Dad?
Yes?
Do you like this hotel?
Yes, I do. I love it. Don’t you?
I guess so.
Good. I want you to like it here. I wish we could stay here forever… and ever… and ever.
— The Shining (1980)

Jack Torrance: [staring at the drink in his hand] Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm it has caused me.
— also The Shining (1980)

Watch as the eye inside the camera, twitching and fresh from that hollow place that appears on a stripped clean skull, pans over the scene. It is a beautiful one, despite itself: green everywhere with high, tree-covered hills sloping across the horizon, moseying further and further away. It is not an untouched place, of course, nowhere is anymore, but the fingerprints are not so deep set, not so close to the surface, as they are in other places where people find themselves, perhaps surprisingly, alive.

Who knows how much time has passed when the eye finally rests upon the dilapidated house. The tick of the watch and the flipping numbers have disappeared, and one is left only with the constant buzz of the cicadas, the odd hunting dog’s bark, a faraway but very bad domestic dispute, the train whistle, that thick wall of impenetrable silence.

The more the eye stills, not twitching quite so much now, the worse the collective dread of the audience grows. If not a jumpscare, then something else, something harder to shake. What once felt like a calming picturesque glimpse into provincial living mutates. There is something in the house, yes. There is something in the woods, yes. There is something in the barn, the red half-finished tree house, the dirt. There is something behind you, yes, getting closer and closer. It watches you with eyes that reflect a dim flashlight, for there are no floodlights here, the darkness of evening like a cloak, and the porch lights are burned out, and you do not dare light a candle here, at night, outside no less, lest you call something worse than the thing that watches you from the wooden fence line, smiling now, for your fear is a beacon.

What is worse: to walk into the woods or to go back into the house? You are merely one inhabitant of either.

In the distance, though not the far distance, something starts to scream.

And so you go —

Horror movies, like many genres of entertainment, are deliciously, or not so deliciously, depending on where one sits, populated by tropes. Playing into them, subverting them, reinventing them. Of the myriad of horror movie tropes, the ones that call to me most are that of the alcoholic parent or parental figure and, separately or intertwined, the haunted house. Perhaps you can guess why. The Shining and Nightmare on Elm Street. Hellraiser and The Craft. The Conjuring and The Evil Dead. Poltergeist and my own life, playing before you, again and again. Oh could I be rid of these memories. Oh could I say it was all a creation, an artistic endeavor. Oh could I wake one morning and stroke my own cheek, comforting, for it was only a nightmare. Only a dream.

Say one thing for the haunted house generally, say that despite it wanting to claim life for its own, say it also instilled a temporary drive opposite to that of the death drive inside of me.

What Freud posited, roughly: the death drive is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.

Me, the weary, so close to the dead always, so untethered to this life that I am. Me, the obsessive-compulsive.

This new haunted house feeling made me say: I will not die here, constantly. I will not die here.

I will not.

Here is the wide, golden wheated field, surrounded by trees. There are the white clouds. There is the dark sky. There is the moon in its changing phases — though never the same phases as when your eyes are open. Sometimes a woman comes, though never the same woman, to tell you truths. Her voice is terrifying in its beauty, a one hundred-sided kaleidoscope. Like God’s voice, in another kind of dream. But in this dream, the kind you do not understand (you will say it again: a child lost in the woods is a teacherless child. You will, in the future — see it, see it glisten like dew on the backs of your eyelids? — meet a teacher. But you will already be a man grown. Man? Oh, you can only wish. But you will be, and the most painful lesson to learn are those you should have learned when you are just this tiny, speck of an age —) and in this dream she asks are you scared and you say yes and she says simply, but not cruelly: you should be.

Because this is a special dream, a recurring one, you will be asked this question many times.

For many years, your answer is yes. And then one day, or many days, you can never tell, your answer is no. And it’s true. Over the years of your life when you are awake — who is to say it is your Real Life, a terrifying question, and it will take years of your life to train your mind to even recognize the question being asked — over the years of your life you have lost some of that fear, it has been bleed out of you, painfully. Repeatedly. Though there is always some left, so bottomless is the well of your fright.

Yet repetition, they say, is the best teacher. So, too, is fear. Live with enough of it and some spirits will greet you as an old friend. Be careful with your blood, though. Do not give that away so freely.

For there are other worse spirits that exist. Yes there, behind you in the mirror. Yes there, under your bed. Yes there, yes there.

For a long time, I knew not how to quiet my head. The backs of my eyes constantly ached. Not even sleep was a reprieve.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to dull the noise. Horror movies can teach you that. One can write the same sentence ad infinitum, engage in premarital sex, practice increasingly high-stakes sadomasochism, let their toxic friend group slip into badly planned out witchcraft, read from a terrible old book and be terrified in the wilderness, hire a couple of charlatans to exorcise them or their loved ones, get strangled by a terrifying clown doll, die. One can do many things, with the proper motivation.

