NOAH
In 1954, Dr. John C. Lilly invented the world’s first sensory deprivation tank designed to isolate the mind from the body.
The purpose of floating in an enclosed tub of water filled with approximately 850 pounds of Epson salt was to completely disconnect any distractions from a person seeking meditation, muscle relaxation, or a way to simply not be for a while.
Its effects can be astonishing. It can cause hallucinations, enhanced creativity, and increased optimism. Just floating in salt-filled water, in total silence, with only yourself; you can float away from the world.
Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like to be in a sensory deprivation tank. Sometimes, I really want to try it.
I would like to float away for a while. I’d enjoy being disconnected from the world; from my school, my house, my problems, my responsibilities.
Maybe even myself.
Don’t get me wrong; despite the fact that I absolutely adore being the half-Japanese trans kid in Northwestern Georgia, it’s got a few setbacks.
I transitioned in my sophomore year. As one can assume for someone like me who lives where I live, it wasn’t… the greatest experience. It was worth it, though… as worth it as it can be.
My dad is white; my mom is from Osaka. It’s this port town in Japan. She moved to the U.S for work and to kind of start a new life… she went through a pretty bad breakup, and some other family stuff, and then she moved here, to wondrous Decatur, Georgia.
I think she still wanted the small-town feel. She wanted to start a family, and live somewhere that was comforting; approachable. She wanted a husband and she got one, and they started their little not-so-nuclear family. She doesn’t talk to her family in Japan much; I don’t think they were very good people to her. And judging from her rare, brief descriptions of her parents, getting hitched to a white guy didn’t make things any better.
Yeah. She chose my accounting manager father who doesn’t like a lot of change other than marrying an international citizen.
So he was not exactly keen on watching his daughter slowly meld into a boy.
He still calls me “Naomi” when he can; but we don’t talk all that much, so he doesn’t often get the opportunity to do so.
I stopped wearing binders in October, the near start of my senior year. I stopped wearing them after blowing out the 18 birthday candles plugged into a frosted chocolate cake that my best friend Cassidy constructed for me and walking straight to the clinic to get the surgery that doesn’t require you to wear those damn binders any more, for the rest of your life.
I told my dad two years before that I was getting a summer job between school terms in order to save for college. He wasn’t aware of where the rest of the money was going until I came home one day wrapped in gauze.
He didn’t say much. He just looked at me, realized what I had done, looked at my chest, and stood up from the dinner table where he had eaten alone for the evening. Then, he pushed back his chair, cleared his plate, and went up to his office for the remainder of the night.
There was a fight. It came later. It led to a lot of crying into my pillow before falling asleep on school nights, but I managed.
I’m just making the better version of myself, I kept telling him. I’m becoming more me.
And he’d throw back at me, where’s my Naomi? What have you done to her?
Mei was the one who helped me pay for my top surgery. Mei, the ultimate older sister. I have about three reasons for why she is the greatest person in my life.
One. She spent a good portion of her junior year spending money at Boston College on her sibling’s transitional surgery.
Two. She is the funniest person I know.
And three… she’ll do anything for me, no questions asked.
Too bad she ditched me for an education. A really, really good education. She’s disgustingly smart. She always jokes that she “gets it from me” when I’m three years younger.
At least I have Cassidy here. Cassidy, the other greatest person in my life. There’s something about meeting your best friend in middle school and never letting go. She could care less if I was a girl, a guy, or a donkey. She just calls me up and talks to me for hours about Love Island, and I laugh at her stupid obsession with brain-cell-killing reality TV.
Cass was the one who linked her arm in mine the first day I walked into school my senior year feeling the unparalleled freedom of a flat chest, only to discover that it still didn’t provide me with any basic respect or validation from the groups of boys who offered relentless insults and taunts through snickers across the hallways.
I guess you get used to it after three years. But I thought that maybe, just maybe, getting such a body-altering surgery would change the image just enough to make them hold back a little. I was stupid to assume this.
I wish I didn’t allow it to hurt me as much as it did. It’s pathetic how it hurts. I don’t want them to win. But sometimes it just… does.
Whatever. I’ll be out of here anyways, out of this school, this town, this state, and up at college, at a school I applied to partially for their Earth and Space sciences programs and mainly for the location; a place where I can just be.
I just want to be in Seattle already. A city where people don’t do double-takes at you if they can’t tell what gender you are. A school where you can go into the men’s bathroom without feeling nervous of who’s watching.
Students at the University of Washington will look at me as a person. Students at Woodside High School? They look at me as if I’m a social experiment gone wrong.
If I could sum up my current situation in a few words, they’d probably be this: I’m ready to re-locate and reboot.
●○●○●
It’s a warm Wednesday afternoon when I’m walking down the hallway with Cass to our Calculus class, shoving my History notebook into my backpack hanging off of one shoulder.
