Ess Pokornowski: HAUNTED • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Ess Pokornowski
HAUNTED

Witch

It is Halloween night in Ypsilanti in 2020 and I am in the upstairs bathroom of our big, blue farmhouse. This is the pandemic Halloween–the year we are desperate to share, to be in the world together before the cold of winter comes again—but I will remember it for something else. I have donned my black leather combat boots, borrowed a pair of tights too big for my partner, A. They feel as if they were made for me. Over this, we will drape the long-sleeved, long-hooded black witch robe previously languishing in the front hall closet. Atop my head, A will place a purple-haired wig, cut in a bob, and atop that, a campy, pointed witch hat. We have plucked all the pieces from the backs of closets, the bottoms of boxes, and they are here, gathered, waiting to be assembled. To assemble me. The most important step must come first, though.

A is tender as she works. I wonder what thoughts tilt her smile as she applies the foundation, the blush, the eyeliner, the mascara. She is absorbed in the act, though, the making and unmaking of my face. This is her idea and I don’t think I would’ve participated in Halloween if she hadn’t suggested it. Perhaps I would’ve covered myself over in robes, called it a grim reaper, something all tatters and bones, shrouded in a mesh so fine as to appear like shadow itself. An indecipherable signifier. Instead, the makeup falls into place, save but for the lips.

She asks me to apply the inky black pencil myself. I take a deep breath and grasp the cylinder from her outstretched hand. Such a simple thing. Such a complicated feeling. I make my mouth an ugly “O” shape and I wipe the stick around it like I am a cartoon character, a child tracing the letter. She laughs and shakes her head.

“You did it just like a dude,” she says, and we both laugh uneasily, wondering how I’ll take it. Though I’ve been fragile lately, I hold it together. The makeup covering me over feels like an unveiling. The pieces threatening to fall apart hold together. “Come here, let me fix it,” she says, sighing. She touches up the edges. I smack my lips and thank her again. She still needs to do her own makeup. To fix her own costume.

We appraise her work together and something thrums in my chest. The dramatic sweep of the eyeliner makes my eyes look large, alien. My lips are greased black, and when I smile my coffee-yellow teeth glimmer beneath them.

“Still something missing,” she says, scanning the Instagram posts she’s used for inspiration, searching for an image that will reveal the absence she senses. “Ah!” she chirps, turning the phone to me: “What do you want? A moon, a star?” In the image, a beautiful woman a decade younger than me sports an inky black crescent moon in the center of her forehead.

“YES!” I cry, refusing to choose.

“Which do you want?”

“I don’t know.” I nearly bite my lip, think better of it, and stare at the phone. The thing in my chest thrums harder. Only then do I realize it is my heart.

Inspiration strikes her before frustration: “What about a pentagram?”

“YES!” I shout again, then, “That’s it. That’s the one.” And it is.

She takes the pencil we’ve used on my lips and draws a pentagram. Star, then circle. First, she traces it delicately, then, she runs the pencil over the lines over again and again, and it becomes wild and unkempt. The tidy container in which I’ve stuffed my soul loosens with each circuit.

When she is done, I look in the mirror and grin the widest grin I can. Unconsciously, cock my head to approximate a theatrical and monstrous femininity. I make A take a photo and stare at the image while she gets ready, scrutinizing my face. My stubble is hidden. My features blurred smooth beneath the makeup.

My smile says, “I am wild joy.” It says, “Is this what you want?” It says, “Be careful what you wish for.” And then A’s phone chimes to tell us Em is on the way. I go stir the punch, unsettling the juice from the bottom. I pour a cup to taste. After I take a sip, the echo of my smile clings to the glass, a lingering kiss. In the downstairs bathroom, I check my makeup in the mirror and my heart skips when I see the soft red of my lips showing through the black, like a vision or a promise.

Later, in the dead of night, after we have danced around the fire in the dark, shouting playfully at trick-or-treaters, after my neighbors have mistaken me for another me, I see my face in the mirror again. For the first time I can remember, I see my own face looking back, not my eyes staring from behind the mask of my face. I realize I am beautiful in my own way, and I cry at the intensity of my joy. I gasp and wave my hands, fanning my eyes, afraid to ruin my makeup. The absurd femininity of the gesture makes me cry harder. I realize I’ve never known this joy.

Mask

A different bathroom, a different mirror. I am twelve years old in the bathroom of my childhood home on the southeast side of Chicago. I have the door closed, a foot splayed wide to block its arc. The door no longer locks. Not since it got stuck a few years ago when C was inside. Dad had to jimmy the lock with a screwdriver. It left the cheap, brass-painted aluminum punched through, jagged at the hole.

