BACKWARDS
NIKOLAI KESSON
I watched a really torture-porny horror movie the other day. You know that kind? It was way too graphic. A guy’s head got taken off with a bookshelf.
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The opening scene of the movie is two girls in a car. The girl in the backseat wakes up from a nap looking kind of disoriented and says that she had a strange dream: she was being chased through the woods. The girl driving looks puzzled and asks who was chasing her. The girl in the backseat says, “That’s the weirdest thing. It was me. I was chasing myself.”
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I started thinking about horror a lot during quarantine. I was never particularly interested in it before, but I slowly found myself writing about it and drawing it and streaming it illegally at 720p quality. A lot of the movies that I watched were stupid-- a dude buys a box with a demon in it on the dark web, opens said box, dies-- but a lot of them had something about them that I very deeply connected to. I don’t know what exactly it was. All I know is that horror seemed to give my emotional state a greater sense of congruency. The enormous amount of terror and grief that I felt in my reality had somewhere to go, finally-- somewhere to be witnessed and acknowledged and simply felt at all. I watched horror movies first around the time of the 2020 election, and then again, a few months later, when I realized I was trans.
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This paper was supposed to be a horror paper. More of a horror paper, anyway. At the beginning of this semester, I decided to take an independent study with a writing professor I had had before-- Jennifer-- to help me along with writing it, because I knew I would hit the wall. I wanted a second person (besides Raymond, my actual teacher for this paper) to reach out to when I started to hit the wall. Jennifer was not ever fully convinced I was hitting the wall.
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As she was reading an early draft for this paper-- a draft that was more horror-focused-- she wrote in the margin, “Final girl. You want revenge.” That kinda threw me. I didn’t want revenge. Revenge was never a thought in my head.
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The final girl is a horror movie trope that fits both the lesbian lead girl from High Tension and Thomasin from The Witch. It’s essentially when, in a film, there is a girl who survives all other characters (and sometimes the villain). At the end of her arc, she is usually met with some cathartic breakdown of herself, some twisted come-to-jesus moment that changes her fundamentally. It’s not a desirable thing to be a final girl. Though she ultimately lives, her life is still over. I almost wonder if that’s the same as being dead. She isn’t -- that’s the whole point-- but she’s done. Her life is done.
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Jennifer’s “Final girl” comment was referring to a bit I had written about a married man in his 40s being unavailable to me despite my terribly large crush on him. She was referring to this fact as a small piece of the larger pattern of straight men not liking me. I didn’t see how that was their fault. I didn’t feel wronged by that at all. Still, there was this weird feeling inside of me when she said it, like there was something actually there, and if I scratched at it a little, it would emerge, solid, fully formed. Like there was a stray thread at the edge of my passivity, and if I pulled it, the whole thing would unravel before my eyes.
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Nathan was a guy who worked at my office. I would call him my coworker, but he was sort of in charge of me, as was every single other person at that job, so I don’t know if that’s fitting. My job was digital menial labor at a publishing company: closed captioning, adding links to websites, bookmarking PDFs. I was a “Digital Productions Assistant.” In my head, I called myself the clicking bitch.
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The office itself was a combination of modern and minimalist. The ceiling was high and unfinished, like a warehouse, which felt incongruent to the clean open floor plan of white cubicles and the colorful, soundproof rooms to make phone calls in. The doors and some of the walls of these rooms were made of glass, so when you walked by them to go to the bathroom, you could watch some middle aged woman point at figures on a projected spreadsheet, her mouth moving soundlessly as her colleagues watched with mild interest. There was also a kitchen with a shiny granite island and a full but unappealing fruit bowl, and the company ordered bagels on Fridays and Qdoba for lunch, I guess in an effort to keep up team morale. The carpet was an office carpet, the kind that’s sort of multicolored and dark in order to hide dirt easily. By the front desk, there were those candy machines that you crank and they dispense into your palm. They were always full of skittles. I was never really tempted.
