following the power-lines

It's a midsummer Michigan evening. I'll be thirty two years old in less than two months. The years really do streak by like the farmland through the window of the Greyhound bus I took to the Upper Peninsula when I was eighteen. Like the shabby steel mill towns through the windows of the train I took from Detroit to Chicago too many times. It's that feeling of speeding up time, pedaling fast at sunrise with the bike messengers in San Francisco, or running past the "No Trespassing" sign and the broken beer bottles to watch the train scream by in a violent wind, then collect my flattened pennies from the rails. I'll be thirty two years old soon. And I'm not sure if I know exactly who I am, or if I haven't the faintest idea. Last night I woke at three in the morning, startled by my tattooed arms. The images of shipwrecks and sugar skulls visible even in the blue half dark of my TV-lit bedroom. Whose arms are these? Whose body is this? I'm almost thirty two and this is the first time in over ten years I've had the body of an adult, instead of the half-starved frame of a child's. I never let myself grow up. I finally let go and just let my body just... live. I let myself begin to grow up. I stopped taking the medications I was given to balance my hormones since I had messed them up from under-eating for so long. I have hips, and breasts, and all sorts of little human imperfections I am learning to accept. I used to think I should've been a boy. And I could exist in an androgynous space for many years in my child's body. Now I have no choice. I am in a grown woman's body and I have to deal with my gender, and my sexuality. I'm terrified. I used to get involved in love affairs too freely and too often. I broke many hearts, and ensnared myself in my own tangled net. Now I question whether I'm even capable of being romantically involved or attracted to anyone anymore. I've become such a loner I can't even imagine how to start making new friends. I know I'm afraid, but I don't really know what of. Sometimes I fear I've become a monster, like the ones I ran from in those buses and trains when I was eighteen. I remember how it felt to cower and cry. I remember how it felt to feel I deserved no better. Ten years later the shoe was on the other foot and I met someone who reminded me of myself back then. And I don't know why but I became this angry, controlling person, and I can never apologize enough to make up for how I behaved. I still don't understand myself. I don't know if I ever will. I've always run away from my problems. But I just began the cycle again wherever I turned up. I never started over again. Sometimes I wonder if I deserve to start over again. Sometimes I wonder if thirty two is old. Sometimes I feel so young. Sometimes I wonder if I can feel at all. Sometimes I wonder if I feel too much. I suppose I'm writing this to try to forgive myself. And to try to understand who I am. To understand why I am so afraid. Why I'm startled by my own skin at three a.m. Why I stare at my reflection and feel a stab of fear in my chest because I'm not sure who I expected but I surely didn't expect who I see. I just don't want life to be something that is just happening to me. It's a midsummer Michigan night. I'll be thirty two years old in September. I have messy hair and a sore back. I have tattooed arms, neck, and chest. I have black hair on my legs that people think I should shave. I have put my body through hell and somehow it's bouncing back. I am beginning here because there is no where else to start.