire adult life, my conception of personhood, like my conception of gender, is inextricably tied to wage labor.

Transition eases going outside in the daytime where I might be perceived; it makes me feel like I could show up at the same place, multiple days in a row, without needing a recovery day to offset each shift wherein I’m misgendered for eight hours straight. It lets me conceive of a livable dailiness, and thus, a livable futurity.

But what a depressing thing to celebrate — that I can finally, maybe enter the white-collar job market, even with the statistical disadvantages of being trans? In Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a crucial plot point comes when the factory jobs that have long sustained Buffalo’s gender-nonconforming lesbians, including the narrator Jess, start to dry up in the early ’70s. As this relatively permissive space disappears, their access to income again becomes dependent on their legibility within a gender binary. Four butches arrive at Jess’s house with wigs and makeup in tow, their economic desperation pushing them into dysphoric femme drag in the hopes of securing department store work. Jess can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, Jess takes the only other option she sees within this binary and joins other butches who have started HRT in order to find work as men. Although Jess could be described as “masc of center,” she identifies primarily as a butch, and her decision to transition — and especially to be stealth — is written overtly as a matter of survival. Both options are driven by economic necessity and both require immense sacrifice:

“I don’t feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body,” Jess tells her butch friend before her transition. “I just feel trapped.”

Fifty years later, this frustration still hits. Life for white transmasculine queers like Jess and I has gotten significantly less dangerous — I certainly don’t have to worry about wearing three articles of clothing that match my AGAB in the event I get arrested for gay dancing — but a less- than-legible gender is still a liability. Like Jess, I still consider myself genderqueer and, though I am happy with many aspects of medical transition, my reasons for engaging with it cannot be separated from the demands of capitalism. For non-passing trans people, work options are often limited to service, nightlife, sex work, and, for a lucky few, “the arts”— all precarious forms of employment, hard on the body, but without access to healthcare that might cover medical transition (or the deluge of health issues which disproportionately affect trans people and can impede our ability to perform this labor in the first place). And yet, there is no dream job. My trans desires are of a dailiness that does not revolve around wage labor, of everyone having what they need, of opulent dance parties and reciprocal community care and adequate rest. It’s not a job I want but healthcare, housing, and surplus to redistribute — and yet, to access those, I am expected to discipline myself into a legibly gendered subject for the opportunity to sell my labor, even below market rate. Transitioning will never make that any better. I’m just hoping that it makes the dailiness more bearable.

•

What I mean is the sky opened up and then flashes of lightor,
by the train tracksrusted
I was a vehicle for everything at once
for everyone’s life stories to unfold around me
heldto lather in that centrifuge

& now all I want is to sit with you
all nightat yr shitty job
because you sit with me at mine.

In the ambient atrocity we’re nostalgic
for a sharp disasterpiece

Demand annihilation
at a comrades’ trusted hands
Inside yr hair like bat wings
This apocalypse
Dissolving

I could wait all year.

("Annihilation Suite")

I am often only aware of the way I remember things after realizing I have forgotten them: A friend’s birthday I catch just in time because it’s the day after Princess Diana died; The right turn I remember to make one block too late, when the sight of a familiar monkey puzzle tree reminds me I’ve gone too far; The fluttery feel of an ex-boyfriend’s lips crossing my face, evoked by the sight of a random passerby’s mustache; The memory of my mother’s voice, laced through the laughter of a woman standing behind me in line at the grocery store.

This inflection point between remembering and forgetting came to a head one morning when a banner flashed across the top of the Spotify app on my computer: Baby Girl is coming. Somewhere, from the depths of my brain, a response to this call floated back through my memory, in the form of rap lyrics: “Baby Girl, better known as Aaliyah.” As troubling as it was to think that the Spotify algorithm had correctly guessed what I wanted, I knew it was right: I was waiting for Aaliyah to come back; I had just forgotten.

