Next week everything will be different. Next week everything will be the same.

I just filled out the last bit of paperwork. On Monday I’m finally going to have my top surgery – something I’ve wanted for years. I definitely don’t think that medical transition is the only way to transition, but it’s something that I want as part of my transition, and now it’s finally happening in the year of 2024. The emotions that I feel are overwhelming, a cocktail of excitement and wistfulness (why didn’t I get this done years ago?) spiked with a little anxiety about pain. I’m a bit of a baby about pain sometimes.

But I feel very cared for, surrounded by people who genuinely want to help me succeed and heal. Like a lull just before a thunderstorm, there’s electricity in the atmosphere, restless across my skin. I’m waiting for the storm to break. My flesh to part. I’m waiting for a sound, or water.

A surgery is going to happen: I’m going to go to sleep, and wake up in a few hours, and I’ll be different, but I’ll still be the same. My body will experience quiet revolution, all on its own. And then I will be in recovery, until I am well enough to get back to things like my poetry workshop and open mics and the Celtic Arts Center, and then next month I’ll be traveling to VoidCon in West Virginia and reading from Infinity Mathing at the Shore and meeting friends in person who I’ve only ever met online. Things will return to a kind of normal – the idiosyncratic, elliptical normal of my life.

My posts might be a bit brief for a while – we’ll see how much energy and focus I can muster while being post-op for a week – but I hope to continue my regular posting. If I don’t have energy for words, you’re at least getting a cat picture until the words return to me.