I Came Out to the Dirt
by William Swift
“Dear Grandad,” I told the dirt, “I am gay.” I sat in the yard, making up songs to my favorite tree. I didn’t understand death. What I did understand was that my grandparents had all died young. Therefore, I did not have any. Death, for me, was an abstract loss marking something others had and I had never possessed. I was not raised with religion; instead, I believed what I had heard somewhere along the way: when we die our bodies become dirt.
“Were you close with your grandad?” people would ask when I told them I didn’t have one anymore. They’d say, “I’m sorry, were you close?”
No, I was very young when he died, I’d tell them, instead of explaining that he was still here in the American topsoil he had never even seen.
I was young when I knew I was queer. I came out as a lesbian at twelve before I knew what the word transgender meant. By fourteen I had come out for the second time, as a boy. But by then I stayed inside and did not talk to dirt or sit in trees patting the branches affectionately. Was I growing up or pushing down, avoiding my own further differences from others?
I wondered, as I educated everyone around me: Would my grandparents have supported me? This question never left me. Instead it reappeared as I planned a short story about a child who believed in the natural world. I thought about how I had manifested them throughout my life, how I had understood their nonexistence at a time when my coming-out narrative was reaching its climax among extended family.
I did not talk to the dirt anymore when I came out as trans, and I wasn’t sure that if I did, the dirt would understand me.
* * *
When I was thirteen I missed a homework assignment. I missed many but when I was finally caught, I was instructed to do them all that night. I had skipped them because I was tired, angry, and struggling with my differences. It went from the very fundamental—I did not have grandparents—to the more intricate: I did not feel as though I embodied “female” the way my female friends did. One of these missing assignments was a journal entry, the prompt to which was: What do you believe in?
Others had written touching paragraphs about God, themselves, or their favorite team. One wrote she believed that there was a cure for autism. That had made me cringe, but I misdiagnosed my shame over the missing assignment, not my impending screening.
My paternal grandmother was a Catholic. She believed in a heaven. When I felt the urge to speak to her, I’d address her only in my internal monologue. People in heaven could see into my thoughts, right? However, this did more harm to my mental health than it was a cathartic release. I didn’t even want to think about the urge to pick my nose in case she could see it, scared to address her and invite her inside. Is heaven where the vampiric dead linger in our thoughts?
I would talk to her sometimes because we were not close. I did not regret not being closer to her—surely it was a matter of circumstance, being so far and so young. However, I regretted the circumstances I had no control over. I had disliked going to her house, so she didn’t know I admired her. She was a stern woman and I was afraid. I hid from her in the yard or the living room, reading, letting her gruffly advise the other children about their grades and their choices. I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I avoided her. Had I squandered a chance, so young, in hiding from her sternness? Before I could be of age to wish I had let her berate me, she was gone.
I wondered, at the time of my assignment, if we had been close, would I be writing about God? Looking back now, perhaps I should have written that I believed in her. That I wasn’t sure how she was with us, but if I guessed at enough afterlife scenarios, one of them had to be right.
I missed her, but who was there to pray to? The invaders of my innermost thoughts? I could never imagine what she would say if she knew I was queer; I just wanted her to know me.
I did not confide in my teacher in a ten-line journal assignment that I had spoken to the dirt and the trees. Instead I chose the word animism. Defined, that is to believe that everything—including nature—has a soul. But I questioned (at the end, to fulfill the word count) if the souls of nature were of the dead. I remembered the dirt and pondered, in what my teacher called an incomplete thought: Did the dirt remember us?
* * *
“Your grandfather fought in Korea,” my father told me, wrapping a Band-Aid around my splinter. He held my arm for a minute after securing my finger wound. “He had a piece of shrapnel in his arm this long.” My father traced the length on my forearm to demonstrate.
“Really? What happened next?”
“Well, they took it out and he came home.”
My father had succeeded in distracting me from my pain, although his attempt at perspective was a failure. I felt my pain stronger for it, my mythical connection bonding my splinter with my heroic grandfather.
In reality I know next to nothing about my grandfather; my father is not one for verbal reminiscence. This was the first and last thing he would tell me about his father unprompted. I attended his funeral for my first birthday, but as a sickly baby I spent the rest of that week in the hospital as my father and his siblings processed their grief.
Would he have thought that I was weak? Would he have treated me male, as the patriarchal head? Would he have chopped wood with me, saying that one day I’d do it for myself? Or perhaps he would have ignored what he did not understand: the silent, studious boy assigned “girl.”
His shrapnel story inspired me; I returned to the second grade elated. My mother helped me write down a list of the things I remembered my father saying that afternoon: that he had fought in Korea and that he had been wounded by shrapnel. When I went to write, I realized that I knew nothing else—I did not know him.
Unsure of how to remember him, and having no stories to long for, I changed the subject and wrote instead about my favorite character. I couldn’t memorialize someone I did not know, and if he had lived I felt he would have sighed or shouted at my weakness, at my differences. Was he changed by the war, like the fathers and grandfathers in my books? Would he have been the patriarch overlooking his “female” grandchildren? He could be a hero instead but I don’t know him.
* * *
“You know, I think your grandad had Asperger’s.” There it was, that word again. Not Asperger’s, because we had no diagnostic paperwork for myself yet. “Had.” Word of my grandparents always came in the past tense. “He was a lot like you.”