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When I was there, I sat at a white desk in a cubicle on a spinny chair, kicking my feet as I listened to Comedy Central’s This is Not Happening and bookmarked PDFs that were sent to me on Slack. Sometimes people would smile politely at me as they walked past my desk. There was this strange sense of formality, despite everyone’s friendliness, that felt almost sterile, like a hospital or a movie set, and I was unsure of how to navigate it. I didn’t speak much because everyone was so much goddamn fucking older than me. My coworkers approached me in a friendly but restrained manner, the way you might interact with a dog you don’t yet trust. I think it was because I was 18. Too young to befriend, too old to exclude.
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Nathan did not exclude me. I never felt excluded by Nathan.
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The torture porn horror movie I watched was called High Tension. It was French and dubbed, and a lot of the sentences felt strange and clumsy. The plot of it was also strange: a girl brings her (clearly lesbian) friend to her family farm, and then a serial killer breaks into the house and murders the whole family save for the girl, whom he kidnaps. The (lesbian) friend then tries to save her for most of the movie. I didn’t like the twist at the end, though. It made me feel weird, like being queer is so monstrous that you split like that and lose yourself completely. That obsession can engulf you so entirely that you no longer are aware of the harm you’re causing. It’s easier to think of the bad part of you as a separate entity. It’s easy to do it unconsciously; to cut out the dirty thing, to become less and less aware of it until it is a dim thing in your periphery. To ignore and ignore it until you can’t see it anymore.
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Jennifer told me, as she was reading the free writes for this paper, that I had to SHOW the obsession. I still don’t know how to do that. What should I do to make you understand? Describe Nathan more?? Fine. For your mental picture, he had a pac man tattoo on his upper arm. He had a standing desk (he was very conscientious about his health, I think) and he always had at least 5 windows open (multiple tabs each) that he would click between. Once, one of them was a livestream of a soccer game. Nathan had freckles on his forearms and his hair and eyes were the same light orange-brown. Not ginger enough to be ginger, but in my head I classified him that way.
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See? That revealed nothing for you. That didn’t help at all.
I don’t want to look at the dirty thing that is me.
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I want to ignore it until it isn’t real anymore.
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I remember having a very strong conception, pretty early on, that Nathan could not like me. Not just that he wouldn’t, but that it was a physical impossibility. I was so nothing at this job. I was so quiet and 18 and uncomfortable, and he was charismatic, almost overwhelmingly so. The quietness was, in part, because of my discomfort, but it was equally because it was more gratifying to just listen to him talk than to actually converse. I wanted to absorb things about him so I could collect him in my head: His speech pattern. The way he seemed, constantly, both cheerful and agitated. The pep in his step. The way he complained. Sardonic. The world was a game. Why the hell was this person talking to me?? I had no fucking clue. When I met him, he was hobbling around the kitchen because he had fucked up his ankle in a skateboarding accident. I remember that he was wearing skinny jeans and converse and that he was explaining the incident with a sort of dry humor, like he was pissed that it happened but amused by it all the same. “It came out from under me,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. “My fault, though. It was stupid.” He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and tossed it to himself, his eyes following the arc. Then he nodded to me and gave me a little wave. “Good to meet you, [deadname].”
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It’s hard to capture, but I liked him, man. I just really liked him.
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When I watched the horror film Lake Mungo, I couldn’t stop thinking about the scene where Alice dreamt of her own death before she knew she would die. I can’t stop thinking of the way she described it: “I was cold and heavy, like I’d been drugged. Everything felt wrong: my body, the way things looked…” I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
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A few weeks later, I got very high by myself. I was alone in my room, on my twin size bed, looking up at my fairy lights that wrapped around the curtain rod and framed the window. I was thinking about Lake Mungo again. Alice Palmer, who drowns in a dam, has dreams before her death where she is standing at the foot of her parent’s bed. As she stands there, she realizes there’s something wrong with her, that there's nothing they can do for her anymore, and her sadness turns to fear. “And I started to cry,” she says, “standing there at the foot of the bed.”
