I’m so glad I can write this letter to you—that we have formed a family built on love and choice, and that even my human mother acknowledges that I am also your child. I remember the first time I met you, at the house up the hill, when Katherine invited me to spend Christmas with her. I had been so lonely in Trinidad. I made a chocolate-and-coconut cake, put on a black dress, and smiled nervously as I said hello to you in your parlor. You were a force, gathered unto yourself, thick hair and dark eyes.
“This is my mother,” Katherine said.
I’m not sure how long after that you decided to love me, but I’m glad that you did, that we’ve had these years with our spirits together. When I saw you last at Katherine’s wedding dinner in New York, you held my face with tears in your eyes and hugged me tightly, telling me how light I had felt the time before, as if I was leaving this world. You could feel, now, that I had come back to this side, no longer teetering on the edge of death. I hadn’t noticed then because I had been dying for so long. Like after Freshwater came out, when I thought I would die in Seattle.
We’d launched it in Brooklyn the week before, on a Tuesday night in February, at the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton. I wish you could have been there. My first book—it should have been something unbelievably special, and maybe it was. I don’t remember much of how it felt. I was sad in the car there because the magician chose not to come, chose to miss it. The store was packed wall to wall with a glorious press of gorgeous people; Yagazie flew in from wherever in the world she’d been at the time, walking around with her camera as her eye. My human mother was there, even though I’d blocked her a few weeks earlier, after she emailed me sharing her disappointment. I wasn’t including my family in this happy time. I wasn’t wearing the right masks, the right skins on my face. She wasn’t having the experience she wanted out of this book launch. I’m supposed to reflect things, you see; they’re meant to angle off me and illuminate her by proximity. It doesn’t work if I don’t let her close enough for the light to hit.
I often feel like a trophy to my parents, a shiny little prodigy who gets shamed and chastised when I step out of line—a whip of violences cracked into the air to force me back into compliance. Threaten my doctors, try to get me committed, out me, tell me I’m going to get AIDS, call me weak and a coward, tell me I’m sick in the head, then pull me close when I recoil too much, or when they’re lonely, or when there is power, money, and shine on the table. Perhaps this is ungracious. I’ve been asked to be more empathetic, more lenient with them. In the weeks leading up to the Greenlight event, my human mother kept trying to involve me as she planned her trip, and she grew increasingly upset that I wasn’t excited enough, wasn’t engaging with her enough. “Do you even want me there?” she asked once, frustrated. I couldn’t tell her I did, because none of my feelings matched what they should have been: they deviated from predictions, they skewed into strange places, and they exhausted me thoroughly. I could feel people’s wants hammering against me, loud and hungry and scared. Big things were happening around me, flashy and powerful, the kind of things that make other people happy, but I was just quiet and sad and drowning, and so many people wanted me to reassure them that I wanted them there, that I wasn’t ignoring them, that I wasn’t leaving them behind, that I was still available, I was still accessible. They didn’t ask how I was doing or if I was okay, but they made sharp little comments—you don’t love me anymore—and all I could smell was their concern for their place in my new life, hands and hands and hands reaching for me. I was too tired to feel any guilt, to jump into the reactions they expected, whatever would make them feel safe and secure. So many hands, and none of them were there to help me; none of them even asked. I don’t know if I’ve forgiven them for that, but I don’t speak to most of those people anymore, so I guess it doesn’t matter. They just wanted to touch me, and that wasn’t going to do anything other than perhaps kill me a little faster.
The months before that had already been deadly. I should have talked to you about it; you would’ve known exactly what to say. Do you remember that afternoon when we drove to Macqueripe with Uncle Gaby, because I wanted to touch the water, and on the way back he asked me what I would do if I became rich and famous? You laughed and answered for me—you told him I’d do exactly what I was doing now—and you were right. I loved you so much for that. All I did in those months was write and cook in the pistachio kitchen: ceviche from fresh red snapper, thick homemade yogurt with local honey, cakes and sweets and shortbreads. I am the same under these changing faces, there’s just all the tensions between the masks as they slide on and off.
Change is brutal, no matter how glamorous it is.
My team knew the book would be successful—we could taste it on the wind—but it didn’t make me feel safe. It felt like doom, it felt like a prophecy coming true, it felt like it would be the end of me. If Freshwater was going to be published, if it was going to burn into the world so well, then it didn’t really need me anymore. I had become redundant. This book, this thing I had turned myself inside out for, was breaking away from me and spinning up power I couldn’t even imagine. I felt, very strongly, that I needed to die. It would be in service to the work: the book might sell even more attached to the story of the tragic young writer who could have had such a stellar career if their corpse hadn’t been found before their first book even debuted. People would read Freshwater and speculate about what my career would have looked like after starting with a book this bold. I would be less of a threat, they wouldn’t hesitate to call the book what it was—not the way they do when you’re alive and young, Black and pretty and fucking talented, and you don’t pretend like you don’t know all of this. Some of them don’t particularly want to admit that you did something this groundbreaking on your first try. All of that hesitation goes away if you’re dead. Imagine a scramble for my remaining manuscripts; imagine if the best way to get this story to the people who need it was to die for it? A book about the pain of embodiment, its author killed from the very suffering the book documents? It’s all deeply on brand.