“I’m just saying,” Cass is telling me, “if I were to be paired with a roommate who didn’t enjoy the occasional trashy reality television series, is there a point to having a roommate at all?”
“You say ‘occasional’ as if you don’t stay up till 3 in the morning watching these shows,” I reply, swinging my backpack around to its correct positioning.
“That was just last weekend!” she defends as we turn the corner. “And it was only because Tom’s ex was thrown into the mix and Emma was totally out to ruffle feathers!”
“For the last time…” I say, “I have no clue who the hell these people are because I have never once watched Love Island.”
“And I question our friendship every day because of it,” she sighs.
I laugh, shoving her side.
We weave through the waves of students scurrying to their next classes, talking about the homework due today that we both did last night fairly quickly. Calc isn’t too bad. It’s English that I struggle with… I hate writing essays. Words are hard.
After pushing through the doorway to Mr. O’Leary’s class, we find our seats and Cassidy slides into the desk to the right of mine. Thank god I have her on one side of me; on the other, I’m forced to tolerate Mason Loughty, a half-witted A-list asshole on the Lacrosse team.
As the class is still talking and settling in before the bell rings, Cass drops her bag next to her chair and looks up at me with wide eyes. I meet her gaze, already bouncing my pencil on my desk in a casual readiness.
“What is it?” I ask her semi-panicked expression.
“I thought I had another tampon in here,” she says in a kind-of-low voice, probably due to the fact that it’s already pretty loud in here. “I used the last one before school.”
“Just ask one of the girls,” I shrug. “They’ll probably hook you up.”
“Why bother with that?” a grinning voice says from behind me.
Fuck. I really thought he would be too busy talking with his douchey friends to hear our brief interaction.
I really would rather not deal with yet another Lacrosse dickweed right now, and Gavin is one of the worst.
“Can’t Hart here just… ‘hook you up’?” he presses on, leaning forward in his chair to smirk at us. “She’s probably got a zillion in that backpack-”
“Boys don’t have tampons in their backpacks,” Cass snaps at him. “Except the jumbo-sized ones you keep in there for your jumbo-sized vagina.”
I duck my head to fight a laugh while Gavin retorts with, “well, Noah would know about those.”
He says my name like it’s a joke, and he most certainly sees it as just that.
You’d think that after finally having a low-enough voice for masculinity, people would assume you’re not having your fucking period anymore. That’s kind of how testosterone works.
But I think he knows this, good and well, and he’s just relishing in every tiny little comment he makes to me daily.
But I won’t give him the satisfaction. I’ll just stare at my bouncing pencil balancing between my thumb and index fingers.
Another lacrosse player has just entered the classroom and is slipping past Cass’s desk to get to his behind her, his backpack hanging off of one shoulder.
Theodore Garner’s eyes flick across his snickering friends mumbling more unsurprising comments about me, and then they flick to his desk, where he sits down without a word.
My jaw tightens, and the hand around my pencil does, too.
“I’ll be right back,” Cass now mutters to me, rising from her chair. She’s hiding a wrapped tampon in her palm, so I’m assuming she got one from Maddie on her other side.
I become very invested in opening my Calc notebook and studying the homework from last night that I completed, making sure to not fantasize about twisting around and punching Gavin directly in the face.
Thank god Mason has turned to start some stupid conversation with him about their Lacrosse practice after school today. Seems like they only have one personality trait, and that’s tossing around a rock-hard ball in fishing nets.
Mr. O’Leary starts the class right as Cass slips back into the room, brushing her dyed-blue and dark grey hair out of her face as she resumes her seat. And this last period of the day breezes by before the final bell rings, and we’re out of there.
As we’re walking down the hallway towards the back doors, I can hear the two boys behind us, still snickering to each other.
I can make out a bit of it amidst the volume of the school day dismissal: “Yeah, Hart and her tampons… totally in there” and “come on, let’s get to practice” and then I tune them out and focus on my best friend at my side.
I’m moving quickly. Cass knows I have somewhere to be. She always squeezes my hand before she watches me walk to my car in the parking lot in the crowd of fellow student drivers.
And that squeeze of her hand in mine helps a little, each time.
●○●○●
I pull into the hospital’s parking lot at around 3:30 and toss my backpack into the passenger’s seat before leaving the car.
The walk to the front doors is a quick pace, as it usually is; I often feel like I need to hurry in order to spend every minute I can with her.
Truth is, I’d like to be staying overnight here every weekend with my mom if I could. But I feel that if I kept staring at her in that hospital bed, hooked up to IVs and plugs like a potato battery in a seventh grade science class.
I check in at the front desk, a routine chore where I face the same women’s faces of subtle sympathy before I trudge to the elevators, hands shoved in my pockets and eyes cast down. I don’t need any stares at the kid walking to see his mother on life support four floors up.
