I look at my hands and I think about / being told that they will begin to shrink while on hormones / and I worry that I am losing myself in this place. / I worry that I am losing the way that I love / and the way I hold the people around me. / I worry / that I am turning into someone I do not recognize / someone I do not know / —someone I could never hope to love. 

***

Since starting hormone replacement therapy in August, I have wept and writhed and withered more than I knew possible. I have been rendered into the sensation of hot iron burning through my skin. I have clutched my arms against my chest and willed breath back into my lungs. I have sat on benches and rained tears onto handwritten letters, dabbing away the blotting ink with my wet sleeve. And yet I have laughed louder than I knew I had the ability to, tasted happiness more clear and sweet than any I have ever known. I have loved more ruinously than the sum of all the love I have ever given. I love my sisters, I love my parents, I love my friends, I love the purple string lights I have hung up over my bed and the long nights spent in the company of others and the nights cut short by one too many shots. I am overwhelmed at all of the new colors life has taken and I feel them all rush by me, sweeping through my hair and drying my eyes. 

***

a non-exhaustive list of new experiences

• Created a new nighttime ritual: NyQuil, Benadryl, 150 milligrams of Spironolactone and 8 milligrams of Estradiol. Formulated the perfect warm honey-tea from the kettle I keep in my room and the jar of Playa Bowls honey and the dining hall Lipton; I take a mouthful and swallow it all. 
• Looked in the mirror and touched newly-grown cheekbones, tugged at gathering cushions around my eyes; these eyebags don’t look like they used to.
• Felt my stomach turn into iron filings, felt myself sway in another’s arms as if a magnet was brought close. Closed my eyes and felt my organs rearranging to better accommodate this liquid love. Learned what butterflies are supposed to feel like. 
• Braced for the silence of a needle, watched the nurse draw two vials of blood from the vein. Found that the veins in my left arm do not lend themselves to being bled. Filled six-and-counting clear capsules and learned to read blood test results. 
• Understood the gravity of grief, felt the plane of my space-time warped by the thing dense and feathered, felt it snag and tear all the way down. Curled my mass into fetal form and sank into my mattress, a neutron star plunging through the floor. 
• Discovered a heaving anxiety, one so viscous that I cannot breathe through it. Learned how it feels to have it lifted, to let it wash over me and remain standing. 
• Am destroyed and choose to get up, choose to reconstitute myself in perpetuity. 

***

At this moment, I have been on estrogen for over seven months. I have been creating myself, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, milligram by milligram, for seven months. And I am overjoyed by this fact, I am overjoyed that I know that I am responsible for the construction of my body, that every hair follicle and blemish is there by design. My friend once said that there is so much love in the body of someone who chose to put it there, and I find that through every nighttime ritual, through every pill swallowed, I am creating a version of myself whom I can love purely and unashamedly, and who can love—truly love—unbridled and infinitely. I find that I am changing into a version of myself which I cannot reconcile with who I was a year ago. 

Love, then, came in teaspoons and syringes—measured, calculated, only under certain conditions. Now, love comes in shipments. It comes in casks, flows like pirate rum. My hands may shrink and my world may shatter, but every night I choose this transformation and all that comes with it.

***

I have come to realize that I was not whole before I began this process. I have always been someone who struggled with emotionality. I could never identify how I was feeling beyond recognizing moments in which I should be feeling good, should be feeling bad, should be laughing from my chest or crying on a shoulder. My life had become a series of stills. Portraits of a distantly familiar figure sitting in my classes, driving to my home, sitting at my desk, sleeping in my bed; freeze frames of a mouth—my mouth?—open in what could be laughter or scorn or nothing at all. And I took this numbness, this indiscriminate flattening, to be normal. 

But it’s changed, now. I spend hours laughing until my stomach hurts, hours staring at the ceiling  and feeling tears streak across my cheeks. I have learned what it is to be consumed fully by emotion, to be devoured by these jagged waves and taste the salt on my tongue. Simply put, I have started to feel so, so much more. And yes, this means that I am devastated by things and devastated by people in ways that I have never been before, but I have never felt love warmer than I do now, never smiled as wide as I have in these past few months. 

I feel alive, like I am experiencing life the way that I was meant to. Like I am at once eroded and rebuilt by the sand and salt and sea that runs between my legs, every wave leaving a new shoreline. I am made anew and I am made whole. And this whole, I think, can be loved. Will be loved. Must be loved.