Because this is a movie, because this could never happen, because I am vulnerable here, laying on my side, my dark hair blending in with the night, I am going to tell you a few things, but remember that everything that happens from now on is just a dream. Just a dream.

This level of self-pity is nauseating. To medicate it, among other things, in another life of course, I used to chug two cheap bottles of wine a night. If not wine, then something else. Only then would the ruminating quiet, the terrible looping thoughts silence, the guilt over the bone deep sadness that locked me into patterns of laziness previously unknown and shocking to me taper down to a simple mutter. Even my dreams were slurred, inchoate. The ghosts inside of them looked sadly on from the periphery. Awake, I would run my slowed tongue over the long, jagged seam on the inside of my cheek, still scarred from the time as a child I was so agonized by my own thoughts and visions I bit into my cheek hard enough it bled copper and salt down my throat for hours. Earlier that summer, I had gotten in trouble for beating my own head hard with a curled up first, nearly possessed with the need to make it stop, make the horrible images end, and perhaps, in that the dreams, too, but what did the ghosts say to me if not that death was one everlasting slumber and if I was not fortune’s fool perhaps I would know it before everyone I ever loved died before me. A nightmare, to be frank.

That bliss, that cottony envelopment of the mind, I could live in it forever, anything was worth it. my sanity, my liver, my — I wished I could fit it over my skull like a saddle. I’m begging for it, tongue out, put me out of my misery, please. Please. The only thing would release my dignity for, even fucking. Isn’t that embarrassing?

The horrific truth: there was no vice I could have chosen that my father had not sullied. And I who actually needed it was left with a beggar’s choice indeed.

Hush, hand over your mouth, over my mouth. My teeth sinking into your/my palm, tearing. I ought to be shot, wild fucking animal, can’t be trusted.

Pain brings us closer to that endless cycle and it’s never gonna end, bub.

Okay, I’m sorry about that, sometimes it gets the best of me, you know.

A short moment of optimism: Am I really that bad? I ask the camera. Don’t the majority of less than stellar qualities eventually come out in the wash? The shot pans over to a long line of people I have disappointed. They answer in a montage sequence, easily, answers slipping off their collective tongue, listing some of my finer attributes: depressed asshole, unsatisyfying performer, self-hating shithead, owner of severe commitment aversion and mommy AND daddy issues, brooder, sad fuck, clings to an image of a tortured artist-genius but does not produce genius nor art, the refusal of enjoyment, sloppy workaholic unless on the precipice of self-harm, the weird quiet coiled way you experience an orgasm like you’re too good for what is happening to you, like seriously what is that even about, the need to medicate out any emotion that makes you feel like you’ll lose that cool-calm-collected exterior, angry, mean, not very comforting, sucks at communication, rough speech, and don’t get me started on the suicide jokes that no one thinks are funny because everyone knows you always mean it a little bit and how you tell everyone he was a horrible father to make yourself feel better but really you know, and we know, that you are worse than he could ever have been because you know better, you half-rate storyteller, sitting there while we pour our emotions out and you think of nothing but a cold fall day on a hillside above a river full of water and memory and your favorite fish which you never even told us the name of and a silver, glinting flask full of bourbon and being anywhere else but here. Etc, etc.

Semi-redeeming qualities:

For those horrible long hours I am sober I consider things — this is perhaps making me worse, though one could ask given the lines above if there is any worse place to go. An echo of words said in a thousand different ways: there is no help for you. If I could make you better I would. You choose this. You choose it.

But how else to survive the pain?

Nevermind. Let’s go back to the movie.

Plenty of movies have haunted houses — and there are plenty of houses, outside that silver stream of film, that are haunted, but not like this one, for sometimes you step into a haunting, and sometimes you are born into it. The night I woke up on my hands and knees in the field, my feet terribly cold, in only my nightshirt and underwear. The night I sat on the kitchen tile, the coolest place in the house, and thought of air conditioning, my fear running sloshy and hot through my body in something like nausea. The night I was halfway to the woods, only a lighter in my hand to guide the way, before I shook myself out of it.

The night I tossed the shocking abalone shell and bone that I had found in the primitive front garden bed over the fence, only to find them rearranged in a row on the concrete porch, waiting for me, the next morning.

Perhaps you think me pathetic for leaving, for all of it. Perhaps you think you could have done better. Perhaps you could have. Perhaps.

But then again, I know better. For you are most likely thinking nothing so hateful. You are always kinder to me than I deserve.

I could show you what I see. I could open up a little more. I could practice vulnerability. I could let you in. For you know and I know that I am simply telling a story. That this narrative has been constructed. That I always hold something larger and more valuable back for myself. I learned early that many people do not take kindly to visions. To people who see them. Even if they say they do. Even if they promise.

It may not look like it, kiddo, but I’ve done a lot of work these long years — to get better. To be better. And yet.

