June 22
My guitar teacher quit the music school, suddenly and without warning, a couple weeks ago. I think possibly the day before my lesson? Maybe two days before. (Did I mention I’ve been taking guitar lessons? 6 or 7 months now, I think. After literal decades of being able to play about 6 chords and wanting more, I went ahead and started some lessons.)
My teacher was a 22 year old kid with bleached tips and acrylic long black nails on his right hand (for finger-picking). He once shared his screen with me during a zoom makeup lesson and I saw “how to ask for a raise” on one of his open tabs so maybe he was feeling underpaid. Regardless, I sense there was no notice given and they were scrambling to cover his lessons. I ended up with the owner and founder of the school – Nicky. Nicky – perhaps in her thirties? – is tall and skinny with long curly blond hair, nails painted yellow or pink, polish usually cracked and peeling, like mine. I’ve only had her a couple lessons now but I like her. She’s transgender, and talked a bit today about her voice. She’s been working to feminize it, however that is medically accomplished, and told me she’d love to sing a duet with me sometime. “I can still do John Prine – hangover from my former life.” Then she talked a bit about how mind-blowing it was to transition, as a musician and vocalist. We didn’t get deep with it, there wasn’t time, but my mind tried to race ahead of my mouth – as always happens when confronted with a situation that requires empathy, and for which I have little experience but feel compelled to get it right.
Anyhow. In the moments since, I thought about what it is like to have a body change dramatically. I’ve had a few dramatic body changes in my life. Pregnancy is the main one I thought of – not exactly the same but not dissimilar – hormones changing every bit of you, from the thickness of your hair to the size of your feet to the shape of your nose and cheeks. Birth and postpartum – similar, but more brutal and less socially acceptable or supported, a deflating, leaking, loosening. Weight gain with thyroid disease, weight loss with tirzepatide. It’s all kind of wild to have the fleshy housing for your consciousness change so rapidly. You see it through your own eyes in the mirror, and from your eyeballs’ perspective at the top of your frame. You also see it through other people’s gaze – the affection, attraction, adoration (when pregnant, when thin after tirzepatide); the disgust or pity (when postpartum, when fat regardless of the reason). Nicky has a whole host of other things beaming at her through other peoples’ eyes, and I’m sure lots of feelings surrounding her choices to change gender, especially now in America today (in Louisiana specifically).
I thought of Jesus too. I am about to head out and spend time with a new mother (speaking of postpartum), so I haven’t the time to properly set down my feelings here. I’ve always been fascinated by the resurrection story. A body dead, desecrated, bled and stabbed, and starved and suffocated, hung and nailed and wrapped and buried and already decaying. Stuck in a dark, cool, likely humid tomb. Then reinflated, reinvigorated, plumped up. Senses restored, flesh reconstituted, cells electrified, brain from silent back to whizzing. In many a scary story (like the Monkey’s Paw), bringing a loved one back to life is a dearest wish turned horror, but the resurrection story turns that on its head. Horror to salvation.
Anyway, that was in the mix too. A body changing, turning, altering, in ways desired and perhaps not desired, with consequences anticipated and never imagined. It’s all kind of in there, and makes me think of bodies in general. Living and dying. Alive and dead.
I wish more of our world leaders thought about bodies, living and dying. About consequences. I don’t know how to live through this time, honestly, though here I am doing it. Here I am.