I GREW UP THINKING that the saddest thing possible was to die a nobody. I remember lying in bed awake at night, haunted by all the people I’d passed on the street that day whom no one would remember. How many years after their death until it was as if they had never existed at all? I remember feeling smothered on skinny streets with tall buildings on either side, wondering how many people alone in their apartments were loved by no one. I thought about all the people in the world alone in cages and rooms with no windows, hidden away. It seemed to me that if you were on no one’s mind, you were as good as dead. The greatest punishment possible was being forgotten.
When I was little, I thought I’d be famous when I grew up. At the very least, I would be great. It seemed like the only possible conclusion. That’s what happened to special people. And I had been told, again and again, that I was one of the most special of all. I had a special family and I lived in a special world. Everyone in it would, should, be remembered.
By the time I was a teenager I knew it was unseemly to admit my belief in my own value out loud. I still believed it, though. I clung to it. When I had disgusting thoughts, desires, I recited mantras to myself, affirming my own superiority. I’m special. I’m great. I will be greater than them.
When my sister got famous, I was terrified. It had happened to her, and this was when it occurred to me that it might not happen to me. The only thing that seemed worse than being a nobody was wishing for greatness and not getting it.
I dealt with this pain by trying to eat alive the part of me that had always believed I’d get what she’d already gotten. Preeminent known-ness. And I ate it alive by deciding it was evil. By deciding that fame was the counterpoint and, as such, the sibling of the processes that locked people away in rooms so they’d be forgotten. If I told myself success was evil, if I really believed it, then maybe I wouldn’t want it anymore.
Whenever I noticed the desire in myself to be praised, to be recognized or rewarded, I told myself I was awful. I became a stand-in for the monolithic violence that made some people demigods and some people subhuman.
Analyzing the ideological violence of your own fear and longing is not, I’ve learned, the way to make that longing go away. It might even lodge it down further, drive it into the core of you, where it hardens and knots up, until it can’t be dissolved.
My hurt made my sister’s fame seem sinister. Not only because of envy, because of anger, but because of loss. I saw fame changing her life, pulling her away. The more I saw her name in print, her face reproduced, the more I suspected she was always on people’s minds when they interacted with me, the more difficult it was to experience her as real, as a soft, warm body. That’s not because she was any closer to dead. Nor was it her fault. It’s what fame, the massiveness of its distortions, did to me.
In lots of dictionaries the third or fourth entry under “name” is some version of “a famous person.” That’s the definition I scan to, the one that catches, the one that rings in my ears. A name is always a stand-in, a metonym for a whole person. But fame pulls the being and the name even further part. The name becomes bigger than the being. My proximity to fame made me cynical, and that cynicism made me suspicious that the purpose of a name is simple: we require a stable identity so that we can be known.
I can’t write about my name without writing about being known—the desire to be known, the disdain for and the fear of that desire, the sense that people believe they know you before you’ve even revealed yourself, and, as a result, the desire to hide.
There are parallels between what is disorienting about being known and what is disorienting about being gendered. Both circumscribe who you can or cannot be before you have spoken.
When I returned to LA, after time with my parents, I deleted all my social media. I didn’t want to exist outside my body. I didn’t want to feel I was in anyone’s mind, ever. And I didn’t want to see my name anywhere, written out in letters. It made me dizzy. It made me humiliated. It made me feel evil.
The chemicals of the new antidepressant had leveled out, but I still wasn’t able to do much. I did walk every day to a flat ridge at the top of a steep dirt path, up the road from Lake’s and my house. We call it “the thinking spot.” If it hasn’t rained for a long time, the ridge is just tan dust, littered with beer cans, shards of glass, and other dispossessed items as wide-ranging as a car hood, a children’s bicycle, or a moldy “For Sale” sign. But when it rains, even for a day, grass sprouts up overnight, green blades pricking through mud. There’s a rope swing, too, hanging from the low, spindly branch of a black walnut tree that looks like a tarantula.
At the thinking spot, I developed a habit, a hobby even, of collecting and making piles of trash. I organized the shards of glass into colors, like Venus (mother of Grace, the boy), whom I met at the sea glass beach in Northern California. When the piles got big enough, I brought up a garbage bag and filled it up, then slid down the path with what I’d collected and emptied it into nearby waste and recycling bins. The trash collecting calmed me. I liked being around anonymous refuse. I liked cleaning up chaos.
Also at the thinking spot, looking up at the black walnut tree branches quivering against the sky, I began the practice of trying to fill up every single pocket of my body with air, in order to feel myself from the inside out. Into my toes, into the arches of my feet, into my shins. Into my bladder, into my anus, into my hip bones, into my colon, into my ribs, my armpits, and even my breasts.
