by Nick Krieger
A term like front hole was my only chance to enforce the physical distinction I felt to women, to ungender my anatomy. “I don’t know what else to say.” I looked directly into Ramona’s eyes, pleading. She inched closer. Through my T-shirt, I felt her nipples bristle against mine. I backed away, but the sensation lingered, expanded until all I could feel was the weight of my chest. I quickly flipped from my side to my back. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”
Ramona nodded, understanding. She always did. But even her support, even the power of language to rechart the landscape of my body and the amazing breadth of my expanding lexicon to identify myself turned flimsy in the reflection of the concrete. A few weeks later, while Ramona and I were kissing in front of the mirrored doors of her closet, I caught sight of myself in full and noticed the subtle round of my outer thighs as they tapered to my hips. I stopped kissing her and faced the mirror. “My legs are so girly,” I said.
She busted out laughing. “Your legs are not girly,” she said.
It didn’t matter that my legs were the least feminine part of my entire body. “That’s what I look like?” I asked.
She stared at me as if this were a trick question.
Even with clothes covering me, there was no mistaking the shapely lines underneath. My sports bra was too loose, my boxer briefs too tight. I dropped to the carpet and crossed my legs. In the past year, I’d scrutinized my reflection hundreds of times, but always alone. I’d never imagined what another person, what Ramona took in while we messed around. “You see a girl when you look at me,” I accused.
She leaned forward and kissed me softly on the cheek, then the lips.
“I can’t believe you see a girl.” I picked myself off the floor and climbed into her bed, tucking my knees into my chest.
She followed and curled around me, speaking quietly into my ear. “I don’t see girl or not girl when I look at you. You know I think of you as a person. You’re just Nina to me.” She paused. “Although I’d never call you that in bed.”
For the first time, I noticed the complete absence of my name during sex. Had Ramona ever used it, I probably would’ve been alarmed; I didn’t feel like a “Nina” during sexy time. But what else could she have called me? My alter ego, Nick, stayed silent; my role-play characters had names, like Timmy and Dirk, but those only worked if I was playing a middle school student or faggy frat boy; and of course, there was Isaac. I, as myself, went nameless.
“I’d never thought about ‘Nina’ like that before. I’m glad you don’t say it.” Hearing my name would’ve been as jarring as catching my reflection in the mirror. Now that I saw with vivid clarity what I looked like in Ramona’s presence, I feared that her compliments, any flattering remark about my physical appearance, would be an insult, her attraction to me disparaging. “I realize I can’t control what about my body turns you on,” I continued, keeping my back to her as I spoke. “But don’t ever talk about it. I can never know.”
By the end of the winter, my job search was the same as it had been at the beginning of the winter. It consisted of me reading but not applying for uninspiring job listings online, sending a few networking e-mails, and refreshing my e-mail in case an opportunity fell into my inbox. I kept myself somewhat occupied, volunteering, interning, writing, and occasionally jogging or snowboarding, but I felt purposeless and stuck. I kept turning to Ramona for motivation; I wanted her to get us to do something, anything other than fucking, sleeping, or eating. We talked constantly about spending more time apart, pursuing our own interests, but the last time I’d engaged in regular social and sports activities was before grad school and it was like I’d forgotten how. Even when her bed felt like a quagmire, I stayed, driven more by my fear of being without her than the joy I had once taken in being with her.
At my home, a place where I spent about one night a week regrouping, Melissa gave a month’s notice and packed up within days, having already signed the lease on a new place with her girlfriend. I sat on the steps that led down to her empty room as she swept it for the final time, our voices echoing off the bare walls as we talked. She told me she hoped to become close with Jess again once they were no longer living together. “I don’t know what’s going on with him,” she said. “He’s talking about having top surgery as if it’s the answer to everything.” Shocked by her statement, I tried to pry more out, but she only said Jess and his long-distance girlfriend were maybe ending things—again. Melissa might as well have been talking gibberish. I was so far removed from what went on in my house, I’d had no idea Melissa and Jess weren’t getting along, much less that Jess was seriously considering top surgery.