I lied to my doctor that my sciatica was flaring up and I almost cried at how concerned he was, how careful, as he wrote the prescription I intended to kill myself with. Muted tangerine circles, ten milligrams of cyclobenzaprine each. They’re a muscle relaxant, but I have a high sensitivity to the drug: one pill knocks me out for thirteen hours, so I was curious what an entire bottle would do. My doctor had no idea, and I wore a face so far away from death, he wouldn’t have been able to guess. I just needed the pills. I needed the safety they gave—not even to kill myself with, but just to shake in my hand, to hold death there, know that it was close, comforting, like a lethal security blanket. Death has always been the thought that calms the hungry avalanche in my head. Just meditating on it lifts the weight of this world a little. I measure danger by proximity to an actual suicide attempt, how close did I flirt this time, that kind of thing. I thought that lying to get the pills was as far as I would go.
I was very fucking wrong.
After the book launch, I went home alone. I took off the pink dress I’d worn, hung up the faux fur, and washed off my makeup. I went into my kitchen and took three times as much of the cyclobenzaprine as I’d ever taken before. It was like a little suicide test run, just to see how deeply it could knock me out. Ten milligrams was my usual dose if I was in too much pain; it would steal half a day and leave me groggy for the other half. I thought perhaps thirty milligrams would knock me out thrice as deep, but instead it knocked me out for three times as long. It’s interesting if you think about it, the way consciousness folds, the expectation of layers and the actuality of length. I think I slept through the next day, Wednesday, and into Thursday. I don’t remember. My calendar says I had a phone interview on Thursday, but I have no idea if I made it. My family and I had plans to go see Black Panther. I made it to that, I know.
I went to the theater on Thirty-Fourth Street, dissociating intensely, very much absent, wondering if this counted as being high. I sat next to Yagazie and whispered to her that I was on pills, so if I acted weird, that was why. She nodded. We watched the movie, and when we stood together on the street outside afterward, my human mother tried to make plans to see me. I was headed for the subway station and I remember how desperate she felt to connect with me, the way she touched my arm, my internal recoil. She is not a safe place; I don’t trust her concern. She wants the relationship we have to match the one in her head. I used to play along, and then I turned thirty and stopped a little, and then the book came out and I stopped some more, and it has just been more and more stopping since then. I see how that could be painful, when the masks are put down and I shrug away from her hand and go underground, back to my apartment, back to the sleep that’s waiting just under my skin, to that drugged and gone place, that you don’t have to deal with how this world hurts place.
A few days later, I fly to San Francisco, and then to Seattle. Death flies with me.
I start to think about estate planning, about what to do with my unedited and unfinished manuscripts. Who should get the royalties when I die, who should be in charge of things, who will be executor of my will, who will own the literary rights—it has to be someone I trust with the stories. I text Christine from Seattle and ask her if she knows any lawyers who do estate planning. She asks me if this is part of a suicide plan. I lie and say no. She tells me that she would still help me even if it was. I know she knows I’m lying, but I don’t take it back.
I feel Death pressing closer, tighter, leaning against my neck and rustling in my ear. I have so many more stops on the tour. I know I won’t survive them, but it’s my first book, it’s the debut, it’s been supported by so many indie booksellers, and I don’t know how to not show up. The book is apparently doing well. The reviews are coming in and they’re brilliant, I’ve been on the radio and written all these essays, including one published by The Cut, where I disclose that I’m trans. It’s such a flesh term, but the announcement gives me a chance to talk about the dysphoria in its accurate form, as spirit at odds with flesh. I’m afraid that the true spirit affirming surgery for me might just be dying, that all these other things I do are the equivalent of binding, or tucking, or all the ways we fold the flesh we don’t want, to try and get it to mimic the self we see. I want to fold the flesh right off my bones and collapse into nothing.
There is so much happening and I can’t feel most of it, just Death stroking my throat and calling me home.
I call Chinelo and tell her what’s happening. The rules of deathspace are that I have to tell someone, no matter how much the whispers say not to, no matter how convincing they are that all of this makes sense only in my head, that once I let it out it’ll be clear that I’m lying, just looking for attention, that it’s not that bad, it can’t be that bad, there are people out there who actually deal with the closeness of death and this doesn’t count, this is just childish nonsense, I’m not going to actually die from it. I know by now that these whispers make it all unreal, so that they can sever me from this and claim me for themselves. It’s how the first attempt happened: the cops and the ambulance and the charcoal back up my throat.