The more of myself I felt, the more that Grace just…drifted away. As if I’d closed my eyes for a long time and when I opened them she was far out at sea, on the other side of a swell, a white spot appearing and reappearing in the water. There was no bringing her back, even if I wanted to.
I wanted to be nameless, nothing, the opposite of known. And yet I had no idea how. To aspire to be known was the only way I’d ever been taught to be alive.
The less I wanted a name, the more compulsively I named everything I saw. Tree. Glass. Car. Hill. Gun. Chicken. Knife. Shit. Cunt. Acorn. Caterpillar. Restaurant. I lay in the grass at the thinking spot and imagined myself as every other thing in the universe I could ever name, so diffuse and infinite as to be indiscernible, as to be unnameable.
In November I told Joshua I didn’t want to be called Grace anymore. Each day I imagined myself with the name of a different man I pulled from the folds of my memory. Samuel, the name of my mother’s father, an orthodontist who used to let me play with his dentistry tools. He had three last names over the course of his life, each one less Jewish sounding than the last, and told me stories about a talking shark that had followed him “from Coney Island to Saipan.”
Simon, the first two syllables of Samuel’s original last name. Edward, my late uncle, a lawyer who looked like a more clean-cut version of my father and had an encyclopedic knowledge of Civil War history. Michael, the archangel, and my third-grade teacher, who taught me about white holes, the opposite of black holes, out of which the disappeared matter emerges into another dimension. Mark (Wahlberg). John, the boy from America they found hiding in the caves in Afghanistan after 9/11, whose voice haunted me as Amelia Earhart’s had before him. Amelia’s voice had been a high-pitched whistle through the sky. John’s lips were so chapped, his tongue so dry, that he could barely get words out. I remember seeing pictures of John on the front pages of the papers at the subway newsstands when I was a kid. He was naked, blindfolded, and tied up. Kids at school said mean things about John and protective rage surged up in me. He’d felt so lonely, so isolated, that he’d done something much of the world saw as evil just to be embedded in a community. At least, that’s why I imagined he’d done it. They brought him back to America for a trial, to decide whether he would get the death penalty or go to prison forever. At night, when I closed my eyes, I saw his white, bearded skeleton face on the inside of my eyelids, loneliness behind everything. He looked dead even though he wasn’t, yet.
I remembered the name one morning, sitting out on the porch in the mist before Joshua or Lake woke up. In the room where Joshua and I slept at my parents’ house, there was a piece of green paper, framed and hung on the wall. It was the list of names my mother had chosen from when I was born. Betty, Myrna, Georgia, Esther, Jane, and a dozen more girls’ names. Grace was circled. On the right side, under the “Boy” column, just one name. Cyrus.
I whispered it, said it slowly, pressed my tongue against the back of my teeth to whistle the first syllable, pushed my lips out for the soft r, let my mouth curl around the us. Then I wrote it down, again and again. I wrote a big capital C on a sheet of paper from one of my yellow legal pads. The C opened its mouth for the following letters. Then I practiced in cursive. Then all caps. Then block letters.
Over breakfast, I slid the paper across the table to Joshua, facedown.
“Don’t say it out loud,” I told them. “I’m too shy to hear it.”
They didn’t look up, just scribbled, then slid the paper back over to me. They’d written an acrostic, “Grace” and “Cyrus” intersecting at the r, an uneven crucifix. I folded the piece of paper up and put it in my jacket pocket. We didn’t talk about it anymore. I told no one else.
A couple of days later, Joshua called me Cyrus during sex. I was on top of them, in the dark, their arms wrapped around the back of my neck. It was the kind of sex that made me feel like a man, which we’d been having more of lately. They said the name and I came, without anticipating it.
The next night they said it again. Cyrus. This time, impulsively, I told them to shut up. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled over onto my back, unmoving. The humiliation of asking to be something you’re not. I’d already been denied when I asked to be called Jimmy years ago.
I apologized to Joshua profusely for having been so curt.
The next day I taped the piece of yellow paper to the wall inside my closet, so I’d have to look at it whenever I changed clothes. Sometimes I admired the shapes of the letters; other times I averted my eyes.
Cyrus remained a stranger whose ways I was trying to understand.