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As I laid in bed, I remember looking at the doorway to my walk in closet. I had put a curtain in the doorway with a tension rod, and it was fluttering in the breeze of the open window. I had imagined a person standing there, in the doorway at the foot of my bed. I imagined the girl me, the person from before, cupping her hands over her waist, futilely trying to get her fingertips to meet at the center. The waterlogged me. The bloated corpse me. I had imagined her at the bottom of the dam. Dead dead dead. The article about Lake Mungo I read said “Dead or alive, Alice has no future.” Yeah, yeah. Maybe that’s transness. Is [deadname] dead? Sure, or not at all, depending on how you ask the question. It’s not the right question, though. That’s the thing. Is [deadname] dead? How the hell should I know? Does [deadname] exist anymore? Who knows. Who fucking cares.
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If she does, she has no future. If she does, she’s standing there crying at the foot of the bed.
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If she does, there’s nothing I can do for her anymore.
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After Covid, the office closed permanently. Nathan became a funny fragmented thing that no longer had anywhere to live in my mind. Because of this, he sort of cropped up in my brain aimlessly, bouncing around within me like a desktop screensaver. I couldn’t picture what his life looked like at all. In the summer, when he was still assigning me work, he would sometimes tell me small, inconsequential things about himself-- the classes he was taking, the goals that he had-- and I tried to shape his day in my mind, feeling around in the dark for it. I could never do it. I guess I thought if I were able to imagine his life, I would have a greater ability to touch it. If I thought about him hard enough, said his name three times, he would emerge-- step out of my mirror-- and the strange hunger within me would cease. The weird clawing inside of me would be solved by this witty but ultimately fallible human person. Nathan would sometimes message me Kirby gifs with my assignments because he knew I liked Kirby, and when he did this, I felt a painful tug. Want want want. It was like there was this lonely little kid in my brain kicking and screaming and sobbing. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. Well, I would think to myself sternly, you can’t have him. Someone could notice things about me that other people didn’t and I could cling to the shirttails of whatever that was, but I could go no further. I could receive gifs; I could not be touched.
You want revenge. Revenge for what? For not being wanted? For being wanted incorrectly?
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No, no. It isn’t that. It can’t be.
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There was a period of time over the summer when I had a terrible crush on my therapist, and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted him to do about it. I wanted him to touch me and I wanted him to stay the hell away from me. When I told him about it, about how lonely I was and how strange and extreme my feelings were for him and how I was afraid he would take advantage of me, there was a beat of silence as he processed, and then he looked at me, concerned. “I understand everything you’re telling me,” he said. “What can I do to assure you that I would never do that?” He didn’t lean closer; he didn't make it more intimate. Relief and disappointment flooded me. I could feel my face turning red. Maybe not everyone with the power to hurt me wants to hurt me, I thought. This was an obvious fucking revelation, but it was not at all obvious to me. I looked back at him, at the 26 year old intern that I told my every terrible thought to, and I dropped my head between my knees, embarrassed. “I don’t know,” I said, muffled. “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
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The funny thing about the crush on my therapist was that it was happening concurrently with my crush on Nathan, and it was happening, I thought, for almost no reason at all. My therapist-- who I won’t name because I’m going to be a little mean here-- shared no qualities with Nathan. He was not particularly charismatic or confident. He was not snarky (which I guess is good if you’re a therapist) or particularly funny. Sometimes he wasn’t even very insightful. I was also not physically attracted to him. At all. He handled my weird feelings towards him pretty gracefully, all things considered, admitting to me only when it was over that it had felt very strange on his end. “‘That was a weird time period,” I said to him during a recent session, after the crush had receded. “Yeah,” he said, frowning. He had a funny look on his face, like he was simultaneously incredibly uncomfortable and trying not to laugh. “I didn’t see that coming at all.”
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The whole situation seemed to indicate that the obsession with Nathan wasn’t fully Nathan-based, as I had initially assumed. When I was the most fixated on him, I didn’t really think about why it was happening, but getting the same strange obsessive crush on my therapist later on made me consider that maybe the obsession was separate from me; that it wasn’t really about Nathan at all. Maybe it was malware in my brain. Maybe it wasn’t even indicative of what I actually desired. I mean, really, he was married and 40. What the fuck was my ideal scenario here? What on earth did I actually want to happen? Even with that aside, Nathan was just a guy who happened to be charismatic. Just a coworker who made me laugh. How could that alone lead to the level of obsession that I had reached? It was the first time that I actually understood that there was something weird going on with me, that the obsession issue was more about me than anyone else. That there was something about him (something not unique to just him) that had triggered some crazy mechanism in my brain, a mechanism (perhaps once useful) that had gone totally awry, slipped from my grasp, a runaway train careening off of its tracks.
