Jan 17, 2014, 10:23:37 PM

“I am going to apologize first, and ask you to let me finish before you continue. Or before you leave, if I offend you,” I pleaded, serious and sincere. She shrugged, then nodded slightly. “Good. First thing. What is the point of all of this?” I asked, since our conversations had barely touched on what she expected from me in any specific terms.

She stared at me a moment, either unsure of what I meant or how to answer. I don’t know which and she didn’t ask me to clarify. She just reached for her glass and took a sip.

“The story is the only point,” she said after a long silence. I took that to mean that the doubts she had just expressed, and the implications we’d been flirting with, could be pushed back for now. I took a moment to collect myself, easing back from the edge I’d been teetering on–before they had me raving.

“Then what is all of this you are trying to tell me? This stuff about the beginning… is this for the story? Do I need to keep track of what you’ve been saying?” I asked. It was a legitimate concern, but there was more to it than this question. There was a more logical problem, as I tried to explain, “There is a tremendous difference between just telling a story and writing a book. You need to establish the context. There has to be a point of departure. There has to be some kind of common ground. If the point is for people to read this, then they have to be able to understand what it is you are telling them.”

“Which is why I am telling you the beginning,” she began, but I cut her off.

“What kind of beginning is saying there really isn’t a beginning. Or, the beginning is somehow not there until the end?” I protested.

“But that is the whole point,” she declared, setting down her glass. “I know the whole thing is a paradox. It should never have happened, except that I was in a position to understand exactly what I was doing, and yet, I’d have to describe the whole of creation to explain how it was even possible to do what I did. I never realized how difficult it would be to talk about it until I tried just now.”

I sighed. “I could have told you that straight off. I’ve been hammering at it for decades, just grokking the paradox, but I was just working up to that point when you jumped ahead of me. Technically, the paradox has no beginning, because the moment you described is eternal. I’ve written it out several times, but never once considered it a place I could start the story.

“But, that’s okay. A writer can start a story any damn way he pleases. All he needs to accomplish is catch the reader’s attention. It’s sort of funny, but in a sense the problem with your beginning is like what you said. People choose not to know a lot of things, like the truth, but in the ways that count they can acknowledge it easily.

“People know that beginnings are illusions. The writer realizes that the reader knows this and contrives to make the beginning slip past the reader. A good beginning sucks the reader into the story before he or she notices it. It’s the same thing you were saying about listening. So the problem with your beginning is that it makes the reader ask too many questions.”

“Is there ever anything but questions at the beginning?” she mused softly, fingers resting lightly on the rim of her drink. Looking up, she flicked her other hand up dismissively. “If it bothers you so much, start at the end. You already know that part.”

I gazed back into her stormy eyes. “You mean this.”

Her response was delivered with a wry grin, “If you like to jump in at the deep end.”

It was hard not to laugh and shake my head. “Just smack the reader with the impossible and dance around the possibility of an explanation?” I asked a bit peevishly. She just shrugged and gave a slight nod. “Are you sure you’re not just here to mess with my reality? If I heard you right, you expected the books to be written when you chose to confront me. I’m guessing it wasn’t to get my autograph,” I challenged.

She frowned, “There is a lot I am still sorting out. Maybe I just wanted to be sure no one was messing with my reality. I had a harder time finding you than I expected, and some doubts once I found out the books didn’t exist. Most of my questions were answered the instant we started talking, but that also got me thinking out loud.

“It’s clear to me you could write the stories, but the notion of helping you was off the cuff. I’ve never seriously contemplated how I would go about telling my whole story; I’ve only ever talked about specific parts,” she leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. I guess I was just testing you and got caught up in it.

“I’ve read the books, so I already know where you start them. You knew that when you challenged me,” she disputed. “Just as you know my true motive for being here. I did a pretty bad job of hiding it, talking about how I’m only here because I dared to look myself in the eye and know myself,” she confided, rising to her feet with her drink in hand.

She took a sip as she resumed pacing. “So, I know; truly, if I want my story told, I must ask you to write it.”

I frowned and crossed my arms. “Something seems to be missing there,” I pointed out.

She nodded, “It is a kind of paradox. You still don’t want to see it, but I can only assume that you knew what you were doing all along. Either that, or in the end the story of my life is just a dream. A horrible truth when you face it.” She bowed her head, her hair flowing forward to veil her face.

A cold shock raced down my spine.

“You are the end of me,” she confided softly, “and I was your hope for a beginning.”

I blinked and the world shifted on its axis. Turns out, I didn’t have to look. I realized I was dreaming. I didn’t have to wake up for my heart to start breaking. I knew in that instant what she had been trying to tell me, what she had already discovered for herself. Why I knew her story. Why I tried a thousand times to write it and always found it too painful.

“I think I know how you got here. I didn’t want write it. I couldn’t write it. I did not want to do this to you… to me,” I whispered.

