Trans Characters – Page 4 – Gillian's Notebook

The Non-Adventures of Francine

I start my day by loading my purse. Of course, I always carry my notebook with the various notes I’ve made about the local story hooks.

Avoid the Third Street Coffee shop on the second Tuesday of odd months – spys use it as a drop location – High chance of being given top seceret documents – shred reciepts as well.

Avoid getting into elevators on the sixth and eighteenth floors of all buildings North of Franklin Street – high probability of encountering a ghost – take the stairs if more than three high school to college age young adults are also present.

The first aid kit is good to toss at good Samaritans. Keeps me from getting involved while not looking completely heartless to injured people.

My wallet of course is always in my purse. I check it’s pockets and find a business card I’ve never seen before. I crumple it without reading it, carry it into the bathroom and flush it.

Do I need the pepper spray? Its misuse could lead into a comedy or meet-cute. I check my notebook. Based on past trends, I’m due a physical attack (mugging, kidnapping attempt, random angry man). The pepper spray goes in my purse.

The electrical tape, paper clips, and rubber bands go in a side pocket.

***

When I was a teenager, Margaret, my best friend, and I had “adventures”. We debunked some hauntings, found lost items, discovered hidden Last Will and Testaments, even broke up a moonshine smuggling ring once. For five year years, we had an adventure roughly once a month. Some times they were three weeks apart, some times six, but in the end it averaged out.

Then something changed. For most of our senior year in high school we just went to school. We applied to colleges. We went to Prom. We didn’t have any “adventures”. Continue reading “The Non-Adventures of Francine”

In The Dark

Author note: This is not a story. It’s bit of memoir.

Context: I wrote this in November, 2012, the year after my sister died. The file name is nanowrimo2012.rtf. I must have been trying to do Nanowrimo that year. I have no memory of having written this. I rediscovered it years after I wrote it and then could not remember which file it had been in. Finally I found it again.

I don’t know what the first line means. If it was part of a story I didn’t write or if it was meant to go with the rest of the essay.

This essay is depression, self hate, dysphoria, and grief. It’s a snapshot of who I was at that time. Part of who I am now. I’ve grown as a person but I recognize myself in these words.

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Author note: This is not a story. It’s bit of memoir.

I don’t know what the first line means. If it was part of a story I didn’t write or if it was meant to go with the rest of the essay.

This essay is depression, self hate, dysphoria, and grief. It’s a snapshot of who I was at that time. Part of who I am now. I’ve grown as a person but I recognize myself in these words.

******

In the dark we traveled to far away lands.

Th buzzing angry hurt feeling doesn’t stop. I can ignore it for a time but it’s always there. Waiting for my distractions to end, for my mind to blank so it can fill the void. I feel as though I will never be rid of it. The bones in my hands and arms ache from despair. Breathing is tiresome, moving my body exhausting, and thinking almost impossible.

I have no future. Nothing waits for me. This trial, this ordeal known as life has no end for me. There is no win condition no goal to strive for. Just death. Maybe now, maybe later. I’m so tired of life. I wish to rest forever.

I dreamt of my sister. We were looking for somewhere to talk in private. There was a chapel or rectory. We went inside and we talked. She talked mostly. Ordinary shit that had no real consequence but it was nice to talk to her. I miss her so much. I’ve been thinking about her more lately. Remember in “The Body” when Buffy imagines she revives her mother and the paramedics come and they have a “gosh that was close” moment in the hospital. Yesterday I thought what if my sister hadn’t died and I could see it and feel it and goddess it was wonderful. It only lasted a second or two and then I was back here alone wishing for death or relief.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a world that didn’t hate me. I don’t suffer as much as others because I keep a low profile, I don’t push too hard against the bars. Sometimes I just wish I could be normal. That I was thin and cis and the right kind of beautiful. Sometimes I think I could starve myself and lose weight. I would never really be thin but I could be less fat. I could be closer to acceptable.