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I had started going to my therapist because of the whole ‘being trans’ thing. He was helpful, generally, but a lot of our sessions in the beginning were very circular. I think it was user error. I remember being hunched over my computer in my childhood bedroom, looking at him through the zoom window, asking him things like, “What is my gender?” “Should I get top surgery?” How the fuck was he supposed to know? He tried his best to coax me towards a description of what I wanted to look like or be called, but my constant terror at potentially getting it wrong-- of not knowing myself so fundamentally-- made me inconsolable. I think what I wanted, more than any particular form or presentation of myself, was to do something correctly. When I couldn’t commit to womanhood-- when I could only half ass it, when I felt it hid or distorted the person I actually was-- I always thought it was because of a lack of something on my part. I was a woman, sure, but there was something about me that was clumsy and ugly, and being a woman was HARD TO DO. It didn’t occur to me that if I had to try so goddamn hard to be this thing that I didn’t even particularly enjoy being, then maybe I shouldn’t have to be that thing at all.
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My therapist tried to get me there, but it was hard to see it at first. It was hard to forgive myself for failing at womanhood; for what, in my mind, was the most astronomical fuck-up of my life.
It was hard. It was just hard.
...
“I don’t know how to explain it to people,” my mom says.
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She’s talking to me on the phone. Facetime audio. When I call her, she is confused about why my face doesn’t show up when she picks up. (“Where are you?” “I’m right here, mama.”)
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“I feel like it’s your story, your journey,” she continues, “so you should tell it. I can’t just tell my friends you changed your name to Niko and not say anything else.”
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I shake my head, a gesture that she can’t see. I’m on my twin size mattress, looking out over the neighboring apartment rooftop. The leaves on the tree outside of my window are as big as dinner plates. If we weren’t having such a terse conversation, I would tell her that the sky is pink.
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“Sure you can, mom.” I press my middle finger onto the window pane and watch the glass fog over around it. “You can just say that I have a different name and pronouns and leave it at that.”
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There’s a pause. I hear her sigh. I imagine her face: she’s tired. It makes me sad.
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“They don’t know what transgender is,” she says finally. “This wasn’t a thing when I was growing up.”
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We’ve always been a thing, but I don’t say that to her.
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“Well...” I start, “I need you to know that this isn’t going to go away.”
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I pause.
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“I can text Maryanne if you want… Explain it to her…”
I trail off. I wonder if she wants it to be explained or if she just wants it to go away. I wonder, briefly, if she is asking me to make it go away.
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I remove my finger from the glass. My fingerprint is just barely visible; I have to tilt my head funny for the light to catch it, and then I can see the whole thing. A small, irrefutable remnant of me. The fog around it begins to dissipate.
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I don’t know if I am supposed to apologize to her for not being able to do the thing she wants, because I can’t do the thing that she wants. I can’t be the thing that she wants me to be. I can’t un-be the thing that she doesn’t want me to be.
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“How about…” she says finally, “when you come home for Thanksgiving, you can sit down with me and help me.”
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Another pause.
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“We’ll write some letters.”
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It’s darker out now. The sky is still pretty, pretty enough to still be worth mentioning, but I don’t tell her what it looks like. I don’t know why her promise of letters doesn’t feel better to me. When I was in high school and walked to the bus stop in the morning, she used to ask me when I got home if I saw the moon, if I saw how beautiful it was. A small thing we both used to notice. It upsets me that the transness was too heavy to be interrupted by something meaningless and pretty like that; that I couldn't break the tension by telling her about the sky. I’m not mad at her for my transness being hard for her and I’m not mad at myself for being trans, but the conversation made me realize the weight of the transness. It made me aware of how the transness was changing our relationship, and it upsets me. It upsets me deeply.