I didn’t own any of Aaliyah’s three main albums back when she was alive and filling the mid-1990s airwaves with her particular blend of dark beats and ethereal falsetto—a sound likened to angels well before her death. But I still listened to her nonstop when I was in middle and high school; I often checked out her CDs from the library and silenced my friends whenever her videos popped up on MTV: “Shhh. It’s Aaliyah.”

The digital age as we know it began to emerge around the time she died in a plane crash in 2001; she was twenty-two years old, then, and I was eighteen. I had just entered my freshman year of college, and free-for-all music exchange platforms like Napster and Audiogalaxy quickly became the greatest perk of living in a dorm. The moment a song was released, or recommended to me, I could listen to it—an experience that had been unthinkable for most of my life. But as a white girl living in Boulder, Colorado, I quickly lost touch with R&B and hip hop. My new friends only kept current with whatever indie-rock bands passed through town; they were always reaching for the new, so that’s what I learned to fill my computer with. Only a handful of Aaliyah tracks stayed with me as I moved on.

Back then, I’d been able to easily locate her most popular singles (“Try Again” and “Are You That Somebody”) on Napster. But when I went in search of the older slow jam “The One I Gave My Heart To”, I kept finding mislabeled files; when I hit play, I was met with Monica’s “Angel of Mine” or Mariah Carey’s “When I Saw You” instead. Perhaps this is when I first began to forget. My old song files also didn’t last long after college and I changed computers. Given how carelessly I had acquired those thousands of songs, it had been just as easy to let go of them without sentiment. I can’t say when exactly they disappeared, though it was likely in the mid-2000s.

It wasn’t until I was building a nostalgic dance-party playlist for my bachelorette party in 2011 that I discovered a loss I wasn’t ready to part with: a search for Aaliyah’s tracks came up blank. At first, I thought I had misremembered my selected song titles or misspelled her name, but after scrolling through search results on iTunes without success, I turned to Google. Where is Aaliyah’s music? It turned out that her two most important albums—One in a Million (1996) and Aaliyah (2001)—had never transitioned to streaming platforms. What did this mean for my relationship with Aaliyah? I might have once called myself a fan, but realizing I’d allowed so much time to pass while being disconnected from her music called my relationship with it into question. That I had forgotten to remember her not only felt like a devastating testament to my own role in her disappearance from the world, but it also revealed the way someone once emotionally entrenched in my life could disappear before I even realized they were gone.

*

The year before my husband and I had a baby, I started repopulating my music library all over again, this time with an aim to cultivate something more permanent—I was middle-aged, with an increasing awareness of my own mortality, after all. As the world continued replacing what was once tangible with its digital counterparts, the urge to save filled my fingertips, and the desire to to flip through physical proof of my old self newly consumed me. I started frequenting music and bookstores more often; every few months I’d compile a handful of digital photos into a mail-order album.

Since finishing graduate school, I’d been working in education and exhibitions departments of art museums, whose focus on “preservation in perpetuity” took on an increasingly personal role in my life the older I became. Around the time that I became pregnant, I discovered a website that would compile and print my Instagram pictures into photo albums; and I encountered a story on NPR that described CDs as music’s most ephemeral medium, the tracks burned into their surfaces simply fading away over time. I imagined myself going through the hundreds of albums sitting on a shelf in my childhood basement, attempting to play them one by one, only to find myself met with silence. The very next day, I bought a record player, and shortly thereafter, an avocado-green shelf took center stage in our living room, which I began filling with vinyl LPs.

When Aaliyah suddenly reappeared in my life from within that Spotify banner, my chest throbbed the way it does whenever I witness a beloved musician taking the stage for the first time. I’d never seen the ad’s image of her before, so there was no foundation of nostalgia to compete with her newly-advertised radiance: her hair unbound in cascading waves, her hand clutching her heart beneath a metallic-gold camisole, her expression a mixture of joy and knowingness, as if she had a secret she was burning to tell. She looked so alive—and for less than a second, my longing was desperate enough to convince me that she was. Then, I almost laughed aloud. They mean her music is coming, obviously, I scolded myself.