Did that mean he would have loved me? Would our interests have aligned? Could we understand each other’s quirks? My maternal grandfather was a lot like me, but could we even have survived the alienation of gender nonconformity?
What did you do over the summer?
“I went to visit my grandparents in Florida,” one child said.
“We went on vacation,” said another.
These stories seemed mythical, of retirement and exiting a plane to the welcoming arms of an older couple. How could I say that I had used my summer to research extensively my latest obsessions? I had filled notebooks, prepared slideshows never to be presented, and created a blog for my thoughts.
I had started drawing floor plans for a fort I’d make of sticks. I had outlined, via cross section, each layer and designated standards that could be tested for strength, building codes. Regulations must be followed. Of course, it was sticks and leaves; there was not much for me to consider. All in all, the “work” took eight hours. And that was just one day.
Another day I sat on the floor of my bedroom and produced two forms of book inventory for my shelves—still holding everything from children’s books to a study of modern Japan—handwritten with an online backup. One hundred thirty-seven at one house, two hundred five at the other, including all of Dostoyevsky’s works. I had heard that my grandad was reading Dostoyevsky when he died, and I figured if I read them all, at some point we would be connected through time by the same words.
On this particular day my mother had told me, once again, that I was just like my grandad. He always read stuff nobody else would enjoy, she said, he always made funny little notes. She said it with no sharpness, rather nostalgia for her parent and an untested theory on the mind of her child.
When I came out I noticed the masculinity in my interests and the way I had fit a gender role unintentionally. I also came to understand that the rates of assigned-female children being diagnosed with autism is much lower than that of males. To bond myself so closely to the spirit of my grandad, yet not know if he would even see himself in a “female” child, let alone a trans one, confused me to no end. Could we have shared our neurodivergence before I came out, and once I had, would I have been alienated from him? Grandad was different too, but I wonder if the old man would have understood me. Could he have gotten to know me, largely unresponsive in the heat of each of our fixations?
He was the grandparent I would speak to, thinking perhaps the dirt where he had lived had stowed via plane, been trod on and carried to me. Thinking he was so similar, I spoke to him the most and with the most fondness—drawing gentle curves in the dirt with a twig. Sometimes I feel like I do know him, a man I never met. Do I?
* * *
“What do the kids know about your mom? Do they know why we don’t see her?” I asked my aunt around my maternal grandmother’s birthday. She had left the family when my mother was young and stayed away until she was an adult.
“Sometimes it comes up, when we’re out doing some shopping or having a nice day and I say, ‘I wish I had this growing up.’ They say, ‘You didn’t?’ and I say, ‘No.’”
My mother had always said her mother didn’t deserve to know us. We didn’t get to see her because she didn’t deserve grandkids for what she did. But that stung—did I not deserve to know her?
She was my only living grandparent, and I spoke to her just once. I was allowed to request the family genealogy I was fixated on, to get any documents she might have. When we met I tried to look her in the eye, but a blood vessel had burst in one. I felt as though the blood spot that made me squirm divided us by divine will. Our shared blood divided, not bonded, us. Blood was not thicker than water. It was a barrier, interminably reminding me that she was not my living grandparent; she was a woman who had pictures to give me. I will always remember her with blood in her left eye. I didn’t have any memories with which to replace it.
I studied her sepia-toned pictures, dated back through all her extended family. I charted each member on a poster board hidden in the back of my closet. I wanted to feel the fictional moment of enlightenment, an epiphany of predestined connection. I did not. Instead, I felt as though I’d lost something, lost the chance for a grandparent. Why didn’t I get to know her? Does she know that I’m trans? Has the rest of my family told her?
My loss was a loss of my coming-out day. The loss of my chosen moment, the time when eyes should be on me, when she should have told me she loved me still. I didn’t lose a presence, I lost a moment. I was grieving her already, grieving my coming-out narrative. I lost her long before she died.
* * *
Sitting here now, it doesn’t feel any less removed to consider the role of the grandparent in the world. It is not a childhood sadness that can be remembered with objective fondness. I wish I could mourn and remember, reminisce on a life well lived. Perhaps it is the ode to what could be, in its own way, grief embodied? Grieving all the days that never were but without the blunted edges of memories?
I cannot say that this is grief or even what is. Those on the other side of this looking glass might not be pleased to hear that I wish I had something that I could lose. Everyone has something left to say to their loved ones, but I’m not sure where I would even begin.
* * *
So, as this piece took a very different direction from its original plan, I found myself wondering if I should come out to the family that isn’t with us, although I have been out for many years now. Still not a believer, how better to do it than to speak to the dirt. If nothing else, it would honor the actions of my youth with a transcendent reflection through time.
Today I put on my oldest shorts—with the care of an adult scared to ruin something nice—and sat on a stump. I bent over at the waist and played absentmindedly with twigs and stones, running them through the loose topsoil.
“Grandmas, Grandads, I am trans.”
I came out to the dirt, and the dirt did not answer me.
William Swift is an emerging trans author who explores gender identity, hybrid nationality, and neurodivergence in his work. Previous publications include the Wingless Dreamer Verses in Rainbow anthology, and a forthcoming edition of Frontier magazine. William graduated from the University of Sheffield, and now works as an caption editor and audio description writer in New York State.
Image source: Zbynek Burival/Unsplash
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