Those might be tears, acrid, hot, carving a bloody path down my face and neck. Or perhaps not. Perhaps.

A brief moment of respite: Of all the visitors, welcome and unwelcome, the cowboy who visited my dreams was my favorite. I could tell he was bashful about the whole thing, stumbling into a lady’s private affairs, but I didn’t mind. Oklahoma is cattle country, to be sure, but not on the far east side of the state, the tree filled side. Places too flat make me nervous, while places with hills I am endeared to, even after all this time. How’d you find yourself here, friend? I wondered once.

He had been headed to Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town along the river, now a city. My mother had been born there, albeit in a different century.

Is this all yours? he asked, looking both at the house and the land around us.

None of it, I said. I think I would panic if it was.

Oh you’re one of those types, he said, smiling, smiling.

Themes emerge for a reason, we’d like to think. But why the alcoholic parent, then, in the horror movie? Why the haunted house? Aside from the obvious, that is.

Well because we always want something to blame for our troubles. We want to know that we stumbled upon this parent, that we stumbled upon this house, we didn’t choose it. There is nothing we can control, though there is something to survive. It is the most universal of feelings: to fear your father, to want to sleep with the closet door closed. We are simply victims of circumstance. It could have been any father. It could have been any hovel, or mansion, or regular suburban prototype. It could have been any life. We want a final someone at the end. We want to survive. Traumatized, yes, but alive, alive. We want to think that there are outside forces at play, that we did not do anything to deserve what is infesting us. Addiction, ghosts. Would you think me savage to say that sometimes they are one in the same?

Ah, enough of that. That is one trope I don’t have in me today.

A catalog of visions, if you’d like, from that space in-between: The ghost who pet my hair, the ghost who touched my mouth, the ghost who whispered in the night, the ghost that walked the hall, the ghost that wailed, the ghost of the terrible man, the ghost that sat on the couch, the ghost at my desk, the ghosts of the porch, the ghost children who called me brother, the ghost children who called me sister, the ghost children who called me by an older, darker name that made me flinch, the ghost of the panther, the ghost of the woman who thought I was my father (another flinch), the ghost of the hornet’s nest, the other ghost who thought I was my father, the ghost of an old uncle, the ghost of — ghosts are easy to dispel. If you are unpracticed, unsighted, you may simply say: Leave me in peace. But you cannot whisper. And you cannot stumble. What does it tell you in all my practice, all my relative sightedness, there were things in that house which were not ghosts and which would not leave and which —

I have had two major OCD relapses in my life — once, in college, and once, in grad school. I choose not to believe in the pattern, however loose, this establishes. Before I decided to live in my dead father’s haunted house for an entire year (I made it less than nine months, though to my credit I could have given birth to some hideous hairy creature in that time), I thought I would go to the PhD program I had chosen that spring because out of my options they gave me the most money. My brain thrums in, then sinks, into reading. A compulsion in itself. But I did not go. Instead I stayed in the house where my father died. For months, I dreamt of cutting my hand with a grain liquor glass shard and going into my father’s yard (was it a yard? Or a field, a forest) and doing rituals, dark and something like what my father was doing (amateurish) that last time we were at that house for my grandfather was there the next morning with his trailer and his wiry mustache and his calling me baby doll and Little Victoria.

Could he have seen me now, his only dark-eyed grandchild, one of his favorites. Able to do a ritual better than my father (dead, dead) could ever hope to. My grandmother said he was never worried about me one day making money, for out of my entire family, the only family I knew, I was the only one he knew would make it out. But, she said, he said, I want █████ (he never called me █████, not once) to find someone who loves her like she deserves. I laughed. I am worried you will stay alone, she said, and I laughed again, though not harshly. What a poor creature, I thought, to have done something so awful as to deserve me.

Of course I feast on patterns, for in many ways my art is an ouroboros, she is my tiny bit of romance, my long lived partnership. But we have gnarled children, grief-stricken ones, my love and I, and this life is so long. (Do not think for a moment of another love, her eyes crinkling in laughter, her kindness). Sit with me then, a safe distance away. Let us imagine the haunted house going up in flame and smoke. The barn, too. The way it should be.

While we watch the ever growing embers, let us talk about kinder things. I will let you trace the scar on my hand from the tumble I took on my bike on the dirt road to my great Aunt Viola’s house. I will tell you of the fish and the river and the trees and why I am named for such a season as this, if you’d like. As a child I would nap in the field, my back to the wind, like a herding dog might. I was odd and somber. Still am, but oh how I love to laugh. If you do not mind, maybe I’ll nap like that now, in the dirt and the grass, in one of my grandfather’s Wrangler shirts. God knows I always need the sleep, despite having passed the worst of my insomnia in the early days. Best to store up when you can. You never know when, though you know it will, because it always does, get bad again.