While the banner informed me Aaliyah’s music would be streamable the very next day, my immediate question was: But will it be on vinyl? A quick Google search confirmed it would be, so I tracked down her two albums and hit “Pre-order.” As if having those records in my living room would somehow mean I could hold onto her forever. But that impulse opened up a bigger question—What did I want to hold onto, exactly? I didn’t even know what Aaliyah would sound like to me after twenty years of absence. Would a flood of memories surge through my body, suddenly unlocked by her warm vocals and those harsh beats—could I hope for a surround-sound-level emotional explosion? Or had Aaliyah been buried and disconnected from my life for too long to evoke any response at all?

*

Around the same time I started printing my Instagram albums, I started wondering where the family photographs in my father’s condo kept going. Similarly to the memory of my beloved Aaliyah tracks, I didn’t notice their disappearance at first; a steady influx of the new somehow always succeeded in distracting my attention away from the old. My dad had been replacing his décor with increasing vigor for a few years, since I’d left for college and he’d gotten remarried. I thought it was healthy to see change in moderation. I even liked coming back to my childhood home to discover new evidence of his second wife’s growing imprint on color schemes and furniture patterns. Rooms once coated in thick wallpaper were now refinished with fresh coats of warm yellow- and amber-colored paints, adorned with mirrors that reflected the light all around and made the house look new.

As I think back now, this time of many changes was likely when the picture of my mother first disappeared. It was the only one that I remember being on the mantle, among a random array of school portraits of my sister and me. My dad had framed that photo and given it to everyone around the time of her funeral, when I was nine—my mother was sitting on a bench in Disney World’s Main Street, her hair growing back during the brief moment when we thought the chemo was over, styled like Princess Diana’s. Truthfully, I hated that photograph because of how it had begun to replace all of my memories from the day it was taken.

In theory, I could understand why my father would want to remove it since every time I passed it, it sliced into me like a paper cut; I, too, wished it was gone. But at the same time, to remove it seemed as unthinkable as trying to imagine the return of our old life in that same living room, with my mom alive, reading a magazine on the couch, waiting for me after school; to lose the photograph would be to physically lose sight of the loss— an already-invisible process we were living through. To succumb to erasure would be to deny a meaningful vacancy. Soon, I began to second-guess myself: Was our house always like this—an impersonal space of forgetting? Maybe it was, and I hadn’t realized it because I was a kid, too alive in the moment to count the photographs, to take stock of the ways they filled a void in our home and in our lives.

Because my mother had been the family’s archivist, the rest of our photographs were labeled with our names and ages, and stored chronologically in the vinyl sleeves of albums that were stacked in a cabinet. All the photos that came after her death remained in the orange sleeves from the drugstore where they’d been developed; no one kept up the work. But I still loved looking at the albums. All the way through high school, I would frequently dig them up, eager to show them off to whoever would indulge me—family members, friends, and eventually boyfriends. I returned to these photos whenever I wanted to remember what my family used to be like, even though I had few words to describe the images inside.

But after my dad and his second wife separated, and he began living alone, the décor changeovers evolved into an almost-compulsive habit, as if he’d suddenly become more preoccupied with staging rooms rather than living inside of them. He downsized into a two-bedroom condo in 2014, and it became even more obvious; Every time I visited him, the table light would change. Over three years, the couch morphed from a tan corduroy to a chocolate velour to a midnight leather. A single painting of an aspen forest—dense, rosy-hued but entirely leafless—appeared in the living room. One of the only consistent décor details ran along a bookshelf in the spare bedroom: a parade of framed professional portraits of my sister and me from various stages of our existence. Many were familiar, but others that I hadn’t seen in decades—my second-grade school photo set against a backdrop of lasers, for instance—felt foreign and somewhat mysterious. Their sudden appearance made me wonder where he was keeping all the other archival objects and precious heirlooms that were no longer in sight.

