Between the folds

21/7/2021

The day was gentle and expectant. It was one of those days with God rays bathing the white and turquoise kitchen, making dust swirl languidly in ways that spelled out afternoon siesta, but not quite yet, let's just linger for a little while, awake. The air smelled citrusy and was warm on the skin. We were doing the dishes, bumping our butts against each other every now and then. I would come up behind you, ironically over-performing my deviant gender identity, and pretend to hump you. At that point I felt like an eternal boy riding his bicycle in short pants, even though I always cherished a floral dress and red lipstick. As non-binary as they come, or a boi in drag, one could say. You felt euphoric, feminine, me coming behind you like that while you did chores. We had accepted that our gender consciousness had been systematically chiseled by a society that urged us to succumb unwittingly to pre-existing moulds. Thus, the least we could grant ourselves was not policing what made us feel warm and fuzzy inside, when we had struggled so much to internalize that feeling warm and fuzzy was a radical form of resistance. 

On days like this I would worship your body, play with it. I would bite your ear and pinch your love handles while you pretended to be annoyed. Eventually you would turn around and grab me by the waist, inevitably stronger than me, the clouds of your name turned into a jaunty kind of micro-thunder. You smelt earthy, of wheat and yesterday's sweat. "Who's laughing now?" you would cackle, tickling me and threatening to eat my nose, before ceasing to let me catch my breath, and asking me in a faintly strangled voice: "Do you think your mother will like me or will she hate my new sandals and my stupid toes?"

I stared gravely at you. "She won't let you step on her impeccably mawed lawn with those goblin toes."

I cackled while you simultaneously complained and fed the cats. It was teatime for them. The bedroom, smelling faintly of ammonia and lavender from the litter boxes, was filled with their infantile voices protesting starvation. The beige and peach tones of my surroundings had turned into lavish platinum from the sun that was pooling on the tiles, making my eyelids heavy with summer. 

I lay down and my limbs melted inside the swamp of bedding. The cats, their hunger now satisfied, found their respective places: Kate, your beloved chaotic black boy snuggled up on my feet, and Gatis, the grey beast that stole my heart six years ago, nested on the crook of my neck. I watched the small, wet gap between miniscule teeth and her delicate bearded chin as she inhaled the air I exhaled, or maybe the other way around, an antisocial feline with a babyish meow and a clingy disposition towards me, always saturating my loneliness with kinship, softness, boundaries, and conversation. 

It was nap time, and I loved the intimacy of the habit: drifting with family.

24/7/2021

Mum brought us mushroom pasta à la crème, crackers with cheese, the fluffy lemon pie you had brought, and filtered coffee with ice. Seeing you for the first time, assessing and approving you, she looked like a little girl, graceful and timid yet playful, dressed in purple and orange, tired and refined, small lines framing her olive-green eyes as she laughed genuinely at our jokes. You had both been feeling nervous about the meeting, but soon the tension was diffused, and we leaned into the familiarity of the setting sun, the pleasant breeze, the trim lawn, and Lucy, the cherished family beagle.

My dad, fat, thinning hair, charming and eternally boyish, took up space telling us stories from his army years. You engaged politely even though the thought of mandatory army service had been a cause of great suffering and anxiety during the previous winter, when you had to present psychiatric evidence to be exempted. My brother was getting ready for his army service and was quite pumped up about it. It was a thorn prickling against our family ribcage, his refusal to attend university and his admiration for all things military, conservative, and reactionary. The family mantra at the time was "the army will either do him good, force him to mature, or it will be detrimental and lead us to lose him completely."

The fact that he was joining us at the table, ostensibly carefree but looking a bit lost, had been a cause for surprise, as well as concern for the both of us. The house we were visiting, the home I had grown up in, was haunted with memories of violence, of children fighting viciously, of stationery and toys being thrown around with the intention to hurt, of breath-stopping word-punches in the stomach. His reputation had reached your mother who, creased with concern, had advised you to text her should anything go wrong.

We had been together for almost a year, and our parents were either relieved and elated at the prospects of a heteronormative relationship or just genuinely liked us for each other (why not both?). The fact that we appeared like a genderbent version of our trans selves was not doing their fantasy any harm either. In their mind, I had finally settled for a smart, nice boy. How wrong they were! But still, it was a milestone of approval we were after, so that our historically turbulent lives could finally enjoy some peace, assisted by their emotional and practical support. The closet was the price we had to pay for the privilege of parental presence.