That infinitely tricky space — a memory, a dream, a dream of a memory, a memory of a dream. Watch as my child’s mind casts forward, into the ether, untethered. No one to stay my hand. No one to teach me.

I see it there in the distance, my own death. A version of it, at least. So tricky are these things, so easily manipulated.

But wait — when I wake, slowly, it is a peaceful waking. I have dreamt of nothing but a memory, one that I had forgotten until just now. I am eight or nine. My father and I walk from the house in the woods, slip through the fence, and walk a mile across someone else’s land to a pond. We fish for awhile, though I don’t remember what we talk about. If we ever talked. We walk back slowly, having only caught and released. I am tall, but my pole is taller, and I am tanned deeply from the summer sun. I do not like the house, of course I don’t, it is dark and sickly seeming once the door is cracked open, but we don’t go inside. Instead he brushes down my arms and legs with his carpenter’s hands to make sure no ticks are there, and then we sit in rickety camping chairs and wait for my mother to come and take me home to our little trailer with my Calvin and Hobbes comics, and blue mushroom chair from Walmart, and short walk to the creek from our yard. He names the trees lining the rocky path up to the house, and tells me of a great panther that stalks the woods that I enjoy walking through on the very rare occasion he is not too drunk or high or crazy for me to visit. I like stepping over the occasional green snake, meeting the odd new friend who inhabits the rocks and the brush, and listening to the voices that filter down from the wind, though I tell no one of this. Not even him, who I realize too late might understand, if only minutely. A fraction. Not enough to make a difference, but comforting still, I suppose, in its way.

My eyes have surely widened during this story, but this big man just laughs.

Don’t be afraid, maple leaf, he says, smiling, kind, even. Don’t be afraid.

The sun is slowly fading away, a cowpoke’s lope. The chair underneath me is tattered and falling apart — stripped by wind and rain and beams of light. My father is beside me, but for only a moment, and for one of the last times. No wonder that he echoes after his death, becoming more than he was in life. A painful reminder. He did not protect me. He could never protect me. He would not protect me, maybe even if I asked. Though I would never debase myself to ask. Remember, maple leaf, that you are alone in this.

Yet what threads itself around my ankles, then? What walks itself up my shoulder to whisper in my ear? What calls to me from the darkness? What snaps a twig in the night? What reaches for my throat with a strange howl? What grabs my hand from the dirt?

I’m not afraid, I say, of it. Or of you. And to two people such as ourselves, that sentence is almost a caress. A declaration of love. Soft meaty bits on display and all.

Well, it hardly matters, anyway. The rest is lost to time, to the dead, and I ain’t dead yet. Pity, that our runtime is almost over. Here, now, I want you to remember that you always have a choice, no matter what happens next. Remember that for me, won’t you?

That’s good, thank you.

Alright then, partner. So what’ll it be?

The house? Or the woods?

Wikipedia says: Fat fetish or adipophilia is a sexual attraction directed towards overweight or obese people due primarily to their weight and size.

The voice in a recurring dream says: So rough with yourself, ██████. Not everything grows back, you know. One day, someone is going to eat your heart.

I look at my body in the mirror. Fat, yes. But desire is a crooked hook down my throat I cannot articulate. What do I desire? A shadow. What do people desire about me?

Let’s find out.

***

I have always been fat. My father was fat, too. Now perhaps a rotted husk in a coffin in a place I cannot bear to remember. When I go there my body starts to fracture — an aching head, a pain in the ankle. Though no weight lost. My mother’s family is thin and bird-boned. I am a big person in a big body with big bones. Were the fat to slough off of me, miraculously, I would still be left with a large pile.

On my “dating” profiles, the first line about myself is always: fat.

Other words: indigenous, friend to all cats, trying to escape samsara.

The fat, it is surely visible, but I feel that I photograph well (by my own hand) and terribly by others. Angle differently, I want to say, but never do.

My life is punctuated with millions of silences and thousands of words, written to you. Always you.

***

I am going to tell you a story about my body. And about desire. And perhaps about love, if you can stomach it. I have changed this story in order to survive it, but not by much. I am heartless and horrible and a soft touch, in the end.

So this is how it goes: They meet in a casino ballroom.

Forgive me. I cannot go on.

***

Here is another story: I downloaded the fat fetish app because I am willing to experience a great many things if I can one day write about them.

The things I am willing to experience: pain, lack of pleasure, weak orgasms, boredom, icy nerves, pain, headaches, stomachaches, a very minor sense of embarrassment, pain.

When I was a child, I was not allowed to cry. As an adult, faced with my own tears, I am an anthropologist on a distant planet. Subject exhibits melancholic traits. Subject relies on archaic and primal modes of sense, such as dreams. Subject cannot, it seems, forget anything.

***

Another dream, another memory: there are three bottles on the forest floor. My teacher has taken me to the river and whipped my fat body with reeds to cleanse me of my attachments to the earthly realm, my deep sadness, my bad attitude, my —

Now drink, my teacher says, in a language older than English, older, even, than Cherokee.