In this way, I began to associate my visits to my father’s new home with some indescribable combination of nostalgia and loss. Among the many disappeared objects whose once-steady presence comforted me while growing up, several continued to haunt me each time I visited. I missed the antique brass lamp that was inherited from my great-aunt; the tufted gold armchair my father used to fall asleep in every night; the collage of tin sign advertisements that lined our kitchen walls—signs we had painstakingly hunted down amongst hundreds of vendor stalls at the Kane County Flea Market back when I was younger and my mom was still alive. We kept up the search for several years after she died, until they covered our kitchen like a painting salon and running out of space became an excuse to stop the tradition. The sudden absence of these objects, which had served as tangible memories in my adolescence, made me fear not only for my father’s emotional and mental wellbeing, but also for my own; My past was being erased. When I was a child, I didn’t worry about memories—particularly those of my family before my mother died. But I also didn’t know then that they could fade away, like the tracks on a CD that once felt so permanent.

*

Although I had lived nearly twenty years without Aaliyah’s music, I struggled to restrain myself during the mere twelve hours that separated my seeing the Spotify banner and the next morning, when her songs would be redownloaded into the cultural memory bank. After preordering the records, I turned to bootlegged music videos on YouTube in an attempt to satiate my urgent craving, including a grainy recording of “One in a Million.”

Before I could discern anything on my screen, I heard those familiar heartbeats: Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Love it, babe.

The first time I heard “One in a Million,” I was fourteen and hanging out in my best friend’s almost-finished basement, which had been made-over with a coat of clean white paint and plush beige carpeting, but furnished only with a television. For us teenagers, this was not an obstacle: the lack of furniture practically guaranteed our privacy, since no one else in her family would have wanted to spend time there due to the lack of comfortable seating. In addition to functioning as a place of solitude, this unfinished basement was a place of many firsts: our first real party (even if her parents were just upstairs), first game of spin the bottle (even if I didn’t kiss anyone except my best friend), and my first hand job lesson (even though I wasn’t giving any yet). No matter the occasion, we could always count on an endless stream of MTV countdowns to provide the soundtrack.

Ba-boom. In her video, Aaliyah appears in blinks and slices and fragments. Harsh bass, rising trills; Lush dark hair, a navel ring’s glimmer; Billows of smoke, a shining black convertible. Eventually the frame pans out enough to reveal the artist’s full iconic getup: a fitted pair of black, laced-up leather pants, , and a tiny laced-front top to match. Over the course of the video, the star reemerges in a number of different get-ups, including one with a mysterious silver-plated eye patch peeking through her dramatic swooping bangs, though she is always a vision with her narrow waist and glowing caramel skin. In the background, a loose narrative unravels involving a man and a motorcycle, with cameras and paparazzi flickering in and out of the shots. But if you are like me, you are too hypnotized by Aaliyah’s intense, unbroken gaze to really notice anything else.

Hearing those ba-booms now, as an adult, I suddenly recalled how they used to startle me when I was young—not the sound itself, but the realization of how much I liked this sound. How instantly I was drawn to this young woman, only a few years older than me at the time, whose intricate identity I could not fully grasp. As I watched Aaliyah flicker in and out the video frame, I also realized how uncomfortable she made me; I had never purchased her albums because I wasn’t comfortable owning them. Aaliyah—part alluring, part promiscuous, part unfathomably self-possessed—felt complicated in a way that I couldn’t understand.

