I slouched around tonight reading Ian McDonald's Desolation Road. It makes more sense than it did the first time I read it, somehow. I'm more aware of, and receptive to, the deliberately mythic, the metaphoric, the multileveled. And at the end, one transformation after another, implicit and waiting in the characters from the start due to the Roles they played...
Book done, I got up to go get some more caffeine. And standing there, seeing myself nearly naked in the mirror, lit from behind, bounce-lit from the front by the same light reflecting off the same glass I saw myself looking back from, the curve of breast and waist and hip rim-lit on one side... I realized. Sometime in the past month, free of having to respond to the name I bore for so long, able to wear whatever the hell I like without worrying about it being inappropriate for work where I'm still a boy... I've changed. I used to be Paul but I'm just not any more. I still have to put that name on some stuff, the tickets for a flight home about week from now are in that name... but it's become 'a name I use for some stuff', the way Peggy used to be.
It feels good.
Maybe I can get on with my life now.
Book done, I got up to go get some more caffeine. And standing there, seeing myself nearly naked in the mirror, lit from behind, bounce-lit from the front by the same light reflecting off the same glass I saw myself looking back from, the curve of breast and waist and hip rim-lit on one side... I realized. Sometime in the past month, free of having to respond to the name I bore for so long, able to wear whatever the hell I like without worrying about it being inappropriate for work where I'm still a boy... I've changed. I used to be Paul but I'm just not any more. I still have to put that name on some stuff, the tickets for a flight home about week from now are in that name... but it's become 'a name I use for some stuff', the way Peggy used to be.
It feels good.
Maybe I can get on with my life now.