“Oh, but you must. If you don’t, I may as well have never existed, and then how could I know my own story?” she demanded, reaching out and taking my arm in her hands. “Do not doubt for an instant how well you know me–how well I know myself. Even as I am undone, I see why I could never turn a blind eye to the truth; you always see the truth in me.”

That said it all, no one could force me to see what I always knew to be true. She simply came to wake me up, though it could to cost her everything she was. My dream was on its dying breath, and I always knew deep down that the girl of my dreams was the girl I dreamed of being. A girl who chose to face the truth and die–if necessary–instead of living out a lie, and this is where her story begins.

I woke up from that revelation, drowning an anguished scream. I’d confronted myself in my dreams before, though not in that exact role. The hardest dreams to wake up from, were the ones where I was whole. On the worst days, I don’t actually wake up. I just slip into character, becoming the person the world at large knows. I’ve played that part so often, I tend to maintain it now even in dreams. I could not help dwelling miserably on the fact that in this dream, I managed to embrace the two desperate fictions of my life.

Both of which I’d constructed consciously out of necessity. It had never been my intention to deceive myself. In the first case, I was simply trying to live up to the expectation to be something I wasn’t. In the second, well, I’d really have to explain the first before it could begin to make sense. The aftermath of the dream takes precedence.

This was one of those dreams that seem unforgettable at the time, but the truth is that my memory of dreams is best when I’m on the verge of dreaming. It didn’t help that reality was never kind to me in the morning. It rarely gave me time to reflect on my dreams, and that morning was no exception. So, I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower. As hard as I fought it, the dream slipped away. A job demands sacrifices, and mine took her attempt to reach me that day.

It was not the first time, and it would not be the last. The day itself was not memorable, but at the time I was working, busy learning, and living in a place of my own. It was pretty mean living; the threat of homelessness loomed close enough to goad me into action. My options weren’t great, but I did what I could. I saved my complaints for my journal, occasionally posting them to my blog. I sometimes wrote fanfiction, or chased my muse in illustration.

Though the story was always on my mind, I was too distracted at that point in my life to write anything more evolved than notes. In full consciousness, I was well aware that the whole story was a means for me to escape from the insidious nightmare of my life. In the world’s eyes, I have an identity problem, which is ironic, because I never had a problem with my identity. I simply was not who or what I appeared to be.

It was trying to live up to other people’s expectations that drove me crazy.

As a child, it did not take me long to discover that reality was not kind to people like me, especially if we called attention to ourselves. As an adult, I’ve been told by many people to write about being transgendered, but my conundrum was never that simple. Based on my understanding of who I am, I knew at the least I should be a girl. I could not fathom what possessed anyone to think of me as a boy until I was old enough to read and understand an anatomy book.

The thing is, I did not stop understanding myself there. I had an exact sense of who I was, and the determination to find out what I needed to be in order to be true to myself. That has always been the fine point. Playing along was a practical compromise, enforced by social conventions. As far as I was concerned, though, there was no acceptable alternative to being true to myself.

I did not start out with a clear mental image. I stumbled across it in pieces, recognizing in other people which traits complimented the aspects of me that were contradicted by what I had. Every facet of identity that I discovered and failed to embody was an excruciating blow as, bit by bit, I was denied a true place in reality.

Instead, I had this false reality imposed on me. At the time I thought this was normal; for all I knew we were all forced into our roles in life. I blamed myself for resisting. In penance, I took it as a challenge. I was perceptive, intuitive, imaginative and associative. I was a natural student of human psychology and a capable actor. To be accepted, I played the part nature provided.

I was a sociable thing, though, and I had a strong sense of integrity. So, I longed to participate more fully and it killed me to know I was faking. As hard as it was to repress my true nature, I despaired over the fact that my true feelings marked me as a freak. I never wished to be the person I posed as, but I did feel obligated to face facts–even if all but one was against me.

The most critical fact was a simple truth I learned from the whole experience. I actively had to participate in the process or the process would not work. If I lost sight of my true self, I completely lost focus. The lights stayed on but nobody was home. It was nice. Peaceful. Then something kicked my mind into gear and I was me again–and not particularly happy about it.

Inevitably, I just couldn’t bear all that self-denial. I took refuge in my imagination, stimulated by comics, movies and books. Initially, I was like the naked goddess, a ghost haunting other people’s dreams. The ideas that sparked my imagination became stepping stones to a world that could encompass everything, up to and including me–as impossible as that seemed to be.

I gained a strange insight into godhood, as the creator of my own world. I was troubled by one little problem. As a goddess, I was as much of an outsider to the people who lived in my realm–for exactly the opposite reason–as I was in the world where I was born. I was present in every aspect of my creation, but my participation in life was always an act.