Luckily, there aren’t any nurses in her room when I quietly enter the room. Just me.
She’s just as I last saw her; lying still, head resting on a pillow propped upright against the motorized mattress, eyes closed and arms stretched to her sides. The slow, steady beeping of the heart monitor serenades my arrival as I make my way to the cushioned chair sitting beside the bed.
I make sure my feet aren’t resting on any cords on the floor below me, where she’s plugged in, electricity powering the body that lies before me.
I hate seeing those plugs, but I hate the thought of not seeing her.
“Hey, mom,” I say, as if expecting a response. “Me again.”
The quiet ticking of the monitor is the only reply in the room.
“I got my AP Envi Sci test back,” I tell her. “94. Not too bad, right?”
If she could respond, I’d surely hear a, no surprise there, or maybe, tell them to start challenging you.
She always liked how good I was with science. Hand me anything around earth and space and I’ll ace it. It’s pretty much the only thing I’m confident in. I’m just some average kid, otherwise.
Well… not exactly average.
“You know, I was thinking,” I say, smiling a little as I sit up. “Everyone always assumes this stereotype of Asian parents… moms, especially… that they’re so strict around academics.”
I look at her face, observing the short eyelashes resting against her cheeks, her lips set in a loose frown.
“But you were never like that,” I say. “I just- I don’t know. Thanks, I guess. For not being… so hard on me.”
It’s true.
Not as a mom from Japan, but… just a mom. She was always so kind. So patient. She knew exactly what to say if I ever was hard on myself in school. If I ever brought home a crappy essay.
“My Naomi doesn’t fall down at one paper,” she would say. “My Naomi will be a superstar aero-space scientist… she’ll go to the moon one day… and she’ll forget about such things.”
And I would always smile, and hug her back, and try not to think about how she would react if she saw “one day” that her Naomi wasn’t the same one she raised to know and grow used to.
Mom couldn’t accept it at first.
It was long before she was diagnosed. The ovarian cancer hit her 6 months ago, actually. The early stages of my senior year wasn’t exactly ideal.
When I told her at age 14 that I wasn’t a girl, that I was in the wrong body and that I still wanted her to know that it was me under here even if I want to change the outside. She couldn’t seem to wrap her head around that.
I think she was sadder than Dad was angry because she thought she was losing her daughter. Maybe not her daughter, per-say, but- the kid she knew. She was scared. She thought I was choosing this entirely based on some brief mental switchup; a phase, something I’d entirely “grow out of in time”.
When I didn’t “grow out” of it, she had to think for a while.
It was early in my junior year of high school when she couldn’t seem to do it anymore. The quiet dinner tables, the passing looks, the eyeing me from across the room as I sat on the couch with my short hair and baggy black jeans.
I remember the exact words she said. Not the whole interaction, but the words that mattered most in that moment as she stood in the doorway of my room while I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at her. My dad was working late.
“I don’t care if your name is Naomi, or Noah,” she told me in her soft, slightly accented voice. “I don’t need a daughter. I just need my kid. You are my everything. Noah.”
She said the name after a pause. The pause was not tense, or angry, or nauseating, like she was preparing to throw up in her mouth at that word slipping from her lips. It was just a pause where blinked at me and smiled a little.
And it was around the middle of my junior year when she set up my testosterone prescription. My own mother. I couldn’t believe it.
She didn’t consult my dad beforehand. This was big for my mom. He wasn’t budging, even when she tried to weakly urge the stone wall that is my father to love me for me, so she did it for me anyways.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to let her go now. Looking at the woman hooked up to the ventilator in front of me just makes me think about how that woman was just smiling and laughing as we baked coffee cake together and went with me to see dumb movies and offered a hug when I was feeling anxious, or crying, or anything.
Seeing her now, I don’t care about the two and a half years of quiet that followed my coming out to her. I don’t care at all.
I just want her back.
“Dad still doesn’t talk to me much,” I find myself saying. Sometimes, when I speak to her in the hospital bed, I just keep talking, no matter what about. “It’s okay, though. I think he just misses you. It’s hard. We’re okay.”
But we’re not, really.
In the back of my mind, every day and always, there is that tiny voice telling me to let her go. And then there’s that other one saying, Noah can let her go… it’s his dad that’s keeping her like this.
I can’t hate him for it. I can’t hate him for it because I can’t see her leave us, either. So it wouldn’t be fair. We both are trying. So, so hard.
You can’t just snap out of ovarian cancer. You can’t just rip the cables out of the wall and jump from the hospital cot, no strings (or wires, in this case) attached.
She won’t just snap out of it.
“Cass won’t stop bothering me about her dumb reality TV,” I laugh a little. It’s a small laugh; just through my nose. “You should hear her. It’s okay, though… I love her anyways.”
I look up at her face, wishing her eyes were open so she could look back at mine, too.
Just like you loved me anyways.
