Handsome

by Holly Lorka

  That’s how I lived for so long. Every time I looked at my body in the mirror, the thing I hated the most were my boobs. My father was really into bodybuilding when I was young, and his muscle magazines were all over the house. I’d take them into my room to turn the pages and stare and stare at how beautiful their male bodies were. Their chests were so nice. When I looked at myself in the mirror, even if I was in prime shape, I never once thought I looked good. Not even okay. Because my breasts were always there, looking back at me, ruining everything.

  Then, as I told you, God fucked with me a little more when I turned forty-five. Imagine you are a middle-aged man. You go to bed one night and you’re slightly okay with your body and everything is fine. In the morning you wake up and suddenly you have the most tremendous rack that could rival Phoebe Cates getting out of the pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Yes, my boobs became that incredible. I know what some of you people out there are thinking: Oh, my God, I wouldn’t stop touching myself. But this was the opposite of that.

  It was horrible. My girlfriend was super excited, because Phoebe Cates’s boobs were super hot; I still google that shit sometimes just to look at her. I couldn’t blame my girlfriend, but I was absolutely horrified. It was like seeing the clown from IT looking at me from the sewer every day when I looked in the mirror. I grew even more uncomfortable. I stopped wanting my girlfriend to pay any attention to that part of my body because it felt alien to me. I started wearing a shirt during sex. I started buying smaller and smaller sports bras and even a binder to keep them down and hidden, but there was no way I could hide them anymore. My loose change got a lot louder in my pocket, and it just about covered my closet floor when I undressed, but I still kept kicking it to the corner and moving forward.

  Until I realized that I didn’t have to. Now, you would think that I would have jumped at the chance to make things right when Captain Gender Reassignment Surgeon showed up at my hospital to do top and bottom surgeries for trans folks. (Even though God likes to fuck with me, he occasionally tosses me a bone.) Or maybe when I started seeing all these guys roll out of the OR with their beautiful, flat masculine chests. Or perhaps when they told me that their top surgery day was the best day of their lives because suddenly these things that are seen by our society as, if not sexy, then at least overtly feminine, were gone. Or maybe when my hospital started talking about covering these procedures for their employees. Nope.

  What made me realize that I didn’t have to kick any more pennies was a day I’d been to the pool. I was sitting in the backyard with my girlfriend in my bathing suit, which had evolved into board shorts with a sports bra/bikini awkward hybrid thing covered by a loose swim shirt. I looked like a seven-year-old at a water park. Aside from the normal amounts of embarrassment and humiliation I have about how I look in that, like when I watch my girlfriend dance and can see that it makes everyone around her uncomfortable and want to run away, I was pissed that my boobs were still all wet and cold under this stupid getup. I complained loudly about it to my girlfriend. She responded, “You’re miserable. Why don’t you just get top surgery? The surgeon is, like, your BFF, for God’s sake. You have the golden ticket.” Just like that, I realized that I could do it, that I wanted to do it. I didn’t have to live with my body the way it was anymore and suffer and kick that fucking change around and act like it didn’t exist.

  My girlfriend, who had loved my breasts when they were available to her, who had accepted when they weren’t and had taken some time to realize the extent of my hatred of them and maybe didn’t understand how big a deal this was to me for some time, was the one who set me free.

  Within five minutes, I texted the surgeon and told him what I wanted to do, and his response was, “FUCK YEAH!” Then I jokingly asked him if he could make a dick from titties, and he said, “Kind of like making a diamond out of two pieces of coal! Also, no.”

  It takes years for people to get in to see this surgeon. That’s how good he is, and that’s how many miserable people there are in the world. Yet, by the grace of my circumstances, I had a surgery date scheduled by the next day. That week, I had my pre-op appointment—I ambushed him in the staff lounge at work, shamelessly lifted my scrub top, tank top, and sports bra, and said into his wide eyes, “See? They’re fucking huge, bro. Get rid of them.” He agreed that they were indeed huge, and within two months, he performed my surgery.

