My body smoldered in the hazy light of the pit.
How had I...?
Where...?
Flashes sparked behind my eyes, too many to count, too many to reason out, a boundless loop of vignettes that seemed to come from separate lives but that I somehow knew were all mine.
Cheerleading routines in the front yard, an impromptu squad formed with a cousin and a friend.
The shimmer eye shadow that made my hazel irises shine, but that I'd later look back on with embarrassment. "It was 2003," I'd explain, all tinkling laughter.
More and more. All these scenes.
Standing in my mother's office, hard plastic shoulder pads on my narrow frame, feeling a desolation no nine-year-old could articulate. Looking at my father, who held a $20 bill in his hand and disappointment in his eyes. Pleading in a little boy voice, "Dad, I don't want to play..."
Being admitted onto the squad, all of sixteen, and thinking I'd made it. That with the bows in my hair and the skirt on my waist and the chest that had finally come in I was one of them now.
Twelve years old, in bed weeping, begging God to make me normal. "Why can't I like girls?"
Twelve years old, licking my cherry-watermelon lipstick and sharing a confidence with Britney in the locker room. "I think he's going to ask me to winter formal..."
Twenty-one years old, at a nightclub with straightened hair and a button-up shirt, out of the closet all of a month. Seeing my boyishness and softness as an asset for the first time, but not knowing how to use it.
Twenty-one years old, in a hot-pink tee with green Greek letters on my chest. My running shorts are neon blue and of course the first time he talks to me I'm a sweaty mess, just off a three-mile run and practically soaking through my sports bra, my ponytail in a bird's nest of a French braid. The way his warm brown eyes crinkle when I smile shyly. The way they lock on mine. His voice like a warm breeze: "I know this place off campus..."
I jolted fully awake with a shuddering gasp. "Where..." I wanted to call his name, but couldn't remember it. My ribs screamed as I rolled onto my side, and I moaned at the electric shock that radiated through my shoulder joint when I maneuvered my left arm to push myself into a sitting position on the abrasive ground.
"Where am I?"
My voice was hoarse, husky, but even so there was a lightness to it that seemed both foreign and right. I looked around. I was in the middle of some kind of crater, surrounded by glass and fire and bits of smoking sand, like I was a comet that had crashed to Earth. Sandstone pillars towered around me in a wide circle, an orange and red Stonehenge. I made to stand, and that's when I noticed: the me who'd fallen into this trance wasn't the me who was waking from it.
My hips were rounded and smooth, my thighs wider than before, my soft flat stomach tapering upward into a pair of full pink breasts. Every part of me was changed. When I stumbled to my feet, briefly teetering as I misjudged how the weight distribution would pull my frame, I stood several inches shorter than before. A lock of thick flaxen hair blew across my face in the hot breeze, revealing a texture so wavy it was almost curling. That, at least, was the same.
She was at my side before I knew it, her platinum hair and blue eyes shining from a face that looked as tired as I'd ever seen it. She was always so exhausted when we encountered one another. Her arms were strong, though.
"Let me help you, Starlight," Good said, putting her hand beneath my shoulder.
"Where are we?" I croaked. My voice was musical, bright. What an odd thing. It sounded exactly like the voice I'd always heard in my head, but never aloud.
"A place of truth," she answered. "Where material realities yield to spiritual ones."
"I don't understand."
"You will."
The dust-choked air cleared before us, revealing a pair of twin rock columns that framed a sere landscape beyond. Between them appeared an immensity of translucent liquid material, and then Good and I were standing in front of a mirror that must have stretched fifty feet high. She looked weary, careworn, concerned, but still pretty, and I looked...
"Like my mother," I whispered. My mother fairer, my mother younger, but still.
Good lifted a hand to my face and drew her finger softly down my cheek. "You've always looked like your mother"--A twelve-year-old boy, wrapping brown construction paper around the bright pink cover of a paperback book, so no one would know he was reading The Princess Diaries--"But yes, now it's more pronounced."
I twirled before the reflection, surveying the lean curves enveloping my still-tall body.
"I have a fat ass," I noted, with something like joy.
Good laughed, and in the distance I could hear the most glorious wind chimes. "Your ass is perfectly fine."
The vignettes were still playing, but now they were in full color, parading across the diaphanous screen of light arrayed before us.