So I tell Chinelo and she talks to me, reassures me that the first book almost takes people out all the time, that no one talks about it because they don’t want to seem ungrateful. She says I need to come home, come and stay with her, so she can make sure I’m okay. It makes me want to cry, how largely she loves me. The magician had said the same thing, about the debuts and the ingratitude, about how people would mock: “Oh, are your diamond shoes too tight?” and he always wanted to tell them, “Yes, yes, they’re too tight and they’re hurting me.” I imagine dancing at a literary gala wearing the diamond shoes, my feet slippery with blood, the light catching red off the stones, having to smile, smile, you’ve been reviewed in The New York Times, in The New Yorker, in The Washington Post, you’ve been in Vogue, Annie Leibovitz shot you, aren’t you lucky, you know this doesn’t happen for every writer, even if they’re brilliant like you—and they’re right. It doesn’t. I’m lucky. The dance floor is streaked with me.
The hotel room in Seattle is lovely and huge and Rick Simonson, the bookseller, has sent me a saffron card, which I’ve saved. I’m talking at his store tomorrow, and tonight I can order whatever I want from room service because they’re paying for it. I order dinner and a crème brûlée, which comes in a huge bowl, the cream poured generously in, the sugar on top scorched and crackling. I can’t finish all of it, so I eat what I can and shove the rest into the minibar. The next day, the sugar crust is now just a sweet brown layer, collapsed from what it used to be. I am also collapsing.
I talk to Alex, who has had to live with the possibility of losing me for almost a decade now, and they are terrified, but they tell me how they’re not the one who has to live with it, so they can’t say anything, they can’t really tell me to stay. I appreciate that, because so many people tell me to stay without knowing what they’re asking, the kind of pain they’re willing me to just continue being in, and they can’t imagine that this pain has been there since I was little, since before I can remember, always and constant, and my whole life is a calculated distraction to try and get away from it. I always knew writing my books couldn’t keep me alive forever, that they would run out and I’d need something else, a new treatment plan, because I’d developed a resistance to this one. The magician tells me about his father and the bus—how all you have to do is miss this bus, because another one will be coming. Another one will always be coming. You will always, at some point, want to die.
I realize I have no idea how to cancel the tour, how to stop the wheels from crushing me. I call my agent, Jackie—you’d like her—and tell her I’m dying. Not in those words, probably in more measured ones, but enough that she understands how serious it is. She’s wonderful, as she always is, tells me she’ll handle it with my publisher, tells me that my health is the most important thing. Jackie says that enough times in the next few months that even I start to believe it, that my well-being matters more than selling this book. That I can say no and stay at home, which is where I want to be, not alone in hotels, brokenhearted that the person I love is not with me, that I go out there and talk to people who love the book, love the self I wear at the readings, and that self loves them, too, but it collapses when I leave, and there is another me that belongs to just me, and it feels like that one is always sad and alone.
Jackie cancels the rest of my tour, leaving only the New York events. I tweet obscurely about it, unwilling to share the things I’m sharing now, how hard a time I’m having staying alive.
That was February. In June, I am in London, on the second little tour, when the depression hits again—a rich old white man telling people at a literary dinner I couldn’t attend that I’m a liar, showing them my Instagram page to disprove my chronic pain, then emailing me to tell me about it. I sever ties with his foundation—fuck how much money they gave me—then cancel a few last things and fly to the magician, who is in a castle in Slovenia. In September, I am in Berlin on the third little tour. My human mother gives out my number without my permission. A friend accuses me of not keeping my word because she asked for money in a crisis and I had to check my budget first. I have been taking care of her across distance this whole trip, trying to help her get away from someone harmful. She knows how tours almost kill me each time, but at the moment she is surviving, and that doesn’t matter to her right now. I don’t matter to her right now. I am money I won’t give her immediate access to. I am not me. The people who are supposed to love me aren’t protecting me. I am alone. I am alone. I look at pictures of corpses on the internet and try to hang myself from the closet rod. There is a do not disturb sign on the hotel door; no one would find me in time. My reflection is ugly, the way my neck bulges. I abandon the tour and fly back to Brooklyn.
I don’t know what career success looks like without all of this stitched into it—all this pain, all this dying. I wish I was back in Trinidad, Marguerite, watching you cook in your chaos of a kitchen, showing you the caramel I make from palm sugar and coconut milk, walking through the market, a different time when I was not the me that I am now. None of this will save me—the money, the recognition, the brilliant work, the fame. It makes me both hypervisible and unseen. People can’t imagine that I can have all the things they want and still not be okay, still be dying so fast it’s incredible.
That time my human mother visited me in Trinidad was the last time I was ever alone with her. We spent twelve hours a day doing tours of the island, things she liked. I wanted her to be happy. When we finally met up with you for lunch, as soon as I stepped out of the car, you took one look at me and exclaimed, “Oh, child, you’re exhausted!”
I almost burst into tears then because you could see me, just when I thought I had become utterly invisible. You still see me, even when I am dying. You tell me over and over again how strong I am, but in the same breath, how fragile. You hold space for the dark and brilliant things in me. Thank you, Marguerite.
In your eyes, I live a little longer.