Most of the time, when I’m alone, I don’t think about being trans. I just exist as myself and that’s fine. When I have to go out, be around people, I have to think about how they see me. How they gender me.

A couple of days ago, I woke up feeling like shit. I cried lying in bed before even getting up. Crying helped. It emptied me of feeling left me a husk that I could order around. I took some pain relievers and caffeine (together they work as a crude antidepressant). I made tea and made lunch and twitched from the caffeine but felt okish. On the walk to work I started to feel better than just ok, almost good. Then I got to the mall and saw a few women and remembered I will never be able to just be me. It will always be a struggle for me to be seen as a woman.

Time Shoppe Stories

There are two kinds of people who find the shoppe.

Regular customers looking for a clock or a watch or a kitchen timer or anything to mark the passage of time. They browse my narrow crowded shelves filled with mantle clocks, alarm clocks, hour glasses, minute glasses, egg timers, flip clocks, until they find just the right time piece. Then they bring it to me and pay and they leave never looking back. I don’t mind them. After all they help pay the rent on the shop.

Then there are the special customers. Those who don’t need to mark time because they are already aware of it passing them by. What they want or need is more time. They enter unsure of why they have entered the Time Shoppe. Sometimes they resist the call and browse for a minute or two but they make their way to my counter in the back soon enough. We talk and I sell them the time they need. Time to heal, time to live, time to love, time to be. I ask for a token payment, never more than what they can afford, and send them on their way.

The bell over my door jingles as a girl, on her way to being a young woman, opens the door.

“Take your time looking around,” I call out. She hesitates near the door but moves to look at a cuckoo clock after only a second. A few more clocks catch her eye before she reaches the counter at the back.

Author’s note: This was meant to be a done in one story but I ended up writing what felt like the ending to a story before I had told all the story I was going to tell. So, I broke the second part off into its own story.

“Time Shoppe”

There are two kinds of people who find the shoppe.

The bell over my door jingles as a girl, on her way to being a young woman, opens the door.

One Message

This is not a story. It’s kind of like a chapter of a memoir I don’t plan on writing. Chapter Five or Seven or maybe it’s the dedication. It sketches out several years of my life in the bare bones. If I was writing this memoir, later chapters would filling some details but this is the story of the story of these years.

—

Early 2009, I have accepted myself as trans but I am only out to my sister and her kids. Online I’m out and writing and blogging on LiveJournal. We won’t talk about MySpace.

A young woman messages me because we are in the same city and have some shared interests. We converse a few times before meeting in person briefly before I go to see the movie Coraline. A few months later she invites me to the college’s film club’s end of semester party. The following fall I begin attending film club meetings and movie screenings. I make a few friends.

In late 2010, my living situation becomes … unstable. I live with some friends for a couple of months. By January 2011 I have found an efficiency apartment; a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom; that is cheap enough for me to afford but still very expensive. In April, a friend from the film club tells me about one of her friends that is looking for a roommate.

I meet my potential roommate to discuss terms and she finds me acceptable. June 2011, while I am moving in, my new roommate asks if I would like her to use female pronouns for me. I say yes. This is only the second time someone has asked me this.

Over the next couple of years, I meet more people who are accepting of me and I become more comfortable and confident as myself. Late 2014, I come out as transgender at work, the last place I am still presenting as a man, and “complete” my transition.

From a single message on LiveJournal I ended up meeting a chain of women who accepted and affirmed my gender. That one message changed my life.

Thank you.

(Super)Friends: Bob Kane’s Comics

It was a Monday. Or maybe it was a Thursday. Mondays and Thursdays feel the same to me. Not like Tuesdays; I can always tell when it’s Tuesday. Wait, I remember now, it was a Friday.

Fridays can be slow or fast paced depending on a lot of factors ranging from paydays to parenting decisions to weather patterns. You can never tell how the comics business will be on a Friday. Oh yeah, I work in a comic book store called Bob Kane’s Comics. My boss isn’t “The” Bob Kane if you’re wondering; just lucky enough to want to run a comic book store and have the same name as the creator of the Dark Knight of Gotham City.