They are not small bottles. To consume them all in one go would be torture. And I know, without either of us verbalizing it, that these bottles, what is inside of them, will take me somewhere else. A test, a punishment, a reward, a balm. I am terrified.

And so I drink.

***

The split between fat people I have “dated” and thin people I have “dated” is about half, leaning perhaps towards “average.”

I have never thought much about this, in context of their bodies. My body is the only one that matters. For isn’t it strange to “date” someone who knows nothing about your size? The stares? The nervousness? The odd feeling of undressing and mental math.

Furthermore, isn’t it doubly strange to “date” someone who may have experienced the same things you have, but perhaps worse? For it really wasn’t so bad for you. And now leaving the house together makes you embarrassed. For what would you do if someone looked at the pair of you in disgust, in faked nausea?

It is so much easier to hide when you are alone.

***

As an adolescent, I was so self-conscious it was physically painful. My body was a torture mechanism I could never part from. I was strapped into this ride whether I wanted to take it or not.

And I did not, in fact, want it. To seize the day, to embody something, to move or be physical. The thing I wanted most badly was a new body, a new mind, a new personality, a new life.

Years later, a free therapist I saw for two sessions said: Ah, so you just constantly wished you were dead?

***

The app states it is: “…a social network and community for feeders, feedees, fat admirers and BBW/BHM. We’re a quirky bunch of men and women who love words like curvy, thick, plump, bellied, chubby, fat, obese, super-size and so much more!”

One of the first messages I get says: “ur not even fat.”

Are you sure about that? I type back. And would you be willing to write me a testimonial?

***

The interface itself feels from another time, one of message boards and forums. I have done my research on Reddit, mostly. About fat admiration, fat fetish, feedism, and the like. When friends who know I am writing on the subject ask me to delineate the differences, however, I stumble and correct whatever I have just said. I found the app on one of these threads. You are brave to show your face, someone says.

Am I? I ask. One must wade through the water, you know.

***

Fat admirer, in my own words: someone who likes fat people. Who wants to fuck them. Who thinks they are hot. Fat admirers could, in a derogatory light, be called chubby chasers. Fat admirers are not always good people and do not always treat fat people as human. What did you expect?

Feedism, not vetted: to gain pleasure by either causing someone to gain weight or by gaining weight. One can be a feeder or a feedee. One can be a mutual gainer, too, i.e. let us get fat together.

Fat fetish (my version): worse than fat admiration. Fat is a vessel for a fat fetishist’s sexual pleasure, less so for the fat person’s sexual pleasure. More in line with the term “chubby chaser” than with anything else.

I say: I love fat people, but I don’t have a fetish. Maybe I’m just a prude, though.

In another world, perhaps.

***

Don’t kink shame, someone says, laughing.

I’m not kink shaming, I say. I’m just a bitch.

I, too, am laughing.

***

I cannot turn off my writerly (ha) eye, nor my obsessive need to document. As I scroll through the app, I observe the number of skinny bodies vs. fat bodies. There are bellies and tits and stomachs and stretch marks. There are plates of food and beautiful landscapes and pictures in the club.

Even as someone who works hard to see all people as people, I am surprised. While I did not expect a den of iniquity, I certainly did not expect this — beggars for attention, intra-community drama, generous commentary, horny posting, and hilarious usernames.

I say: While I am not interested in intentional weight gain, I am also not interested in intentional weight loss.

Why are you even here? someone asks.

I too enjoyed siddartha, one says.

Hey pretty, how’s a beautiful queen like you doing ? x, I receive.

I just love you’re bio so much. Instant follow bcse you re a gorgeous sweet lady , I have my intuition keeps telling me that you re the kindest person on the planet . A man from Paris sends.

Another says: Are you watching the Olympics?

***

A few running jokes between my friends and I: I want to be spoiled but when someone is too nice to me I withdraw. I have the world’s most classic case of anxious-avoidant attachment disorder. The dad may die but the daddy issues will never perish.

I get disinterested in potential “partners” easily, it is true. In the right mood, when someone messages me, I will reply back a few times, less if they bore me. I am a voyeur peeking behind the curtain, but occasionally, I let out a yawn.

***

Apologies, I never answered the question: Why am I here?

To see what it is like to be in a community, a platform, with people who prefer those of my size or bigger. To shield myself from criticism, at least about my looks. To feel above something — baser urges. To indulge and to judge. To remove myself from such judgment by exposure. To be minorly admired, but not too much. Because I am curious. Because I am a dumbass. Because I am, above all, a mind and a spirit trapped inside a vessel.

Yes, the cage shakes, but what can you do?