I scrutinize the face in the mirror. My hand on my chin, I turn my head left, then right. I tip it back. I pull the skin taught. Disappointed, I sigh and recenter. My eyes meet their twins in the mirror and I scrutinize each iris, first the right, then the left. I sigh again and feel as if some nocturnal animal is trapped in the attic of my chest, sharp claws scraping and clattering about along the floorboards of my heart.

I begin to think there is a face behind my face, eyes watching from behind a mask. I am afraid because I know how this sounds: mad. And I fear that perhaps I am. I slap myself, gently at first, testing the gesture. Then harder: once, twice, three times on each cheek. I splash my face with cold water, rinsing away the tears that want to pour from my eyes. I towel my face dry just as Mom begins to knock.

“Just a minute,” I say, and I look one last time at my face, willing it to grow a beard, a mustache, anything to make it feel real. Anything to make me look like a real boy. I don’t know how misguided this wish is, how much it will hurt me after it’s been granted. I don’t realize that this is merely the first time I have recognized the seams at the edge of where I stitch myself together. I will pick at the thread here for twenty-some odd years, until the stitching risks coming undone, little bits of sand and old wool threatening to escape. Only then will I seek help.

I am seventeen and the mustache grows in a straight line, like a caterpillar or a comb above my lip. With some bitterness, I shave it. Again and again. I am afraid if I leave it there I will become my father. Already I am his echo. At every family gathering, my aunts and uncles tell me with wonder how I look just like him, “the spittin’ image,” they say. So I opt to become repetition with difference. I grow an uneven and gangly soul patch instead, not yet realizing how it is associated with a tacky and tenuous masculinity. (This obliviousness will, sadly, repeat itself in my late twenties with an unironic fedora phase.)

I twist the wisps dramatically in class, in the locker room. I try to shape it into a tight triangle, but three hairs keep growing longer than the rest, reaching down my chin like an omen. My friends mock me for the “dirt on my chin.” Still, the wiry triangle is a piece of armor, the first piece of the motley mask I will assemble to cover over myself, patch by patch.

I am drunk in the bathroom at my favorite dive bar. I am twenty-five and out of what is, at that point, the most serious relationship of my life. My soul patch has blossomed into a goatee. Despite the expansion of my armor, the mask growing filament by filament, I have begun to feel naked, vulnerable. So, I perform my masculinity in new ways: a newsboy cap to hide beneath, basketball with the older guys in my grad program, and scotch whiskey and beer at my favorite dive bar. I am almost a regular. Sometimes, I almost feel regular.

There is a cost, though. I begin to drink more than I can afford. I begin to drink alone. It is on one of these solo excursions, when I am a scotch and two pints of Wells Bombardier deep, that I attempt to face myself in the filthy mirror of the Men’s Room. Only, there is no mirror, just four screws, scars left behind. I wonder how long it has been missing, and why I never noticed before.

Sitting at the bar again, I find my hollow eyes staring back between the bottles. I am missing something. Missing something obvious, and deep, and impossibly personal. I meet my own gaze in the mirrored shelves of the bar, waiting for my reflection to blink or turn away. When it doesn’t, I order another drink.

I am thirty-two and I am more depressed than I have ever been. I take a pull from the bottle of Laphroaig I keep in the closet where I meditate. I tiptoe to the bathroom to stare at myself in the mirror.

A is downstairs, keeping her distance because I am both inexplicably angry and inconsolably sad. I close the door almost all the way, leaving a sliver of light, a seam in the darkness. In the dim glow, I look myself in the face. I stare over the scalloped shell sink I hate. All I see is a coward, a farce. Even a full beard cannot hide me from myself.

I hear A on the steps, so I turn the lights on and shut the door the rest of the way.

I am sick to my stomach and the creature in my chest is clawing at the floor, tearing at the wallpaper in the corners of my heart. I face myself in the bathroom mirror. It is the summer of 2020, I am thirty-five and I think I might be trans. The face in the bathroom mirror nods, knowing, and the color drains from our faces.

Haunted

Only after I begin to transition do I realize how many pictures of me there are in the house. At first, I am unbothered, happy to see the person I am becoming in the mirror set against the person I was. As I begin hormone replacement therapy, though, I start to notice things about me I didn’t realize I dislike. My wild hairline and untameable cowlicks. My heavy-lidded eyes, my brow ridge. My masculine jawline. I realize I am dissecting my own face, my own body with a cruel cisheteropatriachal gaze. What would Laura Mulvey and Donna Haraway say? I ask myself, but knowledge alone will not stop compulsion.