A thirteen-year-old boy, dreaming about princesses and devouring The Royal Diaries series. His father standing in the kitchen doorway, disgust etched on every feature of his face. "Why do you even care about that shit?"
An eleven-year-old boy, finding his friends in the heroes of Animorphs. His favorite character is Rachel, who's both beautiful and strong. In his superhero fantasies, he's just like her.
A tall girl, awkward in a blue bikini, careening out over the lake but refusing to let go of the rope swing.
"You're a chicken!" yells a voice from the shore.
She turns back angrily. "I'm not a chicken! You don't know that there aren't rocks!"
A five-year-old boy, sitting in his grandmother's basement, appealing and needling as the crease between her blue eyes grows deeper.
"BB, I can't," she tries to explain. "Your father will be angry..."
"Please, just one finger," the boy begs.
The woman's resolve weakens and she pulls out the brush. "Okay, but just one."
The blonde girl, older now, scanning an immense parking lot for an opening in the sea of occupied spaces. Looking in her rear-view mirror at the passengers, whose t-shirts and makeup match her own. "Listen, you drunk bitches!" But then her resolve weakens too and the three of them dissolve into cackling laughter.
Another boy, the one from before. The one with the brown eyes. His smile so big. The little house in Alexandria. My swelling stomach. A date marked on a calendar--
"No!" I shrieked, recoiling from the scene. I turned on Good with accusing tears in my sparkling hazel eyes. "Why would you show me that? Show me what I can't..."
I didn't need the projector now, because the movie was rolling in my head unbidden.
Nine-year-old BB, a shirt over his head, an earring dangling from his ear, bitterness in his heart, staring into the looking glass over the beaten-up bureau and thinking that he would have been pretty, if only. Eighteen-year-old BB, hearing the soft laughter of the girl from the bunk bed below, in the arms of his freshman-year roommate, and feeling in that laughter a longing deeper and sadder than he can begin to fathom.
"Bright One," Good pulled me into an embrace as thirty years of loss formed a weight that drove me to my knees. "You've always known."
Always, always, always. So backwards. So perverse. Obscene. Everything out of joint. Nothing as it should be. The girl, Morning Star, unborn. Or born wrong. In a prison.
Fifteen-year-old BB, sitting in English class in the fall of 2003.
"It's like when you have the brain of one gender but stuck in the body of another," a guffawing tenth-grader informs his neighbors.
A second boy shakes his head in a surprise display of empathy. "Man. That has to be awful."
And then the sudden voice, stark with sadness and conviction, that answers in BB's head: "IT IS."
He says nothing, and throws the thought away as he turns back to his assignment.
I doubled over on the ground, crying so hard I could barely breathe. Good put a hand on my shoulder and wept softly into my golden hair.
"Does he know?" I asked, thinking of the young man with the brown eyes. The little house. How he looked at me in those ridiculous running shorts. "Does he know I'm not there? Somehow?"
She knelt to the desert floor and wrapped me in her arms, and then we held each other as we both sobbed. My grief was all for myself. Hers was for me--and for the infinite pain she tried so hard to lighten in her circuits of the world. We sat there a long time, two shuddering women, and when the tears finally stopped I felt hollowed out. Like I'd never cry again. Or like I'd never stop crying. Like I'd just released the first volley in an endless torrent of grief.
For a while the only sound was wind coursing through dust. When we took our feet again I found myself wrapped in a soft white robe that she secured around me with delicate fingers. I remembered, and breathed, and prayed, and let my voice ring out over the sandstone, and cried again, and thought about how beautiful the ochre sun was as it dipped toward the desert horizon. She stood next to me the whole time but said nothing. Did nothing. Just let me be. Just let me feel it.
When the closing of the day turned the dunes pink and the skies violet, I turned to her again.
"Why did this happen to me?" I asked.
She sighed and looked up into the heavens, toward the God who'd made her, too, as much as He'd made me.
"I don't know," she said, her blue eyes painted pomegranate and aquamarine in the dawning stars of the night. "But I know you were made to bear pain, and to rebound from it. As you've already done, over and over. From the first time I met you. You were born for resilience. Born to overcome, and then to carry that strength. Born to break the night and herald the day."
She smiled.
"Like the Morning Star."
I considered all of the impossible considerations.
"Can I?" I asked. "Overcome?"
She surveyed the constellations that were fanning their sparkling raiment out over the vast expanse of the moonless black desert.
"I think so," she answered.