I could only interact with people inside my creation by pretending to be one of them. Confronting them as a goddess tended to explode their heads. That taught me the burden of power as deeply as my other role taught me about powerlessness. I could dictate terms, but as many authors discover, characters have wills of their own. In the realm of the mind, if you build it they really will come. If you respect them, they’ll make it real on their own–riddled with flaws and humanity.

Tending to my inner world, I became a student of social psychology, philosophy, religion and magic. I learned as much on those subjects, studying my inner world, as I did studying them from my perspective in the outer world. My private study expanded to encompass physical science–the best understood aspect of our reality–medicine, art and writing. All of this as a pre-teen, and mostly because I was determined to find a way to be me.

Well, I had a way to be me, and that eventually evolved into the story, but I still had to face reality. As a prisoner of my own body, I had no hope of really living, so the only practical thing to do was see if I could change my body. I pursued this goal in secret, well aware that it would be seen by most people as an abnormal–possibly pathological–pursuit. I tried to keep up with the demands and responsibilities of life on the side.

Obviously, this was too much for one individual. I did okay in school, growing up–until I had to balance it with work. I tried to compromise by pursuing a creative career in art or writing. I would have made a great actor, but honestly, adding other characters on top of the ones I already maintained would have been a ridiculous strain on my psyche. I worked on art and writing independently when paying the bills took precedence over education.

In practical terms, I was trying to do at least four full time jobs and barely getting paid for one. I had to give priority to my key pursuit: Fix body soonest. It was a disappointing pursuit, though. Medicine was a few generations away from reshaping a body to the extent I required. True, it was possible to seek cosmetic gender reassignment surgery in combination with hormone replacement therapy, but only at great personal, social and financial cost.

I looked into it. It pushed me to the brink of suicide. Enough said. I never gave up on the impossible. No one on Earth is in a position to definitively rule out possibilities conventional understanding can only regard as magical or miraculous. I could speculate very well on what could produce the precise results I sought, assuming I could establish a viable working context. With better resources, I can be surprisingly articulate and precise in describing it.

Sadly, the last thing I had was suitable resources. I was struggling just to cobble together the requirements to be able to support myself as an artist. I would have focused on establishing myself as a writer, but I became dubious of my chances of getting published when most of my writing was commandeered to work out theories for my main pursuit. Who reads heavy speculative, sometimes erotic, gender-bending, paradoxical, philosophical, sci-fantasy adventure epics?

I’m not saying there’s not an audience. I do read fan fiction. I’m just saying it seemed unlikely I’d be supporting myself well enough to survive writing it. I had better chances of winning the lottery, and I don’t even play. So, I was in a pretty grim place when I confronted myself in that dream. It did not prompt me to write the story, but as I drifted toward sleep one night, weeks or months later, the memory of the dream came back to me and I was able to write down a hasty version of it.

Not long after that, I confronted myself about it. This time without the fig leaf of a dream. It wasn’t the first time I’d used my ability to split my attention to confront myself in my usual roles. It just evolved naturally out of constantly trying to be someone I’m not, while enduring constant conflict between my self-image and my physical form. It’s painful, so one day I just stepped out of my head.

On that night, I was sitting at my computer at the end of a long, frustrating day, unable to focus on art or writing. I was too hyped up on caffeine to consider sleep, and too exhausted to think. Too many of my demons had come out in the story, and it was proving impossible to uproot them. I leaned back in my chair and tried to clear my head, and felt my self step out.

It’s not astral travel, it’s just that the world I perceive is perceived in my head. Since the world is intruding on my domain, I’m free to wander in spirit while my body holds me wherever I am.

I treat that as ground zero and, when writing, refer to my other self in the third person. I don’t confuse myself as much when I come back later to read it. As she poked around my apartment, stretching her phantom limbs, I turned my eyes back to the screen and resumed wondering why I persisted in thinking I was trying to write a story. It was more auto-therapy in practice.

Original author’s note: This is one of those times when I’d kind of like the comments to appear first, so I could warn new readers to go to the beginning. At the same time, with the comments at the bottom, I’m not spoiling anything by saying:

Welcome to my insanity!

Yep. I’ve dropped another paradox on you. This is a work of fiction. This story is true. All of this has actually happened (context is very important!) if not exactly in the same order. Auto-biographical philosophical fiction? Who knows. I prefer the genre mentioned in this chapter, actually. Sadly, I don’t think any of the erotic parts will show up in this book, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the mind-, gender-, and reality-bending parts accounted for.

Um. I’m sort of in writing sprint mode to get this done and published, by the way. Not to alarm anyone, but that bit about homelessness looming is undesirably real foreshadowing. My job hunt has been unproductive so far (I still have a few irons in the fire but the interview process can take several weeks). I’ve burned through my savings and run out of paying projects over the past several months, and if my last outstanding invoices don’t come in this week, I’ll be in violation of my “rental agreement” at the end of this month.

Erk!

So, yeah. I want to finish this fast. Feedback is precious!