Our silence had never been hollow, an absence of words: instead, it was theatrical, conciliatory, convincing in what it disguised, affirming of people’s assumptions, loud and provocative, a word play. Our existence was subtextual, we found shelter in the crevices of interpretation, we blossomed in the fields of others’ guesswork.

28/7/2021

​I am eighteen, in the car with my parents, heading to an award ceremony of the French Institute of Athens for a competition I have participated in. I’m sitting in the passenger’s seat to handle the music on the speakers, and my mum is sitting on the back seat. These days I’ve been burning with the desire to yell my newfound bisexuality from rooftops, but most of all I cannot wait but share it with my parents. I know that their progressive views are finite, so I swallow the ball of excitement that pulsates in my throat, and speak broadly for gay rights instead.

“I am wondering why you keep putting gay characters in your stories,” my mum tuts. Dad has shared his fair share of homophobic ideas in the past, but we fought, I cried, and I emailed him all the recent scientific literature on the matter, which made him stood corrected on his dated knowledge from his psychiatry class in university. After that he slowly changed his approach, or at least changed what he would share with me.

“It’s stories,” he tells her. “People write about all kinds of subjects in stories, it isn’t a bad thing.”

“Yes, but she seems to have a certain obsession.”

“I put deaf characters in my stories, I put immigrants. Why shouldn’t I put gay ones?” the throbbing in my neck has started sinking down my stomach.

“I don’t understand why you relate so much to them.”

“She doesn’t necessarily relate to everyone she writes about!”

“Exactly,” I retort, saved by dad. “And they are people whose rights are being violated every day. I care about rights. I care about the whales’ rights, doesn’t make me a whale.”

The car passes through Syntagma, turns to Panepistimiou street. We’ve got good arguments, it’s going well. It seems like we’re going to get out of this alive.

“And besides, things are changing, mum. People are accepting their true selves. Homosexuality hasn’t been considered a mental disorder by the psychiatric community since 1975. Now people believe they should be free to try different things in order to find who they really love. People have started opening their relationships…?”

“And is this what you want to live like?”

“You know what, would it matter if I did?”

My mum’s olive green gaze is piercing, her painted lips pressed together. “Yes, it would,” she says, “and honestly, I’m sad because I see what people you have started hanging around with, I see what they’ve put in your head.”

Dad pulls up in front of the French Institute of Athens. Mum opens the door, gets out of the car, and slams it behind her. I am about to receive an award for my short claymation film in French about the Mediterranean sea. The prize I receive is three animation DVDs in French, on of which, Persepolis, will change my life. My mother snaps photos of me on the stage, but refuses to speak to me for the rest of the day. After we return home, Dad stays in the car with me as I burst into tears of despair. All my life I had been telling my parents everything. They knew which guys I was into in school, I would discuss my relationship drama with them, they supported me dating George at an age when most of my friends had to hide their romantic escapades from their parents. No one has prepared me for their limitations, for the fact that there would be one thing I wouldn’t be able to discuss with them. I am grieving this fresh loss. My father drives to a distant tavern in the suburbs. We need to talk.

Snapshot: I talk and cry. I tell him about the opening of my relationship with George, I tell him about Elena and our stolen kisses behind the university bathrooms, I tell him about how girls make me feel, that they taste like spring and that they understand me better. He knows that about girls. Throughout he manages to maintain his calm. He doesn’t know the right thing to say. He wants to support me but he is at a loss for words. He tells me it’s all ok. To this day I won’t know how he really felt, and that’s exactly what I need: to not know. To just hear that it’s all ok.

Snapshot: Kitchen. I have just told my mother that I have an open relationship with George, and that I have been with a girl. I tell her it’s normal. She stands up and asks me if she should dump my dad and start going out with girls as well. Another door is slammed.

Snapshot: Christmas party at my place. My new queer friends come over. I have a joke with Irini, my new lesbian bestie, about getting married. We’re laughing at gender roles. I wear white and she, tiny, wears her dad’s jacket and a fedora hat. She has painted a moustache on. My mum sees us. My parents think there’s weed in the house. My friends sleep over and puke in the guests’ bathroom. Irini and Eleni sleep together. In the morning, my mum traps George in the kitchen and questions him about my new friendships, asks whether he approves of them. My mum never got over the idea of two girls having sex in her house.