How would he wear his hair? How would he cuff his pants? Would he be bold with his opinions or listen and offer insight only when asked for it? Would he stay up late, meeting strangers? Would he take pleasure in spontaneity? Would he know that he was his best self at six a.m., put himself to bed early with his papers and pencils organized geometrically on the desk? Would he have lovers or prefer solitude? Would he push his hair back or let it fall in his face? Would he believe that the way things are can be changed or accept their immutability and go inward? Would he lift weights or would he run when he was moved to, even in the dark, or when it was raining? Would he have countless acquaintances or a handful of friends he kept extremely close? Would he believe in marriage? Would he be on time? Would he have Instagram? Would he be a vegetarian or would he buy steak at the grocery store to cook in a pan when he was home alone? Would he do ketamine on a Saturday night or sit upright at the table, reading, with a pot of herbal tea he’d just brewed? Would he meditate? Would he be a masochist? Would he take long walks with no destination? Would he read novels or philosophy? Would his journal entries be narrative or poetic? Would he travel? If he traveled, would he do it alone? Would he have sex with strangers and tell no one it had happened? Would he have sex with men? Would he be on Grindr? If he was on Grindr, would he post shirtless selfies, or ones of him in button-downs, his hair parted on the side, his glasses still on? Would he keep his cocks on the windowsill, or in a box in a drawer in his closet? Would he ever wear sneakers? Would he ever wear khakis? Would he look gay or straight? Would he be happy living in the country? Would he be polyamorous? Would he be celibate? Would he give a stranger a ride? Would he make money? Would he care about money? Would he be successful? Would he value success? Would he ever give advice? Would he wear short-sleeved polo shirts? Would he keep his word? Would he answer emails immediately? Would he speak another language? Would he be a socialist? Would he have opinions? If he had opinions, would he share them? Would he be a service top, or a dominant top, or a power bottom, or a submissive bottom, or all of the above? Would he have a beard? Would he have hair on his chest? Would he be able to fall in love? Would he rather wake up alone? Would he be a father? Would he have a dog he took with him everywhere? Would the dog be big? Would he cry? Would he introduce himself as Cyrus or Cy? What truth did the name contain? Was Cyrus inside of me already or had I invented him?
I told a few more close friends about Cyrus, mostly in texts or emails. It was too scary to say it out loud. But the name spread. Soon I was running into people who called me “Cy,” even though I’d never asked them to. Quickly, it seemed irreversible. I mourned Grace each time I was addressed as Cyrus. The new name rang with guilt for abandoning the old one, as if I’d been tasked with Grace’s care and I’d harmed her.
When people asked me what I wanted to be called, I froze.
“Either is fine,” I’d say, or, “Whichever you prefer.”
Being addressed was a constant reminder of my own lack of self-knowledge. I asked Joshua to call me nothing for a while.
When people asked me how I’d picked the name, I was hesitant to admit its place on my parents’ green list. My selection of Cyrus suggested loyalty as opposed to differentiation. But seeing “Cyrus” written in my mother’s looping script comforted me. As if Cyrus had always been there, waiting in an adjacent dimension.
When I went places where I had to meet new people, I tried to swallow my words while introducing myself. If people asked me my name, I pretended I couldn’t hear them. If they asked again, I said whatever came into my mind first. I’d tell one person in a circle I was Cyrus, then turn to another and say I was Grace. Cyrus, Grace, Cyrus, Cy, Grace. I noticed that when I introduced myself as Grace, my voice had a higher pitch. I was more concerned with politeness, adjusting my voice and speech to make whomever I was speaking to more comfortable. Cyrus, on the other hand, felt entitled to speak briefly, or not speak at all.
The two names talked over each other, always on my mind, an etching on the inside of my eyelids, like the letters of the alphabet had been when I first learned to write. Stop signs, billboards, typewritten bulletins. Cyrus and Grace floating over everything, shrinking and growing, switching places between foreground and background. I felt if I didn’t choose one, I would cease to be.
I didn’t know why I was doing it, stepping into this uncertain identity with no plan. When friends changed their names, it seemed clear that it was a matter of survival. Their birth names had simply stopped being livable. I held myself to different standards: Why wasn’t I strong enough to exist inside Grace? Did I hate myself? Did I hate my family? Did I wish to kill my former self and begin anew? Was I so naive as to think that a new name could shepherd me into a new existence, one that hurt less? Did I think a new name would cut the cord between me and my whiteness, my power, my access? I would always be what I’d always been, no matter what I called myself.
Somewhere deep in my unconscious I still believed that not feeling like a woman was a personal failing. Something was wrong with me. No matter how much I read, how many people I talked to, I still believed that if I were whole, I wouldn’t have to change myself.
I started having the dream about walking behind my childhood self again. In the dream I held Grace’s hand while she led me around. Her small hand fit perfectly inside mine. Other times I lay on my back while she read to me from a picture book and stroked my hair. She was just learning to read. She wobbled through words, asking me the meaning of unfamiliar ones. I walked around with her on my back, arms gripping my neck and legs gripping my waist. I felt like her father.