If you are a child born in a largely rural state, in one of the most rural parts of that state, feeling as if your destiny is somewhere far, far away, but there is certainly a lot of time to pass between you meeting your destiny and having been borned, and truly, the only thing you want to do to pass that time is read your books and be left alone with a cat, preferably domesticated, but if she is not domesticated then through your devotion and love you may domesticate her, you will most likely know Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Hell, even if none of the above applies to you, you certainly know the Little House on the Prairie. Everyone does. This is America. This is Americana.

But if you don’t know, I’ll tell you. The Little House on the Prairie books are based on the author’s life. Now, with our lofty future lens, we could call them thinly veiled autofiction with details that are made a little sweeter, people who are made a little more perfect, by way of sentiment. By way of adjusting just so. Oh, who could deny that kind of power, once it is yours?

My mother purchased the box set at a yard sale, one of those places, one of those activities, of my youth I was once humiliated by and now have grown to love and cherish. The books were out of order but in good condition. I immediately tore into Little House in the Big Woods, fascinated by a father who was good and kind, at least on the page, and the way boiling hot maple syrup could be made into a sticky candy if thrown onto snow.

I read everywhere and at any time: from the moment I opened my eyes, in the car, in bed, outside, at school, at recess, on my grandparent’s couch, during meals, when I really should have been paying attention.

My mother would not let me watch: anything anime adjacent, The Fairly Odd Parents, Spongebob, Harry Potter.

She would not let me read: Harry Potter. But, otherwise, there were no limits on what I could consume. A book in a day, a series in a week, in this way my mind was completely my own.

Books taught me how to talk. What I mean is: my mother is funny and quick and bright, but her best skills are with numbers. She’s a good teacher but doesn’t like to articulate her feelings. Understandable. My grandfather never went to middle school and my grandmother didn’t finish eighth grade. Again, I say: I grew up in the “Early Death Capital of the World.” I grew up in rural Oklahoma. I am, meaningfully, from there. My other grandfather, the one I didn’t know, spoke mostly Cherokee and occasionally rough English. Less talking, more screaming. If I am sad or angry or tired my voice comes out in a slurred, rural mumble. When I hear the same from my mother I yell: dear lord mother PLEASE SPEAK UP! I thought I liked to talk until I met someone who actually did. When I was young, I liked using big words I had just learned but had never heard anyone else pronounce. At my small state school, I was one of the best public speakers in my class. Not hard, you may be thinking. Once I go on a handful of dates and the person texts: I still don’t know anything about you, but you know so much about me. I did not realize until I went to graduate school that some people didn’t like the way I spoke. Found it rough and uncouth, even mean. I thought I was nice-ish, at least. I like to give real compliments and love my friends. I thought it was good-natured ribbing when we did a little sport or played cards. When I think of educated, therapized words, they are soft stones, no edges. Not from the river but from the garden section. Apparently, I am not as good an actor as I thought I was.

I dislike anti-intellectualism though I am not sure I can claim to be an intellectual, a learned individual. I know what praxis means but I can no longer remember my father’s voice and I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

Reading seemed to circumnavigate the horrific pathways in my brain that would translate what should have been a fleeting moment — something bloody on screen, something gross or unsanitary, a dead animal on the road — into a torturous barrage of amped up images, of ghastly mental acts that would leave me gagging or frozen, trapped in what I deserved for having such a disgusting, sinful mind.

Later, I would realize there was a word, a disorder, for what was happening inside of me, but when I was a child, I simply took it for what it was, another sign I was destined for hell, that the prayers I looped and looped and looped were going unheard, and that any doubts I had were confirmation, creek stone-sure.

Though reading was safe, a comfort, Ingalls Wilder added an extra layer of cushioning. Even if the Indians came, even if Pa was making a decision Ma didn’t agree with, even if someone was sick and close to dying, even if money was tight, things worked out in the end. No one cursed, and if they did, it was remedied quickly. Violent acts were there, were present, but they were brushed over.

Everyone loves their family and does not feel like a stranger to themselves or to others. Everyone is happy with being where they are, eventually. Everyone has ample resources, well, everyone that matters has ample resources. Most especially, one’s father is the ultimate hero, who can do just about anything, and charm just about anyone.

A memory: going over to a friend’s house and being afraid of the man at the head of the table. When will he go home? I ask. He lives here, with us, she says.

Is it any surprise, given the shape of me now, that my favorite of the Little House series was the narrative of the author’s husband’s childhood? It is called Farmer Boy.

Almanzo Wilder is born and lives in a place called New York, to which I still have never been. It begins when he is around nine years old, about the age I was when I would have read it for the first time. He sleeps under a goose down comforter and receives two calves to train for his birthday. He eats popcorn and apple cider around the fire with his three siblings, and mother and father. They take a sleigh to church, and he is not allowed to yawn.

He is a boy, a little boy, who will grow up to be a man.

