Trans Becoming and the Failure of Language

Nine months ago, a surgeon cut into my chest to remove my breasts because this is what I had come to want and need. The road to this arrival was wending, wooded, years of observing my relationship to the image spit back at me in bathroom mirrors, screen doors at night when the lamps blush yellow, photographs in which I am looking back at my own face, my own shoulders, and suddenly, someone else’s chest. This was a distance from myself I had never before encountered—a misalignment that grew from