My Skeleton Roommate Betrayed Me
by Theo Rochlin
Salem State First Year Writing Award winner: Style, First Place
I didn’t come out of the closet. I was thrown out by the skeleton who had resided next to me for fifteen years. I was met with fields of fire, the smoke so thick that I could barely see five feet in front of me. Or five minutes into my future. My life went from being normal, from being predictable, to being the most hazardous situation that I had ever faced. I was in a community of people that did not understand what is was like to be “transgender”, and certainly didn’t know how to respond to it. My mother’s side of the family stopped talking to me. My father moved out of the house and my mother started to hit me. I was assaulted in public restrooms, and worse, assaulted by an ex-girlfriend's father who beat me within an inch of my life. I didn’t know how to make them understand that I was just a boy, simply just Theo. When I speak, I can never find the right words to communicate my needs, much less explain complex ideas to others. But I can, in fact, write. And in that moment, as I put my pen to paper, I knew that people could finally have the opportunity to understand my experience.
Boys learning how to swim in the chlorinated pools of their skins. Diving into
the midnight moon reflecting waters. Eyes open and stinging.
It started out as a metaphor, as a snapshot of a pool reflecting moonlight into the inky black darkness of night. Diving into a pool seemed to be the best way that I could express what it was like to come out. One moment you are on the cement that surrounds the water. You can see clearly. You can breathe. Everything is quiet. Everything is beautiful. And then you jump in.
Suddenly, your whole world is turned upside down. If deep enough, there are times when you cannot tell which way is up and which way is down. You cannot find your way back to where things made sense. But most importantly, you can’t breathe. You gasp for air and all you get is water. You panic. You’re terrified. And most of all, you don’t know what to do. That’s what coming out as trans felt like for me. I didn’t know anyone that identified the same way as I did. I didn’t know which sports teams I was supposed to try out for, or which locker room to use. I didn’t know if I should tell someone the truth about my identity, or if by doing so I would jeopardize my safety. But as I continued on with my poem, my confidence in myself began to grow.
Our fathers taught us how to dance. Young, in frilled dresses, we balanced
tip-toe on top of their feet. Borrowed their suit jackets when the air got
colder, unsure of why we felt so much more comfortable in them. Unaware
of the bruised faces and split lips that comfort would later cause.
Our mothers styled our hair just right with sharp scissors, plastic combs, and
hot curling irons. We knew what was good for us. But we were dreamers,
even then, imagining that our long hair was cropped short, styling needed
no longer.
The next two stanzas reflected what it felt like to grow up as transgender, but without the having the words to express how I truly felt. First came an experience with my father, followed by an experience with my mother. When I shared my poem with the both of them, something clicked in their heads. My father could remember how comfortable and elated I looked while wearing his suit jacket on a cold night. My mother recalled all of the times she cut my hair. She recalled how with each haircut my hair got shorter and shorter, and how with each haircut I got happier and happier.
The soles of our sneakers are so worn from running away from our unspoken truths that our socks get drenched each time we step out into the rain.
Beforehand, no one had really understood how incredibly exhausting it is to run from the person you are for so many years. In the past, people had equated my experience to being in a toxic or abusive relationship. But when I was in the process of coming out, I was in the most toxic and abusive relationship that I had ever been in. And it was in no way the same kind of pain. In a way I couldn’t be myself, and was subject to be whoever my partner wanted me to be. However, this was oppressing bits of my personality rather than the entirety of my being. Rather than seeing the person that my partner wanted the world to see, prior to coming out I felt as though people weren’t even able to see me. But I ran and ran and ran from the truth about my identity because I was so incredibly scared of what would happen if I were to be myself. Eventually, I was too tired. Mental exhaustion trumped fear and before long the world knew me only as Theo.
I am a boy in disguise. Every time that sentence leaves my mouth it lands on
the pavement in the chalk outline of a body. The yellow tape around me
reads: Caution, step back. I’ve got blood in places where there shouldn’t be
blood, creating rivers in places that should be bone dry. Caution, step back. I am reckless.
The poem came to a close with a representation of the danger that I faced because of my identity. Nobody seemed to understand that piece about coming out as transgender, because it wasn’t a reality to them. They had never been assaulted in a public restroom. They had never been spit on or called names while washing their hands. When nobody in your community is transgender, nobody has any idea of just how dangerous it can be. After reading this final stanza, it was clear that starting to present as the gender you want to be perceived as was not as easy as they thought. Suddenly, they understood that coming out as transgender wasn’t as simple as coming out as gay. It clicked that it was more than just telling people how you felt, but also included changing your name, your pronouns, how you dress, how you cut your hair, how you speak.
Writing this poem was cathartic for me; I could finally express how I was feeling inside. I could finally explain to others exactly what it felt like to be in this situation. The poem seemed to flow right out of my pen. It was never easy for me to communicate audibly and it still isn’t. But on paper I can explain away the most intricate of subjects. Not only was I able to show others how I felt with this piece of writing, I was able to finally figure out the words to explain it to myself. This poem didn’t suddenly make my life all peaches and cream. It didn’t cure transphobia. It didn’t make my mother’s side of the family start talking to me again. It didn’t stop me from getting physically assaulted in men’s restrooms. What it did do however, was give people the chance to be accepting because now they had something to reference when they wanted insight on how I felt. And that was all I could ask for, for this was just a poem.
As mentioned previously, this poem was not just for other people. It not only gave me a more complete understanding of myself as a human being, but also a more complete understanding of myself as a writer. I became able to comprehend just how important writing was to me as a form of communication. Yes, in the past I had absolutely used writing to convey my feelings, but it was never to this extent. I learned that my best work came out when I was writing from a place of emotion. Of course I still succeeded with my writing when it was not emotionally charged, but it seemed as though I had to write far more drafts for those pieces of writing because I couldn’t quite get the words right. When I write about something that is of importance to me, I can express what I need to say much more quickly and eloquently.
This was the poem that also taught me that my writing can inspire change, not just in my life but in the lives of others. My high school’s GSA sent this poem to the students and faculty in hopes of helping others that were in similar situations as me. In the coming weeks, three people sought me out and thanked me for sharing my experience because it made them more comfortable and able to express their gender identity knowing that there was someone else that was feeling the same things that they were. When I first arrived at college back in 2017, I immediately joined the Slam Poetry team and had the opportunity to share more of my experiences, ideas, and opinions with others.
For me, writing has never been something that I have taken lightly. Since writing this poem back in 2014, I knew that my best instances of communication were those that I had gotten down on paper. This poem didn’t change my entire life experience, in fact even after sharing it with those around me, my life was still fairly unpleasant. But it was better than it could have been. Some people gained the opportunity to better comprehend what I was going through and how to more appropriately respond to it, which was the overarching goal of this poem. I’m not mad at my skeleton roommate for throwing me out of the closet all of those years ago. At the time, I had felt like he had betrayed me. But now, I know that he actually saved my life.