Smash The Time Machine

I wish I’d come out earlier.

I wish some wise and far-seeing adult had drawn me a map.

I wish there had been just enough turmoil in my family to tip me into leaving.

I wish I’d run away.

I wish things had been different.

But really, what do these wishes mean? Imagine, its right there, the time machine. You have it, you’re the only one who can use it, and you have an hour. What do you do?

You know exactly what you’d do. Stuff your pockets full of estradiol and progesterone and head back to 1987 or 1993 or 1998 or whenever.

No need to work out your speech, you’ve been rehearsing it for a lifetime. You have one for all circumstances. An hour-long speech that turns into a monologue and blows a little poetic in places or a ten-minute rush job that covers the basics and ends with you gripping you by the collar or the shoulders or the ears and making sure that you understand, looking into your eyes, frightening you with your own desperate, smudgy-cheeked earnestness.

You are trans. That’s what’s wrong. That’s why you feel like the biggest criminal on the planet. Your brain is telling you there’s something wrong, but it doesn’t know what and it is slowly settling on the conclusion that you have done something terrible, something nameless that has ruined everything, that you are butterfly that turned back into a grub.

There is a reason, but it is not that. It is not that you are worthless. There is a reason why you feel this way, and that reason is a key to an entire garden of joy and freedom that is locked up right here, in these dull walls. It’s right here. You just have to believe it. No, you just have to believe me. Believe you. I am from the future. I don’t have time to explain. There’s work to do and fights to have. You’re going to have to be –

But really, would you do it? If you had the time machine? Maybe you would, but maybe you shouldn’t. It isn’t that you should learn to love your past. Fuck that. It was a nightmare, it was so much pain around you that it no longer felt like pain, it became you, it was several layers of skin, a grey coat slung over your light.

You shouldn’t love and celebrate your past. It is just that this is the void in which you were created. There is no other universe.

Those desperate longings to remake yourself, to launch yourself back into the past and change everything are like the primal urging of a new hatched animal that would be safer remaining exactly where it is, yet which knows, somehow, that it has to pull itself along into the open, into the bright sunlight, brave the eagles and teeth and cars, get to the sea, get to the edge of the nest, squeeze through the gap in the fence.

Once you’ve made it, there is no need for these time travel fantasies. You can’t go back and you shouldn’t. You’ve spent too much of your life living in alternate realities. The prison gates are open now. It is hard, you will weep, but if you had a time machine, your journey would make no sense, and this joy you feel from time to time would never have existed.

Those instants, when you remember how far you’ve come, catch sight of yourself in a mirror or see your real name on a gas bill, are everything. Be greedy for these moments, that are as powerful as sunlight and as beautiful as cold stars, fill your pockets with them, because each one burns with a hard, gem-like flame that is your authentic, living truth.