Silence
I love silence.
I love silence in the central valley of California. I do! Now stay with me, I want to keep it quiet.
I lived in the central valley, and the central valley is one of the great marvels of America and the World. I’m not going to go dredge up statistics, but the amount of food that is produced in California’s central valley is a lot of food.
The central valley of California is a strange, and at times, magical place. We often let the lenses made of pain remained that cover up our two eyes strained, distract us from what is right around us.
What is right around us, well when I was there…in the night
was magic
I am a transgender woman. This is a very, very sensitive and poorly understood condition. Even us, the women like me (and the men too, but you’re on deck right now), don’t understand ourselves.
We have some strange condition that was borne well…a long time ago. I don’t know when gender and its rules were written in the geometric code contained within, and I can only speculate to how it was formed, in millions…numbers that aren’t really numbers to us because they are larger than well anything we can imagine…of lives.
But, when you get into your car every morning, you don’t open the hood and follow the fluids and marvel at the fans and leer at every last mechanical point contained within … the hood.
You just get in your car, quickly, and you drive away. You expect it to work, all of it, and it does.
Well, I can’t look under the hood of god or spirit or energy’s make and model all of it just as the instructions clearly explain. But I can guess at how it came to be, but it doesn’t really matter.. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t.
When I got in my car when I was young to stretch the metaphor meaning me, things operated as they were supposed to function, but some things did not follow the owners manual that I had been given leather bound in the glove compartment with the holy Ford’s words.
I had to throw out that manual. I had to throw it out and never look back, and I did that about a year ago. And since then, my car has driven like it has never driven before. It hums and purrs and accelerates with the torque of a thousand off-limits yellow because you’ll get beat suns.
It works. It didn’t before. It wasn’t broken, but it didn’t work. Nobody knew how to make it work. They followed the manual to the T. The manual was a new edition. It had been released just the prior year.
But the car just wouldn’t work the way it was supposed to work, until I found the right design. The right instructions came to me, well I kind of just figured it out.
And then the car was good as new. And every time I drove it, my hair would blow back so hard that it would pull from the roots and grow longer.
I didn’t stop driving when the car started to work as it was supposed to work, but the problem was that everyone said that wasn’t the way you were supposed to make a car work the way it’s supposed to work.
And I heard it, like I’d heard it before. But I drove on. And I drove on.
And sometimes the only place that you can figure out how to operate something without other people telling you, screaming around you “use this wrench, use that wrench, use this drill, use that drill,” is a quiet place where things are flat. Where the sky and the ground are equal and don’t fight, because they are stalemated at the horizon. Sometimes, this kind of place, in the night, under the stars, you take your car that you’ve been told your whole long life doesn’t work the way it was designed to work. And you figure out how to make it work. Alone. And then you drive back home.
Having a working car is great. Learning how to use your car just like everybody else is wonderful, but some of us, well we just can’t get our’s to work the way they were supposed to work, and we need to go to somewhere quiet so that we can figure out how in the hell we are supposed to make this god damned car work the way it was supposed to work. It was supposed to work the way it works, just the way it works. It works the way it works.
When you get your car running, just how you like, you never look back, you never stop driving, and you never stop smiling.