Repeat after Laura: Ma hates Indians. And Black people. And, Norwegians? But mostly Indians. What is an Indian, anyhow? Well, a Native American. Well, you. Well, me, I mean. But maybe also you. And yet, I did not recognize this. I did not recognize myself.

A worse question: if I had, would it have changed anything?

At the Goodwill that never has any plus size clothing but has the best book selection, I find full-color collector’s editions of books two, three, and five. Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, and By the Shores of Silver Lake, respectively. They are discounted because of their green stickers, and so I pick them up alongside a set of bowls my friend Sean later describes as, “very cottagecore.”

Even now, I am a little sad they didn’t have On the Banks of Plum Creek, because I loved the descriptions of doughnuts and lemonade for a birthday party, and the wasps on the plums, and the water.

Two notable lines, both from Laura’s sister: “You’ll be as brown as an Indian, and what will the town girls think of us?”

And: “I wish I was an Indian and never had to wear clothes.”

Pa doesn’t know what he wants. Pa drags the family to and fro. Pa decides, and decides. Pa calls Laura, half-pint. She is his beloved little darling. Pa is probably hiding, or not hiding, some kind of addiction, according to historical record, but who can truly say? Book Pa is warm and strong and knows himself. He is what a man is supposed to be.

Adults I was not related to had no problem telling me how my own father had wasted his life. Had no problem recounting his history to me, gnarled and ugly and shocking.

This March, my parents would have been married 26 years, had they remained married, and had my father not —

I say: I have mostly made my peace with all of it. I think the hardest part is I will never know what he actually thought of me.

And my mother says: He deceived so easily, baby. Even himself. He did not know who he was, only what he thought he was.

In almost every way that is true, the books I read as a child made me who I am, what I prefer, who I wanted to be. And despite their flaws, despite not even being my favorites in the end, the Little House books taught me lessons I cannot forget: about isolation, about nature writing, about fathers and siblings, about the ways we choose to present our history to others.

But, I suppose the most important lesson, the refracted one, the one you have to search for, is about freedom. About how you have to carve it out and seize it for yourself. About how if you do not take it in hand someone will take it from you. At least for little Laura Ingalls, who never lost the keys to her cage, not really, not really.

In Little House, the Indians are what they are. They are characterized like animals, untrustworthy ones. Snarling and rabid and dangerous. Simple, but for their savagery, which is complex and would never cross the white, Christian mind. They will, as I know, as my ancestors knew, be forced into reservations, were being forced into reservations, were killed, were colonized with violence, with force, with blood and tears, with words of a foreign god. Still are, in so many ways.

I, too, can only be what I am. And I am a hick, and a hillbilly, and a half-breed. I’m just telling you a story. It’s all I know how to do.

And, truly, fuck anyone who thinks they get to tell my story for me. I’m a bad dog, baby. Too big for a cage. I never learned the right manners. Even with years of training, there is a wildness to my eyes. Beware, beware. I bite.

A Note Before We Begin: Throughout this piece, I use the terms woman, boy, girl, and man. I use the terms masculinizing and male. I mention dysphoria and the like. This is not a comprehensive piece of writing, nor is it particularly scientific. I do not believe in the traditional gender binary nor seek to hold it up. I am simply writing towards what society at large is working with. Also, the more we learn about “biological sex” the more we learn that these categories are not as watertight as first assumed. I hope you will take care as you read and engage with me after, especially if you, too, have experienced PCOS and have complicated feelings about it.

My body is, in its way, a haunted house. I live here, I occupy this place, I am this place, and yet I am afraid, too. Those who have explored it, thrill-seekers, might just have had something follow them home, close on their heels. I warned them, of course, and yet. Wait. Was that a shadow, beloved, or just your imagination?

In another kind of essay, I write: “The truth: I never feel more like a boy than when I am with Felix.”

I am certainly not a girl, but perhaps a woman. I am certainly not a man, but perhaps a boy. Perhaps a brother.

Perhaps nothing at all.

Some of the symptoms of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) are, roughly, as follows: irregular periods, excess body hair (hirsutism), weight gain concentrated around the abdomen, acne or oily skin, male-pattern baldness or hair that thins, skin tags, acanthosis nigricans, which is a thick, dark skin on the neck, groin, armpits, and the like.

Funnily enough, one does not have to have cysts, or even concerning ovaries, to be diagnosed with PCOS. What is in a name, anyhow?

The JCPenney dressing room, middle school aged. All of my friends have crushes and I do not think myself capable of it. The lights are flickering. Someone is howling, keening. My mother brings me a bigger size from the women’s section, business casual, when everyone else I know wears juniors in fun colors. Don’t look in the mirror, a voice says. The ice cold fingers scraping down my spine nearly feel like a caress.

Despite being one of, if not the, most common endocrine disorder in those classified as women by the medical system, there is barely any research on PCOS. Instead, it is made into a problem that is caused by being too fat by gluttony or choice, instead of a chronic illness, a chronic disorder, that affects many parts and systems of the body, not just hormones.

