I thought I told you before: you can’t just fall asleep on the phone like that. You have to be firm. You have to tell the other person goodbye; you have to say, “I’m going to sleep now, I have school tomorrow,” and politely decline their pleas to continue. Goddamn, Gemma. I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know why you keep letting the boys pour their best selves into you. Their girlfriends don’t even know their secrets: you do. You alone know which ribbon to pull that unravels them. Where the hidden compartments unlatch, your memory their master key. They all grant you this secret power at night. When only their God can hear. Gemma, why do you pick up their calls — why do you insist on straddling the pinhead of closeness. Perched on that small space, nowhere to spread yourself, it can’t be comfortable. You made too much of a practice of becoming pocket-sized. And now I’m afraid you won’t ever grow big.
If nothing else, they saw you before you saw yourself. Darling, I think they know more than you do. Your special in-between space. You have the emotional depth of a girl but the intimate secrecy of a boy. They know you won’t tell anyone. Bro code. A type of trust that says, you’re one of us, but also different, somehow. I don’t know how yet. If puberty won’t force the change, then time will.
You wanted the girl so badly to look at you, you nearly cried in her arms. But, I’m sorry to say, she likes boys instead. Well — I guess you are a boy, or rather turned out to be one, but maybe even if you were a boy back then — well, you would have never met. You wouldn’t have been able to live with her in that dorm, you wouldn’t have known her awful nights, the details she left legible only to girls. So for her, you were a girl. As a girl, you remained inaccessible. Inscrutable to her framework of romance. Back then you had a litany of boy crushes that you offered to anyone who asked. The list was long, it had to be. But you kept your love (chaste, sacred) for her.
I do think “we” exist in a place without physical location, necessarily. Maybe children who grew up on the internet will understand this: so much of myself — who I am as a person — manifests/ed online. Chased down between Wikipedia rabbit holes, echoes and ghosts left in old blogs and Geocities sites, my whole archive of fanfiction that sometimes feels realer to me than any of the “original” stories I’ve written. The person I inhabit is strung together through digital threads, reticulated and made gestalt. What am I but an experiment built from the notes left behind by anonymous others? For example, I don’t think I could have ever perceived or conceived of my own transness if I didn’t see a version of it modeled and reflected back at me. If I didn’t see that I could be made possible from other possibilities. The internet created me. Here, no longer was I required to perform the role of obedient little Chinese girl; I could be a faceless and formless masculinity that raced through cyberspace without censure. (So much of my gender coded from bits. Do you think cybergender exists? Do transhumanists dream of cybergender?) I am still trapped within the limits of my body irl, but online I can perform my own perfected and idealized boyself.
You may not remember this, but 1999 was really a very special year for you. For over a month, you and your sister chanted, “9/9/99, 9/9/99,” because it was a date that wouldn’t happen for another hundred years, and by the time the next one comes around, you’d both be dead. You were living through history, and you knew it at the time, how special is that. Now sometimes in your sleep you still chant 9/9/99, 9/9/99, like it’s a special spell, like a summoning for ritualistic hauntology. Like by all willpower you are trying to return there. You will never know what it’s like to return there. That date is closed off to you. Things moved so far during those next few years. The door closed, and suddenly you are at eleven, and you are a much different person. You are struggling at the handle, trying to pull it open, but some witch must have cursed you — the darkness has trapped you on this side. Realistically, if you think about it, there must have been darkness on the other side, too. But in your memory, it will always be light. It will always be a time where Gemma was called without acid, anger, or rancor, and a time when Gemma was just a placeholder, not a metonym for you. You don’t know that little boy’s name, anymore. He died there without you.
The first time you fell in love, I regret to inform you, was with that one blonde boy. It wasn’t a romantic love. Nor was it even platonic. I hesitate to tell you what it was. Only because it will color the perception of your life from this point forward. But what’s the use — it’s already been done. You will forever remember that he was your first reader, and that he said you were the best thing he’s ever read, better than any novel. Exceptionally foolish words, in retrospect. He was seventeen, only a year older. But back then a year’s difference traversed epochs and he seemed so much wiser, so you clung desperately to his praise. Even when you didn’t want to become a writer. When I finally found myself becoming a writer, his words rose for me again from the deep, like an ancient but undiscarded buoy. I never liked hearing him call me Gemma. I always knew I wanted him to call me by another name.
Perhaps it was your father who set you free. I read this on your old LiveJournal. That summer in Shanghai, the year you graduated high school but wouldn’t go on to college. The underbelly of all the elevated roads radiated a deep, hypnotic fuschia and they blurred out as you in the car sped by. His baritone above the rubber hum of wheels: Mom wants you to __, __, __… and like any rueful teenager, you replied, yeah, yeah, I know. You were here this summer as punishment, not vacation, to reflect on the extent of your failures. Whatever litany of charges she had laid against you, you had already pinned them to the insides of your wrists. He continued: You know, Mom has a lot of ideas about what you should do about your life. You: Yeah, yeah, I know. Him: But you don’t have to take them if you don’t want to. Do you have any ideas of your own?
I think, Gemma, that you held onto the idea of being an “obedient little Chinese girl” for far too long, and that was the first time anyone had asked you what you wanted. My father is a very absent man, and I don’t blame him for it. Some men aren’t built to be caretakers, just providers. He wanted to know who you were as a person, though. He was the only one for a long time.
Remember? Remember when we would admit such niceties as “will you be here if I come back tomorrow?” and “I will follow you wherever you go”? Sure, those are generic phrases to utter, clichéd and all, but I really liked it when you’d give a soft hint of a smile, turn away, and say, Idiot, wind blowing your hair back in small waves of black. I remember looking at you and thinking, God, I’m so jealous, of everything — the way he looks impeccable, some god of the sea, porcelain skin that will never break and fingers of sterling silver. Then I’d start thinking about loving you, and get scared, because if you are the singular, raging sea, what am I? What am I in relation to you? Am I the moon, tugging at your puppet strings, or am I a boat, adrift in your waters? I was never really sure, you see — your eyes would be as deep as they claim to be, and I’d never try to dive. So instead I settled for a type of gravity — like, if you’d be the sea that always moves, I’d want to be the wind that always moves with you, or something cheesy and crazy like that, because love really is just the gravity between the sun and the stars, but since we can’t be celestial like that, we’ll be brought down to earth and live like humans do.
You’ll forget about Y2K, but twenty years from now, the internet will relitigate it as an anomaly, as a miracle. I can confirm it did feel as electric as everyone thinks it did. Together we teetered on the precipice. In fear of the world ending as we knew it, but also: in wait of possibility. Of wide open space. The world did end as we knew it. You probably already heard that George W. Bush would be terrible for the country. Everyone was talking about it. Your sister fashioned glasses shaped like “2000” out of printer paper, and they kept falling off your face, and through the flimsy forma you could see the glow leaking out of the Times Square ball on TV, liquid and phantasmic. The countdown was over. You fell asleep and January 1, 2000 proceeded as normal. No one took note of it because it was so ordinary. I’ll have to remind you what it was like someday.
Gemma, I am happy to report that you lived through the world’s end. Through that year, and the many years you didn’t think you would. I am happy that you’re still alive. That I thought to save you, time and time again. That I thought you were precious and worthwhile enough to save. That, very soon, you and I will be able to meet that little boy behind the door again. He’s been there this whole time. I think I know his name again. Look! He’s been waiting for us.