We’re supposed to be evasive about which Bob Kane the store is named after but I’m not much of a bullshiter. Luckily for me Gerald is the king of bullshiters. I once saw him convert a hardcore DC fanboy to Marvel and then back to DC.

That Friday had been slow. Gerald was in the back room eating his microwave dinner. I was up front leaning on the counter, reading a collection of a comic series I had missed reading last year, when the door opened and she walked in. Tall, blonde hair in a messy bun, thinnish figure contained in tight jeans and a plain heather gray t-shirt.

She looked around taking in the store from the door. I should have greeted her when she walked in but I was feeling lazy and figured if she need help finding something she’d ask. She smiled when she saw me, most women do. Most of them find it comforting to see another woman behind the counter.

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Lisa’s Story: Zombie Apocalypse – Chapter Eighteen

Over the next couple of days I helped Andy move into his new apartment. After cleaning out the refrigerator and letting the apartment air out, I convinced him to move the former occupants’ personal items to a bedroom.

“You really care about your neighbor’s stuff?” he asked while taking a picture off the walls.

I shrugged. “Kind of. Maybe. They might come back.” I hadn’t really known them or most of my neighbors to be honest. A week ago I had broken into every apartment and taken all the food and drinks I could find but I hadn’t touched their personal belongings.

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“Yeah but you got to have hope or why the hell are we surviving?”

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Lisa’s Story: Zombie Apocalypse – Chapter Seventeen

I walked inside my apartment and Andy followed me. I gestured to the sofa as I walked past it to the kitchen area, “Take a seat. You want a drink?”

“Uh, sure what do have?” Andy asked from the sofa.

“Bottled water, sodas.” The water had mostly come from the superstore while the sodas I had scavenged from my neighbors. I had seen beer and other alcoholic beverages in a few apartments but had left them.

“Root beer?” he asked.

“Sure.” I pulled two cans out of a box and walked around to the living room. I handed one to Andy and sat in my watch chair with the other. We sat in silence for a minute drinking our warm sodas.

“What’s with the couch?” Andy asked pointing to the short sofa standing on end by the door.

“I use it to block the door.”

“Ah, ok. So, today was a lot of fun. What are we going to do tomorrow?”

I couldn’t help myself and launched into my best mad scientist mouse voice, “The same thing we do everyday. Try to take over the world!” Andy stared at me blankly for a second while I broke down laughing for the first time in weeks.

Odyssey 3011: One Woman’s Tale – Part Four

The following story is based on my experiences in the game Odyssey 3011, an Xbox Live Indie game. The story is a mix of my play through and added fictional encounters in the form of a log kept by my player character.

Jump 140?

I’m not sure if I should call that a jump or not. I’m in a different place but it wasn’t a hyperspace jump. I’m not home. Not even close to Earth as far as I can tell. It was a wormhole I think. I’m not in the same system anymore. I’m picking up a beacon from a docking station nearby. I’m going to head there and see if I can figure out where I am.

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Lisa’s Story: Zombie Apocalypse – Chapter Sixteen

We made it back to Andy’s store without incident. I stopped in front of the store and looked south toward my apartment. Andy stopped along side me.

“So, if you want I could go with you. Just to make sure they aren’t hanging around. It’s up to you,” Andy said.

The three zombies I saw might not have wandered into my apartment complex. They probably just ran off before I made it back around those few blocks. But what if they hadn’t? What if they were hanging out waiting for me to go home? Not like a planned trap but just on accident. Could I take three zombies? Probably not. Going alone was a risk. On the other hand, letting Andy know where I lived was a risk. He didn’t seem like a bad guy but he was still a guy, a cis guy. I trusted him to watch my back out here but I didn’t want him thinking it was more than that. Go alone or take Andy with me. Either decision could bite me in the ass.

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Serial Story: Odyssey 3011: One Woman’s Tale

An astronaut finds herself thrown across space to an unknown part of the universe.