I'm in France, Lorient.
I dreamed that we were enjoying the garden at night - drinking, smoking, laughing, because it was a party in celebration of being yourself. I can't remember who was there, but it was a party for every one of us.
Police arrived in unmarked cars and out of uniform.
They took us directly to court, I don't know why, and at the court sat the judge who was a fat, pasty man with hair loss on his head and hair growing on his shoulders and knuckles. He listened to everyone's reasons for why they were there, found them guilty, and sent them to another desk, where sat three women who doled out sentences. They always said "probation," but this probation was spent in prison. We all knew.
There were many transpeople there. I protested on their behalf, and my own. I shouted and chanted that we did not deserve probation for having a party in celebration of ourselves. HELL NO, WE WON'T GO! HELL NO! WE WON'T GO!!! As I did, I saw the judge take notice of me, and I felt afraid, but my anger at the injustice fueled me on and I kept chanting. I encouraged the transpeople to be themselves on the stand, to speak themselves plainly, and to refuse probation in the strongest terms. I saw one woman take the stand as her family watched, and as I watched from behind, she capitulated to her sentence. She looked sadly beautiful, weighed down by her own confusion of why and who she was. The sentencing satisfied her view of herself, to her it seemed the only fitting answer to all the questions she wore and lived and was.
My turn arrived. My lawyer was Dr. Maddie, whom the judge called "Mr.," to which she replied "Mr. Judge, I did not work this hard for you to call me Mr. I think you would agree I deserve at least a Miss." The judge condescended with a nod and I approached. I took off my shirt to make the point that I was a man, then realized that I still had breasts and so I turned around and begged for another shirt so this judge could see me as I really am.
As I did this, he called out to me. We had a pronoun showdown, him calling me Miss, me insisting on Mr. He said, finally, "I will call you Mr., but it is I who must cater to your misguided needs."
Well, this drove me apeshit.
I attacked the bench with the force of my inner fury. I told him what for, why, and where he could stick it. The way I told him this I don't exactly remember or know how to say; it's just that it felt like the anger I sometimes feel when I perform. But this was no performance of anger: the whole dream felt entirely real. As I told him this, he began to see me - really see me - and as he did, his head fell with the weight of its own comprehension. He couldn't look at me; it seemed that seeing me straight on burned his eyes. Somehow finally he relented, if only out of extreme fatigue of conscience, he agreed: I am who I am. And then he sentenced me.
As he wrote on the form to sentence me, he said he must sentence me as a woman. That to be sentenced as a man would be a fate worse than death. I felt the kindness of this compromise, but the fire of justice fueled me, stupidly, still, and I demanded to be sentenced as a man.
I awoke out of this dream in the middle of the argument with the judge. But I did not awaken to the room, I opened my eyes to a deep black like space. The only color was made of translucent shapes I could perceive by the way they caught the light. It looked like looking up through a stack of kindergarten snowflakes cut from clear plastic: each shape unique, the holes and curves gliding past one another as each one of these snowflake discs turned. They turned quickly when I first saw them, like some psychedelic design; but then they slowed so I could see that they were individual, stacked discs, moving independently but interacting with one another too. It looked like an artfully-manufactured splitting of human zygote cells.
I became aware later that I think that this may be the functioning of time. I thought of the grandfather clock mechanism that Corbin brought home, and the video of it moving all of its own accord, as fast as it could. As if sixty years of keeping time, then being broken free of its functional casing, allowed it this freedom of moving as fast and fluid as it felt like. Truly, the mechanism seemed to be enjoying itself, its flat coils quivering as they sped and unrolled, rolled and retracted.
Consciously, I think that maybe there are sixty discs, one for each second. Then twenty=four more discs, one for each hour. Then three hundred and sixty-five more discs, one for each day. And there must be some number of years. In the bathroom, later, I thought that maybe this is too heliocentric, that time might just as well keep a lunar calendar too.
