Too hard to cross the sundering
Why am I not continuing on hormones right now?
The answer is the same as the answer to the question: Why is it difficult to write a novel?
Because, you see, there’s the middle.
And I thought it would not be so hard, for me, as a third-gender person, to find what I wanted in the middle. I was wrong.
Because the third gender is not the middle either; its home is another place.
It’s as far across on its own side of the middle as Male, or Female.
And between the beginning and the end of any journey is the hardest part of Story. The part where Frodo wanders thirsty and starving in Mordor. The crossing of the Abyss. To make it through the atmosphere and out of the gravity well, burning off stages as you go.
It’s why I write; why I journey. I reach that place in everything. It’s why I love the poems of Paul Celan, who reached it in poetry, and whose name can’t be mentioned without mentioning that it defeated him eventually. But he went into that lightless void first, and mapped it with fingers made of words.
Sometimes you reach the atmosphere and touchdown in the ocean, not unchanged, knowing that you’ve reached it, may later muster the thrust to get through it — but not tonight.
And that is not success, but neither is it failure. Call it, if you will, a cliffhanger.