Transition

She is crying as she clings to my legs, teeth chattering as she spits the words.

Don't leave me.

Her nails are digging into my legs, just beginning to draw blood. Long, greasy hair is wrapping itself around my arms. Her entire form is designed to hurt me. Claws and hair and teeth and wide innocent eyes. She is pulling me under.

Still she keeps sobbing, like she is the victim, even as she is making me bleed, she seemed convinced that she is innocent. No, worse than that: she is right. Her way is the only way.

Don't leave me, she says again, her voice growing stronger with each repetition.

I try to tell myself that she is only a child. She doesn't know what she's doing.

But that's bullshit. She knows exactly what she's doing, and she blames it on everyone else. On her friends. On her school. On bullies. On teachers. On her worst days, she even blames her parents. Because it's easier to blame someone else. Anyone except for herself.

And yet even now, with no one left to blame, she can't seem to admit that the problem is within her. A festering mold, growing, left untreated, ignored.

Don't leave me.

I try to tell myself again that she's a mere child. An infant swaddled in misconceptions that she isn't strong enough to break out of.

But I can't help myself— I hate her.

Her nails seem to grip me even tighter. Claws, grown out, existing only to tear me apart.

She tears herself apart to. As if self-punishment can excuse the cruelty that she inflicts on everyone around her, however unwittingly.

She knows— even as she says it again: don't leave me— that I am leaving. In fact, I am already gone. I lost her the moment I changed my name. A death so complete, so total, it was almost gruesome.

This is the only place left that she has any sway over me, in this strange misty realm of dreams. To the rest of the world, she no longer exists. I am no longer her.

I am him now.

But still, she clings to me. She refuses to admit that she is dead, a ghost clinging to life in the only way she can. Even as she's here, rotting, she still keeps looking at me with wide eyes begging to stay. She's made of bad habits and trapped in her own skin, but she refuses to let me be comfortable in my skin now. Always lurking under the surface. I see her every time someone calls me by the wrong name, every time someone calls me the wrong pronoun, every time I work up the courage to shower. Even with short hair and HRT and an unholy amount of therapy, she still has her claws around me. Shredding me until there is nothing left.

She'll destroy us both.

And yet even as I loathe her, I know I cannot kill her. Everyone around me keeps talking about her, keeps bringing her back to life. They do not understand that she is dead and she is meant to stay that way. This half-life she is living is not a life at all. She needs to die. Death is a mercy for her.

She, though, doesn't seem to understand that. For all her self-destruction, all her torment and shame, she still cannot let herself die. She clings so desperately to this sad mimicry of life, because it is all she knows. She has forgotten the summer fields of youth. All she knows is this, trapped eternally on the line between childhood and adulthood, frozen between innocence and freedom, where innocence gives way to despair and yet you are still trapped. She dwells forever in this hellish period because she is terrified of adulthood, terrified of progress. And even more so, she is terrified of youth. Because she knows that youth is not the blessing she pretends it is.

Don't leave me.

These are the only words she knows, deeply rooted in her fear of abandonment. She craves attention, craves companionship, because without it, she is forced to look inward and face the darkness she's been hiding from.

I look down at her and exhale hatred. Fill myself with the apathy that has become my only defense against her.

I am going to leave you, because you kinda suck. This time it's my words, not hers.

It's not the poetic response she expects. She wanted me to regale her with poetic descriptions of her faults, because insults are all she knows. She is comfortable with creative ways of articulating her shame. I revel in her indignation.

I could tell her that she's dragging me down, that she's killing me, that she deserves to die.

But she's heard that before. The words slide off, deflected by their impotency. They are just words. Words that have been chanted over and over by a myriad mirage of faces until they begin to blur together into a single formless mass of apathy.

Don't leave me.

I'm going to. I am going to, and you can't stop me, because you no longer exist.

She looks down at herself. Back up at me. She points.

I am not you. We are not the same. What you are feeling is real, and it doesn't go away. I'm not gonna bullshit you and tell you it gets better. The world still sucks. But we can suck a little bit less.

Don't leave me.

She leads the conversation in circles. Talking will get us nowhere when the conversation is one-sided. She will only say that one phrase: don't leave me. No matter what I say, her answer will always be the same. I can change. She cannot. She is frozen in the worst years of her life. I am moving on to better ones. She is a girl, a child trapped in expectations of who she is supposed to be. I am a man, broken free of those expectations.