Ramona and I had a very pragmatic discussion about the vacancy at my house. She was sick of roommates who built dirty-dish castles in the sink, and I was sick of living out of a bag on her floor, so while we understood that we were responding to circumstances, we also agreed that an opportunity for her to move in had presented itself. We joined forces in excitement over sharing two rooms, a bedroom and an office, and turned all talk to a creative brainstorm about design layouts, wall decorations, and furniture shopping sprees.
A week later, however, once our fantasy rooms jelled into impending reality, I woke up in the middle of the night at her house in a panic. All that I’d repressed from the day we got together resurfaced and fed into my certainty that our relationship wasn’t for the long term. Perhaps we could’ve remained in our holding pattern, but my personal stagnancy, my need for some change, any shift, prompted me to be honest and tell her that I couldn’t ever see myself living with her.
Once I spoke, Ramona suggested we take some space, which we were only able to maintain for forty-eight hours before agreeing we weren’t ready to breakup. It had all happened so quickly, too quickly to split up. But from that point forward, we both knew it was only a matter of time, of resigning ourselves, and this impacted every aspect of our relationship. She’d always been a night owl to my early bird, and now we started to go to bed at different times; we lost patience with each other in our debates over books, current events, and animal rights; we stopped meeting halfway on everything. For two months we had constant fights, most of which I picked but can’t remember because they all fell under the broader, “I want you to be someone you’re not” fight, or the “Why can’t you do something so this doesn’t have to end” fight.
Our last fight occurred on a Saturday in April. Ramona wanted to hang out after her crappy workday, and I’d reached the maximum number of nights I could spend on her couch watching TV. We fell easily into a conversation about breaking up, one that we continued for the next week, in person and on the phone, until it became too depressing and painful to drag on. We agreed it would be best to cut off contact indefinitely, our eventual friendship the goal. I offered to do the exchange of property while Ramona was at work, volunteering only because I’d made an appointment with my old therapist, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, to comfort me afterward.
I used my key to enter Ramona’s front door, the same key she’d asked me to leave behind so she wouldn’t wait, wishing for my return. I trudged up the long, carpeted stairway. In her room, the finality hit me immediately. The one framed picture of us, my gift for her recent twenty-fourth birthday, had been removed from the wall, and her bed, squeezed into a new location in the corner after we’d decided not to live together, looked all wrong—so far from the window we used to open to pretend we were outside.
In the center of her carpet, a brown paper bag and cardboard box held some of my clothes, biking and snowboarding gear, and Isaac. My yellow auto mechanic T-shirt, the one she’d worn the very first time she slept over at my house, was missing—she’d called it her “boyfriend” shirt—I hoped she’d kept it intentionally. On top of the pile, a red Post-it Note grabbed my attention. The large black lettering read: “I’m grateful for having had the chance to love you.” Before I even noticed, a few drops had fallen from my
eyes, splattering big wet splotches onto her note. The grace of her words, her sense of appreciation during this hard time, encompassed everything that had drawn me to her, all that I was devastated to lose.
I took one final look around the room, out the window at the flowers on the bougainvillea tree, at the titles on her bookshelf from the classes we’d taken together, and into the corner, empty without my belongings piled there. I removed her key from my chain and wrapped my hand around it, squeezing tightly, holding on for as long as I could. “Good-bye,” I said aloud, as if signifying the end could make it easier to let go.
It was in retrospect that I realized the challenge of opening up to physical and emotional intimacy was nothing compared to the experience of losing it. At no other time than in the few weeks after the end of our relationship did I live with such a constant struggle for peace from the internal soundtrack of disappointment, sadness, and emptiness. I went on “what if” tears in my head and to my friends, stating everything I could do differently, as if there might be a way for the situation to change, for Ramona and I to get back together, for me to stop missing her. But the only thing harder than what I was going through would’ve been to call or connect with her and have to go through our separation again.
