Should I start over completely at Rutgers by leaving my past behind forever?

I always thought that I would go back into a burning building to retrieve my antecedents as though they were a friend under extreme duress.

I thought that I would be capable of wearing my past on my sleeve.

I thought that I was ready to be a pioneer instead of a person.

I was convinced, mistakenly, that as long as some unsubstantiated trans kid in Uganda got his wings every time a gay person I met at a pride event asked me intrusive questions about what's in my pants or felt entitled to know what surgeries I have had, that I could derive an iota of satisfaction from my transparency in spite of the humiliation and discomfort that it facilitated.

A sense of purpose and a commitment to promoting the visibility of a vastly underrepresented population has beleaguered me with a balancing act that I cannot reconcile.

I write this from a musky basement littered with embarrassment in the form of clothing that has not felt mammalian warmth in over a year and a half. I'm leaning on a pillow made of garbage bags filled with bra imbued tank tops that were stitched together to accommodate bits of matter that I seek to destroy, in spite of the ineptitude of our universe at doing so.

Curse the conservation law. I want so badly to forget that I was born in a female body. It's so fucking painful.

The solicitous inquiry about my transition provokes unwanted memories. It embellishes an opening that has already been antagonized by birth, a void that grows more evocative every time I am lured into a dark cave full of reckless inquiries and drinks laced with determinism.

I thought that I could perceive my past as a legacy rather than a liability. Instead, I want to write myself out of my own history the way that autumn omits the foliage from the trees.

How many calendars would I have to rewrite in order to account for the discrepancies that would undoubtedly come up in future conversations? Must I deprive myself of hundreds of Facebook posts, a lifetime of wisdom acquired through the lens of lashes that were often lengthened, even my fucking Bat Mitzvah? Must I go so far as to invent a twin sister to rationalize the contents of a thousand photos, only to kill her off so as to put her sudden disappearance from my life in context?

Though this task seems daunting, it is one that I seriously entertain.

For while I am incapable of establishing a meaningful friendship with someone who doesn't know what I have been through, I can't bear the thought of one insidious detail compromising their conception of me early on, or ever.

So long as I draw upon my experiences as a trans person for educational purposes, I will continue to be my own worst enemy. I undermine my own masculinity by divulging these flagrant sources of comparison for all the world to see. Interesting and statistically rare as these reference points might be, they conjure to the forefront of my mind stabs of remorse for having drawn attention to them at all.

I don't want a Sabbatical. I want a sunset.

I want the past to die. I want to introduce myself with a display of blood that will never be blue again. I want rigor mortis to take my memories away, to absorb sound waves that I now find staggering to interpret and egregious in the damage that they inflict upon my newly resolved sanity.

I stupidly thought that embracing this magnanimous resolution to educate and reform by living my life as openly as possible would serve as a source of strength. Instead, I find that any vestige of my former self weakens me.

It's sad because...I never thought that I would fight so vehemently to come out of one closet, only to trade it for another.