From the ages of 4 to 9, I dressed in women’s clothing at every available opportunity and called myself Lady Baronia Jackson. And then I didn’t. And Baronia disappeared. As a result, slowly over the course of the decades, my life died. Because Baronia was a deeper insight into what lay ahead and what I would need to face it. She was the best part of me. She had the guts necessary to stomach the things that fed her soul. But I let her go. I was guilty of being afraid of embarrassing myself in the looming world of men. And ever since, I have starved myself when I needed to eat, and binged when what was called for was the clarity that comes from fasting.

We throw things overboard. We have to. To stop ourselves from drowning. Everyone must learn the art of what’s appropriate to discard so that the vessel to which we’ve been assigned can keep afloat. Everyone must try to make the crossing. Blessed then are those who know to school themselves according to their own understanding of what’s waste and what’s not. Because others will convince you to throw away what makes your life worth living. It’s the payment required to join their pack.

But if we’re lucky, we get to right that wrong. Raise the dead. Care once more for what we wasted. It takes a certain dark magic. A reversal of the payment we made to purchase the right to destroy ourselves. I therefore had to loiter in what others deemed waste. In a dress coutured from my used face masks from the pandemic. Amidst a grotesque artifice. A filth parody of blossoming spring. Flowers crafted from sheets of cheap yellow note paper on which I wrote all those lists of all those things I failed to complete. Stuck on a dead tree I found discarded by the side of the road. You must stand in abjection before others. “Except the Daughter Did Not Drown” is a spell.