A former coworker recommended me for a copywriting job at a travel dot-com, a blessing if only because my cubicle provided the one place I couldn’t cry. Unable to sit still outside of work, I traded my daily writing practice for jogs in the park, spin classes, and long bike rides, as if I could expel all my emotions through the physical release of sweating. Perpetually lonely, I said “yes” to any and all social invites with a mix of people too broad to unite under one category. My friends included a few individual A-gays; an old pal, Sandra, whom I hadn’t seen in several years, but bumped into at the gym and reconnected with instantly; and my new roommate, Derek, whom I was getting to know now that I’d returned home permanently after my year on the love planet.
Referred by an A-gay who’d received my mass e-mail about the vacancy, Derek was a rugged, incredibly attractive gym-rat with B-cup pecs and the most wonderfully sweet smile. In his first week in the house, without any instruction, he added his high school picture to our refrigerator, the first cis guy to contribute to our growing living document. As it turned out, Derek had had twice as much hair at eighteen, proving my theory that man, woman, or other—none of us were the same people we once were. To post his picture he used his own magnet, which said in huge letters, “I ♥ My Penis.”
Once Derek joined Jess and me, what had felt like a dyke house when I moved in two and a half years before was now a dude home, and a sort of sad bachelor pad at that. With all three of us recovering from breakups, Derek dubbed our apartment Heartbreak Hotel, and he granted us all a temporary moratorium on sanity. For him, this meant swearing off sex. For Jess, it meant marathon processing phone calls with his ex with intermission dinner breaks at the three-hour mark. And for me, it meant stalking Ramona’s MySpace page, public to even those like myself without a profile.
Which is what I was doing on a Sunday morning, three weeks after our breakup, when I discovered Ramona’s mind-in-the-gutter headline and comments from friends like, “What happened last night?” and “Are you coming home?” Certain that she’d met someone, or at least had a fling, I hopped on the crazy train to obsessionville. Who was this person? Girl or boy? Did gender matter? Was she over me? Did our relationship mean nothing? That’s how Jess found me, circling the kitchen in my pajamas, spinning in my web of self-destruction. “Maybe you should take a walk,” Jess said in a manner so calm I felt even more frenzied.
I nodded my head aggressively. “Good idea, good idea,” I repeated. “Good idea.”
“And when you get back, you should come to yoga with me and Greg!”
I paced around the neighborhood for the next hour, and then, with no other options besides internal combustion, I walked with Jess over to the yoga studio a few blocks from our house. I had been there for the first time the previous Friday, a night not all that different from this morning, except instead of going with a friend from grad school who was like a contortionist, I now had the comforting companionship of other beginners, radiating their contagious excitement. “Quick, come next to me,” Greg said as we filed into the steamy, barn-size studio.
Instantaneously surrounded by well over a hundred mats, laid out in columns and rows inches apart, Jess, Greg, and I sat in a line. Having exchanged only basic pleasantries in the past year, Greg and I caught up among the cacophony of friendly chatter. He told me he was sorry about my breakup, and when I asked how he was doing, he responded with a complete update on his body—the expansion of his head and neck, the thickening of his chest, his decreased flexibility, which he showed me by attempting some around-the-back arm wrap. Greg was built like a beer can, not quite what I expected to see in yoga class, but then again, neither was Jess, with his personality more suited to say “Fuck downward dog” than to do one.
If I wondered what they were doing in that studio, the easy answer was the teacher, Rusty, whom they raved about. He strolled in fifteen minutes late, wearing only a pair of short swim trunks that showed off his tan, lean, and rippled figure. He immediately launched the class into a melodic chant, the Sanskrit words too complicated for me to follow, and then, with an energy that was both ecstatic and sustainable, disarming and motivational, he led us through basic poses, throwing in breath cues, inspirational wisdom, and encouragement.