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She was trying, though. She was.
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I close my eyes and take a breath.
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“That sounds good, mama.”
...
Raymond starts class by asking an open ended question and takes attendance by having everyone answer it. Which of these sensitive topics is hardest to talk about? What are the rules of your own reality show? If I could buy you anything, what would it be? A lava lamp, I had told him. Or top surgery. As if top surgery were an afterthought to me. Sure, if you get around to it, top surgery. Raymond had some immediate and witty response that I can no longer remember, and we moved on. The next person answered-- something something unlimited tattoo funds-- and I silently wondered how and when I had become so open about my being trans. I wondered how I had become okay with telling my teacher that I wanted him to fund the removal of my tits, and how I had become okay with sitting in the beat of silence as he processed this request. Two months ago, the thought of admitting that to anyone besides my therapist and immediate circle of friends was unthinkable. It was nothing. I was hiding underneath the cisgender thing that had been me until it was safe to come out, safe to move forward. I guess it was now, but I didn’t really get why.
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In The Witch, the final girl, Thomasin, signs the devil’s book. Her whole family is dead at this point; she has no other choice. She’s seduced, sort of-- the devil initially takes the form of the family goat, Black Phillip, but eventually transforms into a man with a soft, commanding voice. Satan never fully comes into view. He’s half in shadow, standing behind her, telling her she can have everything she wants if only she would come with him. It is overtly sexual.
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“Remove thy shift,” he tells her. She does. She stands naked in front of the book.
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“I cannot write my name.” She says.
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“Then I will guide thy hand.”
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Despite my weird obsession problem, something miraculous happened: I got a boyfriend. I actually don’t like phrasing it like that. It sort of sounds like I’m saying that this new relationship status I have obtained will fix my quote unquote weird issue. It won’t. I know that. What I will say instead is that I have found a person to talk to who likes to talk to me. It feels very simple. What I will say is that his name is Marshall. What I will say is that he has dark blue eyes and he plays classical guitar (“I have to keep my fingernails filed so they’re shaped like a pick”) and he has a shirt that says “Harry Potter Hates Ohio” that he bought because he “just liked it.” What I will say is that he listens to what he calls “boomer music” and he self identifies as a “country bumpkin” and if I could go lay in a field with him instead of attending every class I have, I’d do it instantly.
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We haven’t been dating for that long, but his presence has sort of melted my perception of time, compressing the expansive, lonely part of college (four whole years) into a much smaller, much less burdensome thing in my head. Sometimes when I was with him, I wondered what the fuck I had been doing before him. He seemed to share this sentiment. We’d go into the attic of my co-op at night (there were mattresses on the floor and a sticker on the trapdoor that said SEX DUNGEON in all caps) and I’d lay on top of him and ask him what even existed before this. What stupid, menial things had I used to fill my time before I could shove my face into his shoulder at 8:30 P.M. on a Tuesday? “Hmm,” he’d hum into my hair, pretending to ponder the question. “Probably nothing important.”
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Marshall wasn’t freaked out by my obsession problem, which sort of threw me. I had brought it up sort of as an emergency exit for him: by the way, I have this thing about me that is crazy. Leave now or forever hold your peace. He didn’t leave, though. He thought I was smart for understanding that about myself, which he told me, and he was quite perceptive about the whole thing, too.
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“I’m not really worried about it,” he had said nonchalantly. “You get obsessed with these people who are super far out of your reach, and I’m not very concerned about you doing it to me, because you know me.”
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He smiled at me affectionately and rubbed my cheek.
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“And anyways, it seems like you only ever want the thing you made up in your head. And you’re aware of that!”
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He shrugged and flopped back down onto the attic-mattress.
“So it’s okay.”
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I stared at him for a minute.
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“Really?”
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“Sure,” he said. “Just be honest about it.”
...
