Cold comfort

I'm a girl.

I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl.

The words run through my head as I look up at the pin point stars shining through the thin wisp of clouds.

I focus on them to force out the otherwise all-dominating thought - I'm cold.

I'm wrapped up in everything warming that I own, but you don't keep warm lying on your back on a frozen pond in the middle of the night. No matter how wrapped up I am on the outside, the cold is at my core.

And I suddenly find myself able to philosophically reflect, that this would have been the perfect thing to say to end the argument that forced me out here in the first place.

No matter how wrapped up warm I am on the outside, I'm cold at my core - and that's just like me. No matter how much I look like I'm a boy on the outside, I. Am. A. Girl.

But you can't use words like "transphobic" to a mum & dad who don't even know what half the words mean when it comes to the subject. And you can't use any words at all when you get so overheated at your own parents' blindness and bigotry that you can barely speak. So you run. You run upstairs, grab your warmest things that you had out ready for the camping trip your parents promised you, then back down and out the back door. Out past the back garden gate, out across the field, onto the frozen pond, and you just lie there on your back, and let the sounds of shouting fade from your ears, shouting at you for what a disgrace you are for being "sick" and "sinful" to believe you're a daughter when they raised you as a son. And feel the calm descend with a tingle on your cheeks as your slowly drying tears get as cold as the water below you.

I hear the ice groan and creak, and I know in some part of my mind I should be scared. That groaning, creaking sound of fragile ice about to crack and shatter, scared the hell out of me when I was little.

"Scared the hell out of me". I think about that phrase for a moment as my mind floats and wanders anywhere that isn't quite so painful. That phrase literally came into being because priests tried to draw people into heaven by scaring them with the alternative. To frighten them away from hell. At least, according to my English Lit teacher. And I've trusted her word on things ever since she became the only adult who understood what I was going through, and tried to help me through it by introducing me to the writings of George Sand & Virginia Woolf.

All my parents offered me - and I can't hate them, because they thought it was a loving thing to do - was prayers, bible stories, church time, and a push to go through baptism. In their church they baptise adults, dunking them in a pool of water to somehow say that their old life was dead and gone, and coming up from the water to say that they were reborn like the risen Jesus, or something.

Water. Stupid to let my wandering mind find its way back around in a circle, as thinking about water brings me back to where I am, and why I'm here. Whatever higher beings look down on me from those starry heavens, they would only be rolling their starry eyes at what an idiot I was for letting the ice break underneath me and fall straight down into the freezing water.

I wonder what they in their high space minds think about what makes a boy a boy, a girl a girl, or any other sex or gender or whatever they call such things in their high and distant world. I wonder if they can see a girl when they look at me, the way I can, and my parents can't.

I wonder if my parents' God can. They say he sees the heart, not just the outward appearance, so I wonder if he sees my outward appearance like a boy, or my heart as a girl, if he's looking at me at all.

I wonder, if I went through the born-again-baptism the way my parents want, if he would let me rise and resurrect as a girl in the eyes of everyone watching. A miracle, worked in his "mysterious ways" they talk so much about.

The ice starts creak and groan louder, and I know what's about to happen, and how stupid I am to just be lying here letting it happen and not get myself to safety. But is that what's really back there? Safety?

What if I let the ice break? I'm a strong swimmer and I cope with cold. I could let it break. It would be like a baptism. I could leave behind everything that the world sees in me as a boy, let it smash through the ice and sink down into the deathly cold water. Put it to death. And rise up again to the surface, fully and completely living my life from that moment on as my true self, the girl I know I truly am, whatever the world tries to tell me when it thinks it knows me better than I do. The child my parents thought I was, the son they thought they had, would be gone, and only their true child, their daughter that I really am, would remain, swimming strongly and confidently through the cold depths, to the safety of the surface.

My mind grows still, the voice inside fades smaller, and I offer up a silent voice of prayer. Whether to my parents, their God, whoever is looking down on me from the sky, or whoever is waiting with open arms to receive me into the dark embrace of the water, I'm not sure. But I let it flow out of me, and I let my awareness of my surroundings float away, and I decide I will no longer live as the boy my parents think I am, but as the girl I know I am.

I know I am.

Everything else I know, goes blank in my mind, and all I know, for a tiny moment of time, is that I AM.

And the ice breaks.