House: (n) a building for human habitation; (adj) kept in, frequenting, or infesting buildings, (v) to provide a person or animal with shelter
I am a human; I inhabit my body.  I have kept in my felt sense of gender for so long, though it rises again... again...again.  I have failed to provide my gendered self with the shelter that xe needed in order to grow, expand, try, fail, try again.
I have lived in this body, as is, for almost four decades. 
I am now gracefully asking it to accomodate me.
Today was my first testosterone shot.

Ground Zero

He slept with her, legal yet still adolescent.  What twists in my belly when I lie awake at night is the thought of the months and months that led up to that mistake.  The worst lies are mostly true and he offered her a friendship that ended up being as friendly as the gaping smile of the wolf's maw.  And now, of course, she is unstable and problematic.  The layers of betrayal veil my attempts to move on, though it's been nearly a month.
He struggles with the psychological cocktail of Borderline Personality Disorder, has issues around intimacy and deception that come from the insidious childhood formula of genetic predisposition toward impulsivity, complex PTSD, and an insecure attachment with his mother, 15 years old and dependent upon her dysfunctional family of origin when she conceived him.  This doesn't excuse his choices.  And yet...
We float, in love.  Unprecedented intimacy that terrifies, electrifies, and enlightens us both.
Alternately, we cry, we curse, we grieve.
We do not sleep.
I'm not supposed to have this deep unconditional love for him.  I'm supposed to hate him, blame him, leave him.  I'm no doormat.  I'm making conscious choices, born of self-respect and fleshy strong boundaries that remind me of the intelligently selective walls of an animal cell.
It isn't the first time that he's betrayed a major agreement between us but it's definitely the worst.
I've sent an email, asking her to meet us in 2 days.  I want her to see my face when I ask her respectfully to leave him alone and move on.  I want to see his face when he tells her that there's no chance they'll be together.  I want to see her face- to track each micro-expression, record each twitch and shifting gaze for later analysis in the middle of my obsessed nights, tossing and turning with the looping image of him spreading her in front of him on her living room floor.
I want to record my process, to create artifacts of my path back to something resembling sanity and peace.
July 27, he slept with her.  We stayed awake and talked and cried and screamed and held each other for 3 days.  On the 3rd day, we rose and birthed a new relationship.  July 30: Ground Zero.  May the phoenix rise.

Making It Up

He yelled.
Swore.
Raged.
The boy opened his bedroom door because of the noise.
Because he was scared.
He threw the sketchpad and pen down the hall toward the boy's door.
That thrust me into action, calmly, firmly telling him he needed to leave.
He huffed and he puffed and he put on his shoes and left.
Within the minute, he came raging back and I saw him coming.
I quickly gathered the boy together and noted sadly that the boy already had his shoes on.
I felt a brief irrational pang of regret that the boy had ever left the womb-
had ever left that space of buffer and ease of mobility.
I kept him clutched to me as I gathered,
keys, money, bus tickets, umbrella.
We left, even as He told us we weren't to leave.
We left and I was grateful He did not follow.

6 hellish hours later of balancing "fun outing" with honest processing,
my focus on the boy and his confused sadness,
we returned for the boy's bedtime.

He sat across from me, a small blue vase of wrinkled discount roses between us.
He wants to know how to make it up to me.

I think to myself,
That's the problem.
You're always making it up, a play, a scene.
It's all invention.

I look at Him and say
"I don't know."
And I don't.

How can I trust a script?

The Intervals Between Waves

Mark Twain is quoted as saying,
Some German words are so long that they have a perspective"

Herzkreislaufwiederbelebung: CPR (literally: heart-circle-run-again-enlivenment)

In German, it seems the thing to do is to simply cram smaller words together
to make a a very specific word.

This comes to mind today because I want to find a word, a single word, for
"the intervals between waves experienced while wading in up to your chest."

I want a 3-10 letter word that captures that feeling of anticipation mixed with recovery.

I need a way to say that today is a day that I feel partially imobilized because I'm
still a bit dizzy and disoriented from the Previous and also a bit edgy and excited
because the Next coming very soon.

Tagesverwirrteletztenervöseaufgeregtezukunftparalyse?