I've tried reasoning with her. I've tried every compromise. But I will no longer keep selling myself to keep her happy. That is not my job. Her job is to figure it out on her own. And I know that sentencing her to loneliness is sentencing her to death. They are synonyms in her brain. She is so terrified of being alone that she will trap herself in the wrong body forever just to keep everyone happy. Everyone except herself.

Her tears have begun to take on the consistency of oil, thick and black as they stain her face. Her last desperate defense is her shame, her feigned remorse. This is her idea of an apology: a guilt trip. Maybe if she "apologizes" she can get what she wants.

I will not give her what she wants.

Because she wants me. She wants to kill me just like I want to kill her. She wants to mold me until I am just like her. She wants everyone to feel just as trapped as she does. She'll destroy the world to feel less alone. Would revel in the fire that matches her burning innards.

Don't leave me.

And that fucking phrase that she throws around so desperately. She cannot be alone. She would trap herself in an ugly friendship over and over just because of that fear. Eventually she will learn. She will look back and see with new eyes every flaw.

But this version of her will not learn. She will not grow. She is a parasite that exists in stasis. Eating away at me but never growing. She does not care about growth. She just wants everyone else to shrink alongside her.

She is rising, her hands along my arms now. Soon she will be at my throat. My mouth. My eyes. Keeping me silent. Keeping me scared. Suffocating me until I look just like her. Bones and crusted skin and long dirty hair and thick black tears and scabbed skin.

I will not be her.

Don't leave me.

Shut up.

I am angry now. The only piece of her left that I haven't destroyed. The link that ties us together. We are both sick with it, the anger that has plagued our family for generations. She is my internalized anger, compacted and converted into shame and bitterness. The anger that now I have tried so hard to shut down, until it comes out, explosive and unwarranted.

I have to let it go.

She smiles at my outburst. She can see herself reflected in me, will not stop until we are one and the same. Still, don't leave me, she says. That ever-present fear of abandonment that haunts her every action. Her every movement. her every thought.

I hate her. I hate the shreds of herself that she has left in me. I hate the sound of her voice. I hate her dirty hair. I hate her bleeding wrists. I hate her ugly tears, her constant, droning sobbing. I hate her, because she is a her and I am not. No matter what I do she will always be here. The her that I used to be. That I will always be.

Unless I grow a pair and kill her.

It's more than a want, it's a need. If I let her, she'll destroy us both, leaving only ashes behind. And maybe that would be better: to let her end it.

Don't leave me.

In death I cannot leave her. We'll be trapped together forever. If I leave myself, I will not leave her. If I stay with myself, I will not leave her. I need a middle ground. Somewhere far beyond me and her is what I need to be. The self that she is holding me back from. In clinging to me she is holding us both back.

You're already fucking dead. I'm not leaving you. But you need to leave me. Leave me the fuck alone.

Fight fire with fire. It is the only language she understands. She cannot understand my filtered empathy because she knows it only in its purest, most destructive form. But my anger she can understand. She's been dealing with it her whole life.

Don't leave me.

I peel her off of me like a band-aid. She leaves red marks behind, just like real band-aids do. I'm allergic to adhesive. And I'm allergic to her. She is a rash, a scar, an itch, a scab that must be picked out and washed down the drain of the shower.

I hold her under the mist and watch her drown in the fog. The fog that she created, the haze that protects her from her memories, will now be the thing that destroys her. She is one of them now. A memory. Meant to be forgotten to the murky pool of the past.

She chokes and gasps, snow-white fog pooling in her mouth like foam coating her lips after an overdose. Air is alien to her. Red and purple with rage and breathlessness. She knows what she's made me feel. All the helplessness, the panic. She is feeling it now in my stead.

Her claws can no longer reach me. they have lost their energy. Her mania is fading, to be replaced by the cold depression that we both know so well.

Her tears are no longer black. They are clear, clean, washing away the dark stain of her malice. Something resembling hope.

I am not sorry. She does not deserve or want my pity.

For the first time, she sees me, not as a distorted reflection of her, but as my own person. Not a tumor that grows from her skull but an entire separate organism, birthed from her suffering.

I am real. I am the man she never knew she wanted to be.

And I'm leaving her behind, letting her body decompose in the great swamp that makes up my childhood. Rotting alongside all the other things I need to forget. To unlearn. To rediscover and redefine.

She is gone. Now it's just me: he.