I wasn’t fully aware of Aaliyah’s now-famous backstory as it was happening in real-time. I’d known she was romantically involved with the infamously debauched R&B singer and later-revealed sexual predator R. Kelly, but I had never followed the details of their relationship. I would come to learn years later that he produced her first album, Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, in 1994; but if I ever realized they were married when she was only fifteen years old, the obvious connection between that album title and the bizarre details of their relationship still eluded me. They had all come to light well-before R. Kelly’s crimes were as openly discussed, but the media also didn’t use the same words back then—they actively avoided such necessary terms as “trauma,” “grooming,” “abuse,” and even “power.”

Once their marriage was over, Aaliyah never spoke of it publicly again; most people seemed to respond in the aftermath by forgetting the situation altogether. But I recognized something symbolic in the glimmering eye patch that she wore in her music videos and at award shows: a deliberate signal of something held back. It was as if she had left some dark and unknowable part of her self hidden in plain sight—something I now see as an aspect of her identity that complicated the brighter, performed narrative of a young woman simply moving on with her life.

As someone who was born and raised in the kind of suburbia where tidy, two-parent households appeared to be the norm, I learned that most nuclear families—including my own—rarely discussed the darker aspects of their lives. The thought of boldly displaying one’s own darkness like a self-afflicted scarlet letter was both alluring and terrifying. And yet, this was where I had felt my deepest, most instinctual connection to Aaliyah, which I had forgotten about entirely until her music resurfaced years later. Now, I’ve become more aware of the word people use to reference her persona most consistently: “mystery.”

“It was the mystery of Aaliyah that allowed the track to land so perfectly in the pocket for listeners…”

“She seemingly took the parts that felt the most like herself—the air of mystery, the laid-back vibes—and reworked them to help pioneer a new way forward in pop and R&B…”

“Twenty years after her death, Aaliyah is still a mystery…”

It was a mystery that could perhaps only be evoked in full by the music itself—a challenge that only a few true fans would undertake to parse out the meaning from the melody. I once heard New York Times culture critic Joe Coscarelli voice a certain fear about Aaliyah’s legacy, that she would ultimately become an “empty icon,” with her image usurping the complexities of her music, and by turns, her full being. While this was something he said before her music was re-released in 2021, I still share that fear to this day—that we could remember someone so tragically incompletely they’d become a ghost twice over. That we could gut their memory into a shell of itself without even realizing it, feeding false fuel into the machine of the collective consciousness.

*

The first time I visited my father after the pandemic, I walked into his extra bedroom and noticed the mélange of photos was gone.

“You’re probably wondering what happened to the dresser that used to be in here,” he said matter-of-factly, standing in the doorway.

“You mean the place where all of our family photos were displayed?”

“Yeah. I gave it to your sister for her new apartment.” He didn’t say anything specifically about the photos. I’d wanted to press the issue, but it had been over a year since I’d last seen him, and I’d just arrived, after all. It seemed like too much to ask.

Later that evening, while my dad was at the grocery store, I quietly approached a plastic crate I’d noticed on the floor, where the dresser with the photos used to be. I opened it delicately, as if it might fall apart, even though it appeared brand new. I’d been expecting to find the old, framed photos that had been relegated to my memories, but instead I stared into a pile of albums I didn’t recognize. As I opened a faded red leather-bound book on top of the pile, a photo flew out. I immediately looked around to make sure my father hadn’t returned before moving to retrieve it. The photo turned out to be a black and white shot of a couple and their bowl-cut styled toddler, all clad in long, wool coats, in front of a Ford Model T. As I flipped through the images in the rest of the book, I determined the boy must have been my mother’s father, and that these antiquated albums must have ended up with my dad after my maternal grandmother died while I was in college. At the end of the album, an index handwritten in blue ink gave me pause:

The captions were brief, but held enough personality within them that I could almost hear the voice of the woman who wrote them—my great-grandmother, who I know almost nothing about beyond her apparent passion and diligence for archiving. The impulse to chronicle these photos beyond simply storing them away echoed my mother’s own meticulous labeling system. Standing there in the empty bedroom, I briefly considered that not everyone would have this same desire to record the details of any given moment as a means of preserving them for the next person who would come looking. I considered, too, that maybe I was being too hard on my dad: for some people, the details of what’s been lost are just too hard to look at.