  Five days after surgery I went for follow-up and could finally have my binder and my dressings removed to see my chest. You know when you have those really great moments in your life, like maybe when your children are born or when you discover that there’s a search feature on your porn site where you can type in absolutely anything you want and see it? Well, this was better. My chest was finally correct, even though my freshly removed, resized, and replaced nipples looked like scabby pepperoni the size of nickels. I didn’t care.

  I’ve had several of my trans patients tell me that all of their dysphoria disappeared instantly when they woke up from surgery and looked down to see their new dicks for the first time. I certainly believed them, but I didn’t understand what exactly that must have felt like for them until that Tuesday in the office. Even though they have a really shitty small handheld mirror in there (and need to get a full-length one if they want to be legit), the second I saw my chest, all of my dysphoria was gone. In a puff of smoke and pepperoni, the thirty-seven cents was gone, and it wasn’t on the floor. It was in a trash can in the operating room.

  So I lied to you in the last story when I said I wasn’t going to change my body at all because I was already a butterfly. I just didn’t know yet. Sometimes you don’t realize the extent of what is living just beneath your surface, even when you hear it every day and even when you see it staring back at you in the mirror. Sometimes you also don’t realize that perhaps you have options to make yourself correct, to stop all the hating.

  That’s exactly what happened to me. I very suddenly stopped hating myself. Now I don’t know what to do with this amount of happiness. I feel like someone just let me out of prison and it’s perfect weather out and the chirping birds are happy to see me and I just found a million dollars, and then Phoebe Cates gets out of a magical pool located next to a correctional facility, undoes her bikini top, and says, “Hi, Holly.”

  I have what I’ve always wanted, and it looks glorious!

  thanks a lot, life

  I found out George Michael died during breakfast on an island near the southern tip of Vietnam. I was eating my bun cha and scrolling through Facebook when I saw it and said out loud to my noodles, “George Michael died.” As I did, I heard two people at the breakfast table next to me say the same thing. They were Americans in their late forties or fifties. They were eating pancakes, and I heard one say to the other, “Who is George Michael?” The other said, “I don’t know.” I was immediately sad for them.

  George Michael was a beautiful, talented angel sent here by a God who wants us to be happy is what I wanted to tell this oblivious couple sitting next to me. But you kind of need to mind your p’s and q’s when you travel to places like Vietnam, look like a dude, and are eating breakfast in a sports bra.

  Within one month of his death I had two powerful dreams about George Michael. In the first one, we were in love. I got to gaze upon his beautiful face while he smiled at me. I was with the Faith era George. I kept stroking his stubbly chin and marveling at how his gold cross earring glinted in the sunshine. He wore his leather jacket the entire time even though it was hot outside, but in the dream, in those tight jeans, it made total sense.

  In the second dream, he came to me as a part of Wham! He and Andrew Ridgeley were young and had a beach house and we all lived together. I ignored Andrew Ridgeley the entire time because who ever cared about him anyway? Young George, with his feathered hair and tiny shorts, took me by the hand and introduced me to someone and said, “This is your spirit guide.” He and George then took me to a house where they showed me all kinds of details about my
life to come. My mom showed up in this dream, but she just floated past me without saying anything. I woke up and scrambled for my notebook. There was so much specific and helpful information to write down, and I was excited. But I was also confused.

  My mom had passed away two years ago. When she left us, we weren’t on great terms. We were never on great terms. She had been difficult and unhappy and angry the entire time I can remember, and I was tired of listening to her bitch about everything. She had survived cancer eight years before. I had hoped that might make her finally appreciate her life and perhaps enjoy whatever extra time she got. Instead, she became even more bitter, blaming everyone around her for her unhappiness. I couldn’t understand it and I was over her shit and I wasn’t good at hiding my feelings. When I knew she was near the end, I booked a trip to visit her even though I understood that she didn’t want me to. Before I went she told me, “I don’t want you to come.” My response was, “You can’t stop me.” Such warmth from both of us. The final words she said to me as I was leaving her presence for the last time were, “As soon as you leave, your father and I can go to Walmart.” That was that. I drove off in my rented Corolla and looked for a trash can to stealthily throw away my empty tequila bottle. A month later she died in her sleep after eating a Big Mac and drinking a glass of wine. Good night, Mom.