Snapshot: Demonstration outside the parliament for the passing of the civil partnership law. I have recently twisted my ankle at some queer party, dancing on it while pining for Stefanos who was making out with someone else. I receive a text from my mum “you have a twisted ankle and you told me you were going out for coffee but you went to support the gays instead!!!!!!” She has spotted me limping on TV.

Snapshot: About two years later, in the car with Mum. We have made a lot of progress, she hates the fact that I’m bisexual but her love for me is stronger so we have stopped arguing about it. She is learning Dad’s way, not showing how she really feels about my choices, in a way, respecting me. I tell her about that instance with the demonstration on the TV. She genuinely has forgotten it, but remembers something else.

“I didn’t want to tell you, but I saw Stefanos on TV, speaking at the parliament as a representative for trans rights. That means he is trans, right?”

“What do you think trans means, mum?”

“Doesn’t it mean that he likes to dress as a woman? That he’s going out with men?”

I’m so taken aback I don’t know what to tell her. She knows nothing. She thinks Stefanos is a cis man who crossdresses and cheats on me. We’re parked under grandma’s place. I wonder what her upbringing must have been like for her views of the world to be so distorted. She never had a chance to come to terms with our queerness, she still doesn’t know who we are. I reassure her that Stefanos is not cheating on me, and ask her the most pressing question. “Do you actually like Stefanos, mum?”

She doesn’t, and I know it’s misguided. “Of course I like him!” she blurts out. “But I will never pretend I like that gender stuff you’re both working on.”

Snapshot: I’m in the sea, swimming with mum. She looks different in her swimsuit, with her little hat on for the sun. She looks approachable, vulnerable, even. The world is light blue and this is our moment. It hasn’t been like that for so long. “I was scared you would stop loving me, mum.”

“I will never stop loving you,” her eyes well up. “You’re my baby.”

Snapshot: In a minimalist golden frame, on the bookcase by my desk. Mum is 30 and looks 18. She smiles with her heart, like a little girl, holding toddler me in an inflatable swimming pool on the sand. I am playing with the waves and chewing on my doll. She looks at the camera expectantly, with the sun on her back. Today I look so much like her. I burn like her. I explode like her. And we’re healing in parallel directions.

Roland Barthes wrote that “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body”. The feeling of her damp swimsuit and the cool skin of her thigh always visits me when I sit down to write about where I came from. In writing, I can tell her everything I’ve ever wished. I am in love with my mother’s body. I am in love with my mother, it isn’t hard to admit. I am desolate but I now know how to keep on loving despite failure, despite having been let down.

When I’m with her I choose to identify as a person she can understand. In things below her threshold, I explain myself, I let her know. Beyond her limitations, I become silent. I cannot stand her silence, I cannot go through her distance, never again. Choosing my mum, I decide to hide my new-found identity as a non-binary person. She doesn’t have to know. She will never understand, and maybe she doesn’t need to. Choosing myself, I decide to step back because I need my mother. And for that to work, there is one requirement on both ends: I need to be legible to her - at least partly. I need to be someone my mother recognizes. So I shatter. I am scattered.

Snapshot: I found a boyfriend, mum. I’m over that malaka Stefanos. Look at us, mum, aren’t we a pretty picture? We are in love, we went to Ireland, he got me a ring with an amethyst, we’re gonna get married. How glad I am to finally see you happy, child, how you make the world glow!”

Snapshot: Nephellie is in the closet too. Or rather, more specifically, she’s sitting in front of the closet of my one-room apartment at Vyronas. Behind her head the rooftops of the city and, tiny, the Acropolis. She’s sitting on a chair and I’m painting her eyelids. In the photos from our travels she doesn’t wear makeup - she doesn’t feel safe anymore - they recognize us as a harmless heteronormative couple. A girl and a boy. A boy and a girl. We live fourteen lives, we speak in code, we change out of clothes fast. I’m not a girl, mum, but I fell in love with one. We went to Ireland, she got me a ring with an amethyst, we’re gonna get married. I’m happy, but about things different from your dreams for me.



So I shatter and I am scattered.