I guess I thought Nathan liking me (or whatever the hell else I wanted from him) would make me real. I thought it would make me different. The Witch ends with Thomasin signing her name in the book. It ends with her, naked, covered in blood, following Black Phillip into the forest, where he leads her to a coven of naked witches around a fire. They chant together in some language that no living soul understands, and slowly all of them lift supernaturally off of the ground, levitating, tumbling upwards into the sky. Higher and higher they rise. Thomasin begins to laugh. The light of the flames dances on her face. She laughs soundlessly as she ascends, ecstatic, nearly hysterical. Cut to black. I guess I thought if I deified this arbitrary fucking guy, then he could help me achieve whatever type ascension that was. That I’d be free of whatever clumsy and ugly thing lay within me that I thought would make it impossible for Nathan to like me in the first place. That I’d stop feeling so sexually frigid and fraudulent and flat out strange. I now recognize that part of what I wanted was for him to change me into a person who COULD be a woman. For whom womanhood was not an attractive but ill fitting coat. I didn’t want Nathan wholly because I wanted Nathan; I wanted Nathan like Thomasin wanted to sign that book: a way out, just a way, any way. It’s completely ridiculous and it’s the truest thing I can say about it. I was the wrong person in the wrong life and I created an equation in which obtaining someone else would make it so I would never have to address that fact.
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Raymond said to me the other day that he thought the reason I wanted revenge was because the knowledge of my vulnerability did not make me any less vulnerable. That the vulnerability was the thing I hated; the sense of jittery rawness, a flayed wire, an open nerve. I was so terrified of going back to before, before I understood my obsession problem, back when I was straight and female and ugly and uncomfortable. I was so terrified of falling back into my head, and every time someone triggered the funny mechanism within me (as Nathan had, as my therapist had) I felt this flash of rage towards them. They weren’t going to give me what I wanted (Sex? Validation? The taste of butter? A pretty dress?) and what I wanted, if I received it, would damage me terribly. It made me so angry. It made me so angry that I had had this problem within me for so long, and that I just didn’t see it. That I just didn’t understand it. At the end of High Tension, it’s revealed that the main character, our queer final girl, was the killer all along. In the last ten minutes, she oscillates between trying to save her friend, reassuring her that they will both get out alive, and trying to kill her with a buzzsaw. Earlier in the movie, the killer is depicted as this hypermasculine ugly white man with a brick house body, but at the end, the killer is just her. We finally see behind the curtain: there was never an external evil. It was just her and her obsession. Her and her monstrous desire. It’s you. You are chasing yourself.
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Sometimes I wanted to talk to Nathan so badly that I thought my little heart was gonna explode. I was so sure that if I could just talk to him I’d stop feeling the way I felt, that I’d stop being the person I was. I was so convinced that the solution lived outside of me, that I was not the antagonist of my own dumbfuck story. I was, though. And even though I get it now-- that the obsession with Nathan had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me-- I still find myself wanting to talk to him, wanting to reach backwards through time, to tell him about my haircut and my house and my cool new clothes. It makes me want to kick myself, knowing that even though I GET that it’s me, I’m still standing there with the buzzsaw. Knowledge of the vulnerability doesn’t make you less vulnerable. What on earth do you do about that? How does one stop being the killer? I wanted to apologize to him for the whole stupid thing. I wanted, idiotically, to tell him about this paper; to tell him that I found the stupid thought loop, that I noticed it, finally, that I was trying to turn it off instead of leaving it to run in the background of my brain forever.
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I was so close to not being crazy anymore.
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I wish I could tell him how close I was to not being crazy anymore.
…
A while ago, I gave my roommate an earlier draft of this paper to read and critique. As she handed my laptop back to me, she said, quite bluntly, “I don’t know why you liked Nathan. He’s ginger and has a stupid tattoo.” I stared at her for a moment. She opened her computer and quietly continued to do her orgo homework, and I just burst out laughing. I mean, she was right. He was ginger. The tattoo was kind of stupid, wasn’t it? I dunno. I just laughed and laughed. Marshall was sitting next to me eating breakfast and reading a PDF on his computer, and it occurred to me that if I reached out and touched his arm, he would rub my shoulder and pull me closer to him. I don’t know why I even needed to know what tattoos Nathan had when there was someone next to me who I liked, who I knew enough ABOUT to like. There was a real boy next to me and he was eating a bagel and rubbing my knee and I wasn’t following him with a buzzsaw or trying to sign his book or praying that he would make me a Real Living Breathing Woman. He liked me as the person that I was, even though that person wasn’t a woman and wasn’t cis. I didn’t know that something like that could happen to me. It’s silly, but before this, I didn’t really understand how I could be romantically loved at all.