  The day after she died, I was in Safeway buying beer for my dad, and I slipped and fell in a pile of cottage cheese that someone had dropped on the floor in the checkout line. As I was lying on the floor with the manager and several customers gawking over me, asking if they should call 911, I held the beer close to my chest and thought, Well, my mom’s dead, and now I’m lying on the floor in a pile of cottage cheese. Thanks a lot, life.

  I’d since been waiting for her to come and talk to me about things. Not about the cottage cheese. I wanted her to explain herself to me, to tell me why it was so hard for her to love us. Why she would lock herself in her bedroom for days when we were kids and let me slip her love poems, which she would never acknowledge, under her door. Why she could be so happy to dance and sing around the kitchen table while we ate our tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, but then would pull us out of bed at 3 a.m. for a family meeting that ended in her threatening to pack her bags if we didn’t do better, didn’t try harder. How do you try harder when you’re ten? I wanted to know, felt I had a right to know. I’d spent two years waiting to hear from her in a dream, or see her in a shadow, anything to help me understand what happened to her, and I got nothing.

  But here was George Michael, showing up a damned month after he died to tell me he loved me and to introduce me to my spirit guide while my own mother floated by with a blank face and her mouth closed. What the fuck, Mom? George was nice and all, but I needed answers. This was so unfair. After that dream I became sadder than I’ve ever been. I woke up the next night with a heavy empty feeling that wouldn’t let me sleep. It was so devastating that I called in sick to work. I never call in sick to work, but I just couldn’t stuff all of that sadness into my uniform. I decided to take a drive and found myself on the road to Blanco State Park, even though it was cold out and I wasn’t wearing socks.

  On the way back, after sitting at a picnic table in front of the tiny falls while my ankles froze and I wrote nothing in my journal, I listened to an audio book that I’d gotten months before. The book was The Light Between Us, which is about a psychic medium who talks to people who have died and helps their loved ones deal with grief and loss. I don’t know how I found myself listening to this book. I don’t ever listen to audio books because I generally think they’re annoying. But I listened to this one and cried the entire fifty-nine miles home. I went inside and listened to it in bed and cried for another hour. And then I was all, Duh, Holly. Why don’t you find a medium to help you talk to your mom already? I googled Laura Lynne Jackson, the author, but she is now booked out for five years. I certainly couldn’t wait that long, so I looked around the Internet for another certified medium, because that’s a thing. I found one in Kyle, Texas, who had great Yelp reviews, because that’s also a thing. You can Yelp your medium!

  I made an appointment with Elizabeth Stanfield and spent the next week waiting nervously, trying to tell myself that, you know, it was no big deal. It probably wasn’t real and wouldn’t change anything.

  That Sunday came, then 3 p.m. came. My phone rang. It was the medium calling to give my reading. She said a prayer and asked me some brief questions about what I wanted, and we began. I’d been intentionally vague with her regarding any details of my life. I needed her to prove to me that this was real.

  She started telling me about my grandparents. I didn’t recognize them from her description, but the medium was certain they were my grandparents. They then told the medium my aunts’ names to validate who they were. They name-dropped Georgiana and Marjorie like it was no big deal, except those are indeed my aunts’ names. Apparently, my grandparents are around me all the time and sit with me on the couch when I’m sad. They told her I’m a writer surrounded by notebooks and pencils, and that I’m working on a book. They are smiling and clapping for me. They also told her that I drink too much and need to take vitamin D and B-12. Oh, okay, medium. Now I see why you’re getting good Yelp reviews.

