Welcome to Planet Earth

Welcome to Planet Earth, where people lie to gain favors and cheat to win romance. Hookers get trampled on at the crack of sunset by men fiending for the unholy. Priests touch young children and fathers hit their wives. Trans women are murdered in Brazil and Morocco and in the banlieus of Paris. Gay men are called faggots over high school loudspeakers.

I take a flask from my hip and throw whiskey through my mouth. The whiskey burns my throat and stomach. I like the burning feeling: it reminds me of this planet that is set on flames.

In college, in 2015, I was nonbinary and threw in some maleness to my femalehood. But Yale guys were making fun of me behind my back, calling me weird names and laughing at my appearances. Part of me wanted to die on the inside: I didn’t know they were making fun of me. They were critiquing a body that was weak and full of pain. But they didn’t care–throwing cheap shots at me won favor with their other male friends. It made them look bigger. And more manly. All I was trying to do was survive: I was trying to live without killing myself at night. But they were still mocking me in my attempt to live. Then when I went on a hormone called testosterone, my body started to look entirely like theirs–I passed all the time as the intrepid organs they inhabited throughout Yale. And suddenly, they stopped making fun of me. They became scared instead–scared that I could look like them, scared that I could talk like them, scared that I could walk like them.

I went to the gym in the basement of my residential college Timothy Dwight and lifted a barbell. I then exercised my triceps. A guy called Nick–white, tall, handsome, and on the heavyweight crew team–came up to me and touched my shoulders. He said sorry, then ran away.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

Ten years later, my girlfriend and I wanted to get married. We raised a clean apartment in Rockville, Maryland–we watered flowers and did the laundry and had roommates. We made these roommates, who were nurses and interns at the National Institutes of Health, mocktails and cocktails full of vodka and raspberry juice and some white wine in between. We bought ginger beer from the store and dosed it with a lime and some mint. When COVID struck America, we took our computers into our rooms and worked solo. We laughed during these times and played Settlers of Catan. My girlfriend watched RuPaul’s Drag Race with a friend. We invited even more people to our little enclave–we made love and kissed and baked blueberry pancakes, with lots of maple syrup. My girlfriend even hit on my friend. The friend paid no mind, and I didn’t get jealous. We were in our twenties, we felt alive, and we were having fun. And then we got a new car. We moved to another suburb of DC and settled down, planning to get married. But my girlfriend got a call from her mother. She had a tumor in her pancreas. Her mother got an MRI, and then another MRI, and then sat down with a doctor. The doctor said she had cancer and only a year left to live.

We were ready to start a life together. We even talked about raising kids. We said we could adopt a trans youth–someone whose family had kicked them out. We said we could nurture this child, and give them good schooling, and let them play soccer and make art. But my partner’s mother was dying. We got married. Her mother sat at the altar, but she was secretly throwing up in the bathroom from all of the toxic chemo in her body. People pretended like this wasn’t happening. Her cousin, an auntie from New York, sat in the bathroom, next to the toilet, and crunched her hair into a ball. Outside on the floor, Indian dance music played, from Bollywood. Siblings and uncles from Queens and Florida and Peru moved their hips to a Southasian beat. My Dad threw his arms up in the air. My sisters took pictures to post on Instagram.

All of this commotion made me manic for one full year. My partner couldn’t take care of me, and I couldn’t take care of her. I abandoned the relationship. I went to Manhattan to get treated. I heard over a phone call that her mother fell to the floor in the kitchen when she died. I wasn’t there. I was too scared to see it happen. I’m a coward for that. And I’m a coward on a few other fronts. I have to relay a mantra now, in my head, when I’m alone: I tried my best.

But alas, my friend: welcome to Planet Earth.