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High Tension is a very problematic movie in that it depicts queerness as this monstrous terrible thing that makes you crazy, but I think there’s a different possible reading of it. What if it isn’t the queerness that makes you crazy, but your own rejection of it? The running from it? If I hadn’t been the wrong person, I wouldn’t have needed someone else to turn me into the “right” person, ergo I would not have been crazy towards Nathan for such a ridiculous amount of time. The relationship with Marshall works because he’s just a person that I Like So Much, not because he is going to overhaul my personality into someone who can live as a woman. The life I exist in now is one where I am no longer forced to be what I am not. If I had arrived at this earlier, I might’ve been able to have normal relationships, to step out of my head and into reality, as reality would not have been intolerable.
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At the end of Lake Mungo, Alice’s family discovers some footage from her trip to a camp at Lake Mungo, a dry lake in Australia. In the footage, Alice is walking by herself in the dark through a barren landscape, and as the video progresses, a figure emerges in the distance. As it approaches Alice and comes more into focus, the audience sees that it is disfigured and pale, like a corpse. Alice’s dad, upon viewing the footage, identifies the figure as Alice’s drowned body, which he had identified to the police when she died. At this moment, a quote from Alice at the beginning of the movie comes into full focus: “I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn’t reached me yet, but it’s on its way. And it’s getting closer. And I don’t feel ready. I feel like I can’t do anything.”
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Strangely, the disturbing footage brings her family closure. I guess it clarified the inevitability of her death, somehow, and after they see it, weird things stop happening at the family house. Alice appears to be at rest.
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In the very last scene of the movie, the Palmer family moves away. It appears, at first, that they’ve moved on from Alice as best that they can, and that Alice has moved on from them. The movie shows a photograph of the family standing in front of their house one last time before they leave. Slowly, the camera begins to zoom in on a window of the house. We see a figure there-- Alice-- still inside. Alone.
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I don’t really know what happened to the person who was so obsessed with Nathan. I don’t know where that girl went. I remember how lonely she was, how bereft, and I wonder if she folded back into me when I decided to become Niko, if she sank to the bottom of me and remains there still, bloated and bloodless and pale. I wonder if I made that happen to her. If my transness was the bad thing that she wasn’t ready for. That I wasn’t ready for. The ending of this essay could make a grand point about how I’m Okay now, about how I don’t have the obsessive qualities I had before, about how I Solved It, but I can’t help but think I abandoned her. I can’t help but think that in stepping into this new identity, I moved away, left her in that house, invisible, untouchable, alone. Is there room for both of us in me? Is there room for me to have compassion for the decisions that I made, for the person that I was? I’m not sure. I just wish I could have moved forward without letting her slowly fade away. Without letting her become the ghost, the half-person that I always conceptualized her as, even as I was her.
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In short, I don’t know if I split or survived or ascended or died. I don’t know. In some ways, I have moved on from my obsessions, and in other ways, I have simply abandoned the person who had them. It’s very hard. I had to leave her behind to become myself and I wish I could apologize to her for that. And I wish I could apologize to her for the things that I did to tolerate being her at all.
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Sometimes you just have to move away. Even if the ghost is still in the house. Even if you’re abandoning someone. Even if, at one point in time, that someone was you.
It’s okay that I was crazy for years because I had to be crazy in order to be less crazy now. I am grieving the crazy person that I was. I want to apologize to that person for not being able to do more for her. I was not able to do more for her, and now I am leaving her behind.
It's ugly and it's ridiculous and it's embarrassing, and it is also just what happened. It is just what happened to me.
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It's okay that it happened this way. That I had to do it wrong until I could do it right.
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That's okay. It's okay. It's alright. It is.