  Next she said she saw a young male hanging around. She said he was handsome and was standing with his hands on his hips. “It’s George Michael,” she said. I swear to God that’s what she said. I have the reading on MP3 if you don’t believe me. It’s at this point that I lost my shit and started jumping up and down in my office. “He is playing a song for you,” she said. “He wants me to sing it to you. Well I guess it would be nice / if I could touch your body …” and the medium and I both sang “Faith” together into the phones that connected us. When we were done singing and laughing, George Michael had a lot to tell me. He told me through the medium that it was important to strongly be me and to believe in myself. He said that now is my time to roar, that this book needs to get out into the world because it will help people to understand things, and to tell other people to get out of my way while I do what I need to do. He said I am never alone and everything real is always about love. George Michael showed up for my medium along with my grandparents and then together they told her what the title of this book should be. I’d been struggling to make a decision between two different titles, and it was tearing me apart. The title of a book is an important thing, right? They told the medium like they’d all been reading my notebooks. Oh, God. My grandparents were reading my notebooks.

  We were now going on forty minutes into my reading and she hadn’t mentioned my mom yet, so I finally asked the medium about her. Almost immediately she said that my mom was here and started telling me what she was saying. There was a lot of vague information from her. I wanted to believe my mom was really there, but much of it felt irrelevant. This went on for a while until it was time to end. I thanked her profusely, and we ended the phone call.

  When my reading was over, I sat trying to wrap my head around it. It was just another Sunday afternoon, except George Michael and my grandparents came by to chat, encourage me in my endeavor, and give me the title of this book. I was disappointed that I didn’t get anything significant from my mom, like she had ghosted me again. Maybe this was just going to be how it was, or maybe I’d try again another time. The truth was that I had gotten so many great things that I couldn’t be all that upset about it.

  I went outside to tell my girlfriend about the reading. She had agreed to stay in the backyard with the dogs while I was on the phone so I wasn’t disturbed. When I walked outside, after I sat and told her about the reading, this is what my girlfriend told me:

  “I was out here praying for you to be able to speak to your mom. While I was praying, your mom came to me and very clearly told me to go inside because she couldn’t get close to you except through me. I went into the house, and she dictated a message for you. Your mom said she was in the wrong life. You couldn’t get to know her
because she wasn’t in the right life and she couldn’t be herself in any part of her life. It made her very unhappy and unable to talk about it. You never saw it, but she was talented and had a good stage presence, but she couldn’t pursue her dream of being a famous opera singer and that took all of the joy out of her life. She sees you on stage now, telling your stories, and she’s so proud of you. She says you don’t know it, but you got your talents and your dreams from her.”

  My mom didn’t really show up for the medium, but she showed up for my girlfriend, who had frantically scribbled down the message for me and delivered it to me while I sat sobbing and shaking in a lawn chair under a tree. It was definitely real, and it changed everything right away.

  My mother didn’t pursue her dreams because she got pregnant when she was seventeen and had no choice at the time but to stay home and raise her family. She was angry because she couldn’t be who she was supposed to be, and it swallowed her up. I couldn’t possibly be upset with her anymore. Not only because it wasn’t her fault, but also because she gave to me these dreams of being up on stage in front of people, telling my stories and writing this book. This is from her. Now it all made sense.

  I called my sister shortly after this happened to tell her, hoping it might help with her feelings about my mom, but it changed nothing for her. My sister is still angry, and I get it. If I didn’t have these dreams to write and perform and be something bigger than a normal life would allow, I wouldn’t understand either. If I couldn’t find a way to do this, grief and bitterness would swallow me up also.

  My mom should have been a famous opera singer. She, George Michael, and my grandparents are hanging out and watching me, this weird little sensitive, awkward kid who was so ashamed and teased, who felt like a monster for most of my life, who gets to show up here 100 percent myself, fulfilling my dreams. By embracing myself completely, with the help of what my mother gave me, I’ve been granted the gift of finding exactly where I fit in this life. That’s the secret, isn’t it? We are put here to be ourselves, to bumble and shine like the tenderhearted fools that we all are. My mom would tell you now if she could: don’t hide yourself away. Even if your ship is a little ridiculous, you’d better learn how to sail the shit out of it, because if you do, it will eventually carry you to somewhere beautiful. And if George Michael sings to you, you’d better fucking listen.