Forget the cobra and warrior poses, I could barely stand on one foot and act like a tree. I kept expecting my high school basketball coach to appear at the door yelling, “You lost, Krieger? Tip-off’s in five minutes.” And when I wasn’t thinking about Ramona sleeping in someone else’s bed, I was thinking of how much coffee I drank. Finally, I got tired of thinking about how badly I had to pee, so I went to the bathroom. Once there I was compelled, as always, to fixate on my reflection in the mirror.
My tight tank top scooped low enough that even with a Frog Bra underneath, I was baring cleavage. For a second, I felt like I’d been caught illegally without a binder, and that a doctor or lawyer could pull out footage later and point to this as evidence that I’d been faking my chest discomfort. I briefly wondered what Jess and Greg, both in T-shirts, thought about my outfit, and I found myself relieved not to care. From just my one Friday night yoga class, I already felt this studio was a safe space to let go of self-consciousness, to moo like a cow and shake my ass while sitting in an invisible chair. I returned to class, eager to forget what my body looked like and experience the sensations of being inside of it.
But it was hard to feel when I was so busy checking out Jess, Greg, and everyone around me, trying to morph my body into poses that looked like theirs. As if busting me, Rusty would say, “If you don’t know what to do, watch your neighbor, do what they do.” At first I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but I was pretty sure he was trying to tell me that someone else’s body, someone else’s experience would not show me how to have mine.
I followed the instructions as well as I could to root my mountain into the ground, breath deeply into my pigeon, and rock myself peacefully in happy baby. Somewhere along the way, my pinky toes woke up, my jaw and shoulders relaxed, and a power emerged from my core. By the end of it all, I was drenched in sweat, lying on my back, my legs and arms slack, my whole body exhausted but alive. Although thoughts of Ramona fluttered back in during this final resting pose, I recognized there’d been a whole half hour when I didn’t think of her once, when my dialogue of despair disappeared. I was feeling so good that I sang along in the last chant, a repetition of only a few words. I felt even better when I discovered that it loosely translated to, “May all beings everywhere be happy and free.”
On the street, Greg said good-bye, mimicking Rusty. “Don’t roll up the yoga when you roll up the mat.” Jess laughed, his eyes aglow. Sunday mornings with Rusty became our ritual.
With yoga, I had an activity in common with Greg, and now if I spotted him across the dyke bar that wasn’t completely a dyke bar, we’d nearly run to each other, ignoring any cute girls, and talk yoga. We’d discuss challenging poses, deliver a play-by-play if one of us missed a class and brag if Rusty had touched and adjusted us or whispered something encouraging. At home, Jess and I took our practice further, exchanging alignment tips and sharing breakthrough moments with the same enthusiasm we’d once discussed gender, but without the hard edge, as if we were flushing out our previous anger, frustration, and confusion with each kitchen vinyasa. Although Jess, Greg, and I didn’t consider ourselves gay, we were all gay for Rusty. He was our bond, an expression of all the individual work we were doing together.
The basics class was an entertaining, music-infused workout so challenging it focused me away from my thoughts, but it was more than exercise. The ancient philosophical teachings mixed with aphorisms to come out as Rusty-isms, and they lodged themselves into the new space inside of me. “Yoga is a process of undoing,” he’d say. On my mat, I was unlearning a lifetime of survival habits, building strength to carry myself, creating a foundation to raise my community, remaining present in moments of intense discomfort, staying still when all I wanted to do was flee.
I’d thought I was going to that studio to move on from Ramona and the relationship I’d entered on the cusp of my boyhood, but as I returned week after week, I found myself mourning for my own former self, letting go of my attachment to an unquestioned, recognized, accepted gender. What I thought and expected my life to be, being a woman—all of it was gone. There was no distraction, plan of attack, work-around or escape, nowhere to go, nothing I could do but breathe.