I didn’t want to admit how betrayed I felt by my body, and how angry that betrayal made me. I tried for a long time to banish anger from my emotional vocabulary. I pushed it down until I couldn’t even recognize it. It moved to my edges: twitches in my neck, compulsive blinking, the scabs I picked on my scalp, my habit of pulling out large patches of my leg hair. What a delusional thing to feel: that my soul, somehow, ended up in the wrong container. I wasn’t entitled to anger.
Joshua visited when they could, and I saw a handful of friends, but everything outside my own amorphousness was foggy and difficult to recall. I relied on routines and repetition to make the days feel bearable. Breathing from the inside out, like I did at the thinking spot. Rearranging the row of objects on my windowsill every day. Filling a vase with water, and nothing else, and counting how many days it took for the liquid to evaporate. Refolding all the clothes in my closet every day and piling them according to different patterns, like texture, color, or shape.
I decided, with more resolve than ever before, not to drink. As painful as it was to be inside myself, I had an uncanny conviction that I needed to feel all the contours of this being. I couldn’t float away. I told a friend that I was scared not to take a sip of something when my heart started pounding in my chest. They told me that every time I wanted to dissociate, I should look for the color red and let it fill me up.
As it turned out, red was always there. Lines of red neon light on the highways, drawn out into the valleys. Red bougainvillea petals on Future Street, on Isabel Street, on all the tight alleys in the neighborhood. Piles of dry red bougainvillea dust in the gutters, whipped up by the wind. The red frame around the picture above my bed that Antonia took in 2016 of my torso, cut off below the chest. My red denim jacket. Red antennae lights on the ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Red cars, red roofs, red signs. The glow around the sunset on particularly foggy days. Exit signs. Stop signs. The blood under my fingernails when I picked my head. Red reflections on the water. Red on the horizon all the time.
It made me feel safe and calm to keep my room in perfect order. Clothes folded in squares. A shelf of eight shirts, a shelf of eight pairs of pants, and twelve hangers for jackets and button-downs. Every piece of clothing had to have singular meaning and be something I would wear in the span of two weeks; otherwise, I took it to the church thrift shop at the bottom of the hill. A suit jacket that used to be my father’s, a worn-in white T-shirt a friend had given me, the striped rugby shirt with the William Blake quote written across the front: “Bring me my bow of burning gold.” The next line of the poem is “Bring me my arrows of desire.” I told myself it was a lesson in not making other people the center. I wore the shirt so I would have to be alone with myself, to direct the arrows of my desire toward sensations, not people.
I got through my bouts of debilitating anxiety by running up and down the stone staircase near my house until I was so out of breath I couldn’t think. If it was late in the afternoon, the sun was a little lower and a little pinker each time I got to the top of the staircase. There was always some change to track at the bottom of my descent, too: a brown caterpillar getting closer to the grape soda can wedged in the dirt on the other side of the railing; a spider hanging off a dead agave plant.
It calmed me down to calibrate my body to the movement, however big or small, of nonhuman things. The earth was rotating, the caterpillar was inching, and I, a thing, ran, panted, and paused. When I finished the cycle—up five flights and down five flights, five times—I walked slowly back home, almost without thoughts.
It was still warm enough to sit outside on the balcony at night. I wore shorts, no shirt, put my legs up on the railing. If I didn’t look down, I could summon the sensation of flatness where my chest was. If I couldn’t ignore my breasts, I pushed the extra flesh toward the center, to the sides, down over my ribs. I pretended it was butter, that I was spreading it thin.
In the evenings, music drifted up the hillside from backyard parties at people’s houses. The sound filled the neighborhood. Joshua and I slept with my door to the porch open at night, so that we could hear the music, dogs barking, horns from the train tracks by the river. It calmed me down to feel like earth was one big room. If I could hear everything in the room all at once, then I existed as simply a part of it, and I was okay. I wanted every particle to be its own center such that I felt held in the world, no matter where I was.
The objects of my desire seemed smaller and less grandiose than ever before. I fantasized about walking down the hill in my neighborhood in a T-shirt, with a flat chest and nothing binding my breasts, the wind pressing the fabric against my skin. I fantasized about pulling my shirt off from the collar, instead of from the bottom seam, like men in movies did. I fantasized about sleeping on my stomach, without breasts between me and the mattress. I fantasized about driving down the mountain in a convertible, top down, leaning back in the driver’s seat, open to the world instead of hunched over in hiding, like the teenage boys in tank tops who lived by the lake where we spent the summer. In the fantasies I was euphoric but calm, not at all lonely even though I was alone.
I saw him in glimpses. When I walked by a mirror and caught sight of shoulders that were broader than hips, a face with a sharp jaw and thick brows. When I saw my hands on the steering wheel of my car, veins swelling as I turned. When I squatted to lift heavy things and bounced back up with ease. In quotidian moments I saw him, someone I admired, even lusted after.
But these moments of alignment made the misalignment that much more unbearable.