What I know for sure: They stuck me on birth control at 12 years old and told me to come back when I wanted to get pregnant.

I have recounted before the way it felt for me as a child to be mocked and bullied for my body hair, for my weight, for my ugliness. Perhaps I have not said the way it carried into my adulthood, the way I Nair-ed my arm hair off (for the first and last time) in what can only be described as a hypomanic state onset by grief and the way my bowels continually betrayed me, while my college roommate Jen watched in confusion. The way I could feel the stares during the times I was too depressed to shave at the thick line of hair exposed by the bottom of my jeans, the way the hair spread across my feet and onto my toes. The way it took me an hour and half to prepare myself for a mating ritual, the way I showed my friend exactly how I was going to strip so that she could tell me if I was missing anything, the way I threw up on the way from nerves and the way my brain told me, convinced me, that I was pathetic and disgusting and overly mammal. The way I went to read at the library instead, shining, stinging pink legs on display.

PCOS presents a bundle of symptoms that, for many cis women, presents an experience with dysphoria. How is this my body? they might think. How do I make myself palatable to myself?

Colonization has made it almost impossible to trace a line of research on a “third gender,” for the Indigenous cultures I am a part of, at least. A few weeks ago, I was at a conference with they/them and “any pronouns” scrawled on my nametag. I am an old spirit, much older than this body is. My public facing life, at least in an employee sense, is a shadow one.

Even now, I cannot call myself Two-Spirit outwardly without shame. Though to be fair, I can do almost nothing outwardly without shame.

The Greek stem word for andr- means “man.” This means that an androgen is a hormone (natural or “synthetic”) that is a masculinizing hormone, or a hormone that regulates something “male.”

An age old problem: I love seeing body hair on other people. It is not tied up in sexuality or sensuality, for me at least, but it feels affirming. It feels grounding. Okay, then. Why can’t you accept it on yourself then, coward?

For others, those who do not fall within the traditional binary, I imagine (and too have felt) that the “masculinizing” effects of excess androgens provide a bit of euphoria. I remember cracking open (for the first time and not the last) The Complete Dykes to Watch Out For by Allison Bechdel. I was cat-sitting for S., a glamorous third year in my graduate program, and it was an impossibly hot and humid Alabama day. The air in her bathroom was so cool it was almost powdery, and so I sat on the edge of her bathtub and grabbed the tome from where it sat in a basket next to her toilet. I cracked it open onto a random page near the beginning, where our trusty Mo prepares for a date by taking the slightest millimeter off her long and straight armpit hair.

Even through the 200mg haze of Sertraline, something clicked inside of me.

Later that week, someone says: I let him go, but he still haunts me. I can’t see him but I know. He’s not far now, I’m sure, but if you had come and been my friend earlier, I am sure you would have seen him. I know what you are. It is not said unkindly so I smile, the tendon inside my cheek twitching. I make no eye contact with her ghost, I refuse to look, but stays in my periphery anyway.

The Gnostics believe that we all have a piece of God inside of us, however small.

This piece is from a world immaterial, aside or above ours. It came to us from the Fall, where things burst apart and reoriented themselves into new matter. These bodies we wear are prone to decay, to rot, and so they are evil in themselves.

Only when we are aware of this are we able to shed our ignorance.

Stupid girl.

I was raised in a strict Baptist, then Southern Baptist manner. Within the confines of the Church, there was a specific way to be a woman, and you were not allowed to forget it, no matter where your sinful thoughts led you to stray, at least internally. I wanted to want to be silky and smooth. I wanted to want to wear a dress. I wanted to want to have a husband, though my dark fantasy was if I was forced to marry, I hoped I would be so unappealing to him that he would cheat on me, giving me appropriate means to divorce. Or, of course, one of us would die early.

The first time I thought, God must give me the strength to live this life I am meant to live this life that He wants me to live the life that will make my mother happy for me to live it must have been near the time I received salvation and been baptized.

So six years old. It was Easter, and I wore a white dress and carried a purse in the shape of a lamb, which I still covet.

People ask, on Google: Can PCOS go away? Does PCOS get worse over time? Where art thou Father, and why hast thou forsaken me?

I describe my career (that is, the one that is not writing this) as a [REDACTED] drone. This career has allowed me insurance, and to go to a clinic that is not the Indian Clinic of my youth. My new doctor is nice and extremely religious. In a way, I am more comfortable with this than I would be if I were allowed to be one-hundred-percent honest about my “lifestyle.” Nonetheless, she is thorough and sweet. She asks me, before she prescribes a pill that will lessen the cortisol and androgens and stress/inflammation hormones and receptors coursing madly through me, if I am sure I am not doing this for someone, some man or boyfriend, that wants me to look like a Barbie.

I can’t help but laugh. No, no, I say. Of this one thing, out of many, I am certain.