I cut my features up, weighing how they align with an idea of beauty that is implied but never stated or analyzed. This all happens at a level below conscious cognition. I must force myself to reflect on how I see my reflection. I realize I am haunted. In all the old photos, I see a face behind the mask of my beard, my goatee, a face beneath the face. A butch dyke. A nonbinary bitch. They were there all along and I hid them from myself.

At first, I tell myself I am being unreasonable. I begin to worry only after I start to hate myself in new ways: to hate my trunk-y body, to hate my uneven face, to hate how my eyebrows creep out at the edges. It is after I find myself standing at the top of the steps, staring at the canvas blow-up of our wedding photo, losing track of time, again and again, that I tell my therapist.

“I feel haunted,” I say, “like there is a ghost version of me haunting me, leaving traces all over the house.”

“Why do you think you’re starting to feel this way now?” she asks.

“I think, I just feel like a piece of dude-me is still there, trapped inside me.” I don’t add this, but I think: And in all the old photos of me, I see another me, femme me, girl me, screaming silently to be let out.

My therapist coaxes and challenges me until I explain how it used to feel behind the mask, staring out of the dull eyes. I struggle to express how it feels like I am trapped inside my body with another I, as if my mask has turned inward, the beard curling back in at its roots.

Later, I find the words.

“Before, I was haunted by the me that I never let myself become, and now I am haunted by the memory of the me that I forced myself to be.” My therapist nods, but looks uneasy. We talk about internalized transphobia and I wonder where my seams are, the boundaries where my identity meets my perception of a me that I may or may not be.

A year later the memory comes back unbidden. I am trying to fictionalize my youth when it happens. I am scraping the memories of walking train rails like balance beams, stick fighting in abandoned factories, tag in industrial waste. The memory comes like a balloon popping: jarring, disconcerting, sudden; yet, not unexpected under pressure.

It is on a hot, wet day in the Summer of 1997 that we find the fabled neighborhood stash of woods porn. (Strange to think that mine was the last generation to seek such things, before the internet became ubiquitous.) The magazines are in a hard shell briefcase, stuffed into a cement cylinder, that has been abandoned in an empty lot just past the train tracks. The landscape is obscured only by a thin stand of trees, the last unscarred pieces of ancient wetland standing guard. I pick up a magazine with the others. I let the pages run through my fingers. When I come to the photo of the blonde in the bob, out loud I say: “I want her.” In my head, a voice echoes: “I want to be her.” The echo lingers.

Exorcism

The pain is so powerful it is meditative, I am wholly embodied. It is Fall of 2021, and I have been in transition for a year. I find the pain strangely satisfying, as if the laser is cooking more than the hair follicles out of my face. As if it is burning me clean, making me new again.

The smell gets to me, though. The swelling, the tenderness, the light UV burn that set in leaving my face looking tenderized: all of that feels necessary, cathartic. No, it’s only the acrid stink of burning hair that bothers me. It lingers on me, under my skin. I smell it for days as the singed hairs worm their way out. The scorched roots stand like tiny blackheads and I want to pluck them out with tweezers, but I am learning to be patient. My eyes swim under the tinny UV goggles, tears pooling at the rim. A cup half full. A cup running over.

The laser treatment is only ten or fifteen scorching minutes, short enough I can grit my teeth and let the tears well under the metal goggles. Eventually, after that course of treatment is run, I will turn to electrolysis and then to a home IPL device, convinced that turning all these devices on myself might expose something hidden. That the light I cast inside might push my secrets out by the root.

Becoming

I scrutinize the face in the same downstairs bathroom mirror where I first saw her smile. It is Michigan, 2022. My hand cups my chin, I turn my head left, then right. I tip it back. I scrutinize the blasted landscape, admiring the patches of hair that will never grow back. Trying to identify the patches that will.

It is a rebirth, a renewal, an unmasking, one that I later realize goes on interminably. I learn in my skin, my flesh, my bones, that to be, to exist, is an unending chain of becoming with narrative links. I, I, and I.

My reflection smiles back, and there is no I hidden behind my eyes. I keep the canvas of our wedding photo on the wall. I remind myself that the face on the canvas is someone who is not dead, but passed. Me, but past-me. I in another tense.

Ess Pokornowski (she/they) is a late-blooming trans, queer, and crip writer. She’s published and taught about bodies, fantastic monstrosity, violence, and justice. She earned a Ph.D. in English from UC Santa Barbara, serves as a staff reader at The Adroit Journal, and lives with her partner, their pets, and gnawing anxiety.