*

The reason behind the disappearance of Aaliyah’s most important albums is indeed intertwined with the question of remembering—but more specifically, with the pain of remembering. The young artist’s uncle, Barry Hankerson, was the co-founder of the boutique label Blackground Records, which released One in a Million and Aaliyah back in 1996 and 2001 respectively, and still owns their copyrights to this day. Hankerson had also been Aaliyah’s manager, beginning from when she was only ten years old. It was Hankerson who first introduced her to R. Kelly when she was twelve and facilitated their collaboration on Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number, and he was reportedly furious when he learned of the marriage that took place between them not long after. But probable rumors have since emerged that might suggest otherwise—that Hankerson in fact suspected something was amiss well before the marriage was made public, since he had been managing Kelly for ten years by then, and had heard firsthand about multiple accusations of abuse from other young women in Kelly’s orbit.

The story then goes that Aaliyah’s family was understandably devastated by her untimely death less than a decade later. Some of them couldn’t bear to walk into a public place and suddenly hear her voice, and Hankerson himself was supposedly too broken up about his niece’s passing to continue managing the albums he held the copyrights to. If the stories are to be believed, around one year later, Hankerson was the person who anonymously sent a video of R. Kelly urinating into the mouth of a young woman to a journalist, having finally come to terms with the harsh realities of Kelly’s crimes, and perhaps even with his own role in allowing them to continue for as long as they did. It was the first crucial bit of evidence to begin reshaping public perceptions of Kelly more broadly.

Some ten years later, as music began moving increasingly into the digital space, there were rumors of almost-agreements, hushed deals, and unreleased Aaliyah tracks surfacing in the streaming world, but they always managed to fall through, and so her two main albums became increasingly harder to come by. While most of us don’t know exactly why Aaliyah’s albums remained locked away for so long, the combined traumas of her life and death seem like undeniable factors. The sheer suddenness and unexpectedness of her passing, combined with the strengthening whispers of her abuse in the face of increasing allegations against R. Kelly (and their subsequent media coverage) may have been too much to bear for some of those involved. Maybe turning away from the grief and guilt incurred by these memories felt like the only option, even for what seems like the ultimate price of compromising the young star’s legacy and life’s work—letting the facts of her existence and the public’s memories of them fade in tandem from existence.

*

A few hours after I discovered my great-grandmother’s photo album, my father sipped a modestly-sized glass of white wine over dinner. I tried gently (but persistently) raising a slew of family questions every time the conversation cracked a window in that direction, but no single exchange lasted longer than a handful of minutes. My father’s work at the steel mill (“pure hell”); My grandparents’ experiences with the Depression (“no one leaves that unchanged”); The layout of his tiny childhood home just south of Chicago (“The kitchen was our bedroom”). Eventually, I decided to give it a rest and wait until he was ready to say more—to allow me a glimpse of the darkness that helped shape our family history. Some things were simply worth waiting for, after all.

When Aaliyah’s albums finally arrived at my home months later, I waited for an afternoon when I knew I’d have the living room to myself to listen to them. Alone, I turned up the bass on the stereo as my younger self would have, sprawled out on our couch, and watched the needle drift onto the black vinyl’s first ridge. As the space slowly filled with the ticking gong that opens One in a Million, I lost myself—not within the memories of my youth, as I had expected, but within the immediate fullness of the record’s sound. I’d read somewhere that when a song is compressed into an MP3 file, the sonic elements that your ear supposedly cannot hear are eliminated in the interest of saving space. Experts claim that such an absence would be impossible to detect, but as the richness of Baby Girl’s highs and lows floated through my ears and seeped into my hippocampus, my breath shortened, my chest tightened, and I knew that they were wrong—that sometimes absence is the loudest sound in the room.