25. My left hand is buried near a stream, under about six inches of topsoil. Ants and worms flock to my flesh, carrying tiny parts of me away when they leave. Above, bees float on lavender drafts and little green blades push their way towards the light. My skin is soft, softer than it ever was in life.

24. He called it His Garden, and it was beautiful but it wasn’t His. The woods came right up to the back porch, and He’d put a fence around a small section. The fence always seemed ridiculous to me. It was a dividing line between two places that were exactly the same. The only difference between His Garden and the woods beyond was a vague idea of ownership. Squirrels entered via the uninterrupted canopy and trees dropped leaves across the border. Despite the fence, I always loved laying in the garden. Sunlight dripped through the trees like honey and woke the sweet-smelling soil. I never brought a blanket to sit on, even though He was angry when I came inside with bark imprinted into my back and dirt sticking to my sweat.

23. Today, if you walk into the back corner of His Garden close to the fence and you kneel down and you reach into the dirt like you’re praying and dig and dig until your hands are raw and it feels like you’re excavating your own flesh instead of the earth and sobs course through your body thick and uncontrollable if you do all of these things you might just might find the part of me that remains in the garden.

22. He touched me differently than I touched myself. Alone, I caressed my jawline, fingered the coarse hair on my belly and thighs. I thought about how much the feeling had changed in the last few years. It felt like light, like relief. His touch was heavy. He squeezed grabbed prodded me. Knew what parts of my body had give, which were solid. Sometimes I wondered if He felt things I couldn’t, knew things about me I didn’t.

21. He never saw my breasts. They’re double-bagged, or incinerated or decomposed, disposed of with all the rest of the biohazard hospital waste. My surgeon was the last person to see them attached to me, sexless and fleshy. That was years before I met Him. After the surgery, happiness settled in the base of my brain and didn’t leave. For months, every time I touched my chest or put on a shirt I thought how lucky I was to get to live in this body. A body of my own design.

20. We fought.

19. He always told me He liked my shoulders. I was glad. I’d been working out for years, since before I came out. I think that was one of my favorite things about Him.

18. There are so many things that can go wrong with your body. Tiny things, big things. A blocked blood vessel. A severed nerve. A bullet hole. A sawed off leg. A botched surgery. A disfiguration. People talk about trans people being trapped in their bodies, but aren’t we all?

17. I cried when I turned 18. I didn’t know why. Because I was still alive, and because I wanted to still be alive. The feeling was disappointment. When you want to die, when you think you’re going to die as soon as you can work up the courage to follow through, things are easy. Having a future to worry about is terrifying. I lived for seven more years after that. I died when I was 25.

16. One of my baby teeth, a molar, is wedged behind a baseboard in my parents’ house. Nine years old, a friend told me that teeth were made of bone, and I took that to mean they were magic. I said a prayer and imagined that my tooth had spit its magic into the whole house, surrounding my family in golden light and ensuring nothing bad would happen, never ever ever.

15. I told a boy once that I thought my scars were ugly. He traced his finger along my thigh, looking at the patchwork of flesh. They were faded a lot, then, no longer shades of angry purple. “No, I don’t think so. They’re just, like, a part of you.” He kissed me and I tried to believe him.

14. Three of my fingers are buried in the dirt at the base of our houseplant. Neither of us had ever been able to keep a plant alive, so when we moved in together I researched what species were easiest to care for, and bought a pothos. And it thrived. I put it on His bookshelf, and the plant yawned and stretched and drooped closer to the ground as the months stretched on. It survived everything we threw at it. It sagged and dropped leaves when He visited His mother for a month and I struggled to leave the bed. I dragged myself past the plant on the way to the kitchen one afternoon, and when I looked it in the face I saw myself. Unwashed, unmedicated, body slowly being poisoned by the rotting thing inside of me. I poured a glass of water, drank half of it, and poured the rest into the pothos. We both made a full recovery when He returned the next week. I nursed us back to health, but only because He was there to motivate me.

13. While cuddling with the man who’d just taken my virginity, I mentioned that I’d started testosterone two months prior. “Oh, you’re on testosterone,” he said, eyes widening, “that explains why your vagina was so weird.”

12. We fought all the time.

11. Andrew was the first trans man I fucked, sophomore year of college. It felt right. He was the first person who’d seen my body, really seen me, the way I wanted to be seen. As I touched him, I discovered myself. The comfort of solitude. Screaming, sighing, breathing into one another. Want extended beyond sex.

10. I got my first period while swimming in a river with my family. I cried that night. Some part of me had believed that I would never experience female puberty, that the talk my mother had given me didn’t apply, that my body would simply refuse. I’d also been irrationally, impossibly terrified my blood would poison the fish. Years later, I wonder if any of my iron made its way into the ecosystem, if part of me is still in that river.

9. I have three stick-n-poke tattoos, all done by friends, all with needles meant for hormone injections.

8. I did drag once, for fun, for a charity event my friend was co-hosting. I convinced Him to come watch, and I was pleased at how excited He was. He hugged me afterwards and told me how sexy I was. That night, He asked me if I would ever consider having sex in drag. He persisted, and I agreed to try it sometime. I put makeup on in our bedroom mirror one night as He watched me from the bed. “You don’t really need to do all that,” He came up behind me and rested His chin on my shoulder, “just, like, pretend to be a girl.”

7. We fought all the time. It was usually my fault.

6. I took my first dose of testosterone on my 21st birthday and went to a gay bar that night to celebrate. I’d been afraid to start testosterone because I thought it would make me less attractive. As it turned out, this was an unfounded fear. As the months stretched on, the deep, unnamable discomfort I’d felt my whole life started to fade. My confidence grew. I became a regular at the gay bar and relished in the new attention from men. One whispered to me that he liked pulling hair. I let him, because he was already doing it, and he left with strands woven around his fingers.

5. I felt strangely less human every time we had sex, like He was taking something from me. I told myself maybe I was into it, maybe I could learn to like the emptiness.

4. When I cut my hair short for the first time, I wanted to donate the excess. I’d read about charities that take hair donations for wigs to distribute to cancer patients. The salon didn’t do donations, but she gave me the ponytail to take with me. I never got around to donating it. The hair sat in a drawer in my desk for months, until I moved out and my mom threw it away.

3. Good girl. Boy toy. God, you’re so hot. Yes, sir. You’re a good little bottom. Please, daddy, please. Such a pretty boy.

2. We fought all the time. It was usually my fault. The last fight I started was the last thing I ever did.

1. Once I was gone, my body was finally fully His. He cried, begged, caressed my cheek, apologized. Then He dragged me to the shed, laid me on the table, and picked up His saw. It was hard work. My body was disturbingly real, and panic jolted through His body every time He broke flesh -- He didn’t want to hurt me. He’d never wanted to hurt me. His arms ached as the blade parted skin flesh bone flesh skin. The smell and the sounds and the horror filled the shed, the remains of my body permanently lodged in His brain.