Organs

When we think about organs, we think about the squishy stuff inside, but the skin is an organ too. Organs are the stuffing and the plush of the teddy bear; the inside and the outside. Heart is a muscle, but it´s an organ too. Such is often the nature of things: both, not either or. The heart is very important – together with the lungs it works as a power-couple without which we die within minutes. My father is apparently dying. He has had heart issues for a long time, and when I was a child and in my teens they´d usually pop up when I was acting queer or saying some kind of a truth that disrupted the family´s respectful facade. But ever since my brother drank himself underground, dad hasn´t quite been his old self. I can tell he´s struggling to follow a conversation when I talk to him on the phone. It´s a wild, uncanny feeling to observe someone who used to define my world crumble to dust like that. My mother doesn´t seem too bothered. When my brother died, she was excited about having neighbors come for coffee and pay condolences.

My brother´s organs were fucked up from years of alcohol abuse, and on the Finnish Independence day three years ago they just went and called it quits. I haven´t cried about his death once. I did have a dream afterwards where I was running on an empty field with a rifle in my arms and barracks in a distance, and a colossal monster was flailing threateningly on the other side of a barbed wire fence; horrible to look at, but unable to hurt me. I wonder how I´ll feel when my father passes. I wonder what kinds of dreams I´ll dream. Despite everything, I can still connect with the childlike spark of affection and admiration I used to feel towards him. His praise meant a lot to me. I wanted to become like the good parts of him. That was one of the reasons I went to Uni and dreamt of an academic career. If I will ever graduate with a PhD, I wonder if I should ask for his sword of a doctor and have my graduation date carved onto the blade next to his. Perhaps I should not see myself as his heir in this pursuit, and get a fresh sword instead. I see too many similarities with him anyway every time I look in the mirror or open my mouth. We have the exact same skin and hair, and the same asinine autistic determination. Could a generational curse be broken by accepting that this is where my genetic material comes from, but it doesn´t have to mean I as a person am just a chip off the old block?

To this day I struggle to assign fault to him. He was always one of those people who would withdraw from conflict unless he was completely certain of victory. Is this why I´ve become such a soldier of misfortune with the habit of upsetting giants and trying to leash behemoths? He was never a man who´d depict masculinity in its culturally idealized form; he was a skinny book worm with pectus excavatum and a severe addiction to his work. It´s hard to point a finger at someone like that and go ”this man held power over me and abused it”, because mind-games and indoctrination don´t leave visible scarring; rather they twist the mind of the subject and make it so that they indeed do seem like the root of all evil. Ha, perhaps I am a bit of that as well; look at me chomping away at the hand of the man who pays for my fertility treatments. But you can´t expect to raise a child as if it were the devil and have it grow up to be a tender, thankful sweetheart. He planned the house and the garden in which I was raised to become so fractured, so twisted, that I´m more like a pack of hounds at this point than a full human person.

Dad sent me to a psychoanalyst in high school who was paid to make me straight and cis. I would not have started to date that psycho rapist if I hadn´t been so worn out by the conversion therapy and years of abuse at home that I figured I probably just couldn´t make decisions for myself, so I said yes to the first male who´d have me. I remember crying once to Dad about the thing that happened when I was even younger, the miscarriage, and how I was left much shorter that I would have been without the pregnancy hormones closing off my growth platelets way too early, and him saying that early pregnancies reduce the risk of breast cancer. A disconnect, that´s the right word to describe him with. He exists in a permanent state of toxic positivity, where something as horrid as teenage miscarriage is turned into a good thing, where sadistic rapists are asked to move in with their victims´ parents, because it´s not the rape itself that´s the problem, the problem is if the neighbors find out, if it affects daddy´s career.

I went to swim last night and came home from the pool white as a sheet and sweating bullets. My left foot was more swollen than on previous days, my bones were aching, and I was exhausted and panicking at the same time. I called a helpline ugly crying about how I can´t deal with losing my future to the crimes committed against me in my past once again. The helpline worker understood me and said that I´ve done all I can by going to psychotherapy, and this should prove the fertility clinic people that I am responsible for my health and my future. I managed to calm down. It does help to talk to someone who, unlike the trans clinic-affiliated sex therapists, knows that rape is a common crime that almost always goes unpunished, and contrary to common beliefs is not caused by the victim. I woke up feeling much more balanced and serene. The foot is still very sore: hairline fractures are not necessarily detectable by X-rays. I feel trapped if I can´t exercise, but exercise might make the issue worse. Perhaps, in a way, walking on the sore foot also gives me the feeling of mastery over my own pain. There is so much of it, from my past, in my present, and most likely loads and loads of it in my future as well, so focusing on the pain I feel in this moment helps me rise above all that, helps me spit in the face of the medical abuse I´ve been put through, the masses of white-coats who´ve claimed to help, but have only made things worse. I wish I were rich enough to hire a blackhat to erase my whole patient database. But instead I´m stuck with doctors who get their ideas about me from mistakes written down by their predecessors, some of whom made huge efforts to get things as wrong as possible, like the trans clinic goons for example. For a man like me, pain is a friend and a tutor, not the enemy. I think I´ll slip my sneakers on and go for a walk to gauge whether I can safely use the foot without damaging it further. I´ll treat myself to some music while I´m doing that. ”Our Will” by Velcra has helped me focus in the face of many a catastrophe:

”Misleadingly it may seem
That their opponent is weak and feeble
but underneath
We have the willpower of steel
The insight, the heart and
the stomach of a king”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjWfU6Rg-QE

PS: I had a dream in which I was wandering around a massive supermarket with a middle-aged man I didn´t know. He pointed at a stack of sci-fi books called ”The Fat Planet”, and asked me if I had read it. Confused, I said I didn´t think so; but something about the book still felt familiar. The cover art depicted a planet and a space station in orbit, with the planet´s surface pock-marked by craters and mountains and valleys making up the shape of a human skull. I found myself able to cite long stretches of the book, and the man said this was because I had written it myself, just forgotten. I cheered up: certainly publishing a whole-ass novel would be enough to be granted permission to have a child! But it wasn´t so; science fiction wasn´t considered serious literature, and towards the end of the dream I was spectating out of my body as I had to clumsily strip-tease for a living, my body fat and saggy and distorted and covered in stretch marks with no purpose; not as badges of honor for a completed gestation, just signs of bad habits and lack of willpower. Awful!

My subconscious has brought me pleasant visions and sensations as well, though. I experience vivid recalls about lovely moments from when my Nera was still alive. I can feel how her warm body and silky fur felt in my arms. Just before I wake up from sleep I can sense her stir up from her spot by my bedside and sit up and breathe onto my face. I can sense her warmth and weight as if she were curled up on my bed. She undeniably existed, she was undeniably mine and I hers. Perhaps her visitations occur to give me hope that I can have a child one day. I know that even if I get granted permission for inseminations, there´s no guarantee of a pregnancy. But that´s not the horrific part of it all. The horrific part is that the decades of misdiagnoses and medical abuse I was put through because I was abused and amnesic may prevent me from even being given the chance of becoming a parent. If I could only be given the chance, the right to try, I could then handle whatever end result there may be. So that´s what and where my focus must be.