Echo

Pride on the Page Day #27

Each of the mini-essays I’m publishing for the month of June are part of a creative challenge to share joy during Pride. You can find out more in the link below. You can even participate, if you’d like!

Wild Lion*esses Pride from Jay

✍️#PrideOnThePage (a fun, free, creative community challenge) - runs June 1-30

27. Echo

It started with a beard filter on a phone app. Several of my trans guy friends online were having fun playing with their apps, taking pictures, even posting them in public forums to ask about what beard style worked best with their face shape. We were dreaming in the collective sense, brother-dreaming, beard-dreaming. I felt silly doing it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to grow facial hair. That dream was too far out of reach for me.

I installed the app anyway.

It was harder than I expected to take that initial photo. I needed it to contain my face, yet that wasn’t a comfortable thing to look at right then. I shied away from my own camera repeatedly until I could come up with a photo that had enough potential to work. The app processed… and processed… and then…

Based on the light and my pale complexion, it decided that I should be old, that I needed grey hair, a grey and white beard and mustache. Was I really old enough for that? Should I have been offended? But that very first image plucked a string deep inside my chest that vibrated and hummed and echoed behind and before me in a continuum of time, time that suddenly belonged to me. It reached back to me as a 4-year-old kid, a kid who loved beards and wanted to grow one someday. It reached forward to a deep desire to grow old, to have a future, to become an elder through survival. It shined a light on the haunting fear I had never faced, that intense fear that I would turn out to be just like my mother, which was partly a fear of growing up to be an old woman. It was a wake-up call that I’d been here all along, this same man that I am now, just waiting for a little grey to grow under my chin.

Did I save the picture? No, too risky. Too vulnerable a dream for my wife or the kids to accidentally find if they picked up my phone. Too tender to hope for as I injected T every week and waited for something—anything—to happen along the line of my lips. Too bold to desire, too much to ask for, too far from reach.

Little brother me, go on and dream. It happens.

Your trans friend,

Robin