My doctor now prescribes me lithium at night. The drug gives me so much brain fog at times that I can barely talk–a word will come into my brain but I can’t let it out. So I mutter vague platitudes to those around me. They question my sanity when my speech doesn’t make sense. When there is too much of the lithium in my body, I start to salivate. My mouth twitches and I get anxious, curling up into a ball on my bed. I put my arms around my chest and get a plastic cup from the kitchen. The kind of red solo cup that frat stars who made fun of me used to drink beer in college. Except the red solo cup is there so I can feel better about not going to the hospital.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

After my divorce, I started to work in prison reform. I frantically messaged nonprofits and got on the phone with a few inmates. I made some friends. One was locked up behind bars for two years. He felt depressed as a kid, so used heroin to cope. But then when he went totally broke, he started to sell heroin just to make some money. He shot up through his arms one night, then got busted by the cops for having a stash in his pocket. He ravaged for days on end in a jail cell dopesick. Even more depression took over his mind. He tried to find a needle and some bags to live out a high again, but the gangsters in jail wouldn’t let him feel free. I kind of wanted him to get high again. I wanted him to feel good, but he couldn’t. He got out of prison and did electroconvulsive shock therapy. It made him feel better, but then he started to forget things. Over the phone, he couldn’t remember an important story I told him two weeks ago. I asked him about the poetry he once wrote. He told me the shock therapy dulled his ability to spew out words on paper. And then he kept forgetting after that. I got a call from him a few days ago. He was calling from jail. The cops busted him again.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

Amid all of this chaos, I go to a sauna now to feel better. Eleven years after Yale, I have distant memories of a blonde haired crew boy who could have raped me one night after a party. These memories surface in dreams, and then I think about them during the day. But the sauna seems to cure everything. What happened was so long ago, that the pain has mostly left my body. When I get out of the splintering infrared heat, I plunge myself right into an ice bath. First my thighs go in. Then my abdomen. And then my torso. Once my shoulders hit the cold water, I take a breath in, hold it for ten seconds, and visualize all of my trauma in one space in my head. When my breath gets let out, the trauma gets let out too. The air around me becomes lighter. My muscles feel relaxed. I grab my towel, do a few more heat to cold cycles, and exit to go to my car. But as I exit, I hear the sauna attendant crack a joke about Caitlyn Jenner.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

I went on a trip to Florida with my friends. We got a hotel room at Disney World, and went on rides and saw a mock Indiana Jones play. I had so much fun. We threw down some beers and laughed about our college time. We talked about people we knew. We slept well in a cramped hotel room. But the next day, my friend’s boyfriend came to Orlando. He seemed really angry and drank a lot. He derided my friend in front of my face. He kept talking loudly. And then he yelled Isabel. This was my former name as a girl. He called me Isabel to my face. He didn’t want me to be a man. He didn’t believe in Isaac. I thought my trip to Disney World would be fun. I thought that I could relax in front of Mickey Mouse. But instead I was deadnamed.

Welcome to Planet Earth.

In the throngs of a DC summer, I walk outside of my apartment and look for my car. The Ford Fusion has been towed despite my paying $2,145 in rent each month and signing a twenty page lease. There is a sticker on the car. It says The Lincoln At Fair Oaks. The sticker was supposed to ensure that I could park there freely. The staff tells me that my tags are expired, and if I park there again the next night it will be towed again. I ordered and paid for my tags five weeks ago, but the DMV messed up and didn’t send them in the mail. I pay $30 to Uber to the towing company. They charge me $240 for the car. I take out my credit card. I only have Discover cards. The towing company doesn’t take Discover. I walk 25 minutes to an ATM. The ATM only doles out increments of $100. I take out the first increment. But the second increment won’t go through because my bank froze my debit card. So I walk 15 minutes to a nearby hotel that has another ATM. I retrieve the remaining cash, pay the towing company, and plunk down in the driver’s seat of my car.

As I drive back to my apartment, I hop on Virginia’s Highway 29. I put on some Bruce Springsteen. Born in the USA has never made me feel more alive. Springsteen’s vocals are crooning out into the suburban hemisphere. His guitar sounds like a slice of heaven on a summer stereo. I finally feel a bit of freedom. The wind graces my chin. My hands aren’t trembling in anger. My chest is calm. But all of a sudden, I hit the brakes. My leg muscle clamps up. A pick up truck ten vehicles down collided into a passerby. Police sirens start to wail. The fire department is called. People get out of their cars to inspect the damage. Ten days later, I read in the local news that the passerby died:

Welcome to Planet Earth.