Gazpacho, Hormones and Saint Narcissus
No Catatonia in Catalonia, thank you very much!
The second my flip-flopped foot touched the gleaming sidewalks of Girona, the jewel of North-eastern Catalonia, two things became very apparent to me.
Firstly, my deracination as a recovering alcoholic, sober now for two whole years, made me wince with a sudden sense of exposure, now I was outside my comfort zone of Cobh.
Secondly, my new sense of self as a Transgender woman, all shiny, new and uncharted within all this newness still had the street smarts of a concussed wood pigeon.
Some things will never change.
Even with Google maps as my co-pilot, I was a self-contained hymn to Acedia the Goddess of Torpor.
You’d swear I’d never before been let out into the world and judging by the shotgun stares of the locals, I’m coming across as a glittery aberration of nature.
I felt like a galvanized piece of sirloin there in the polished thoroughfares of Girona.
They see a riot of blond hair and the legs of a soubrette on stage but still they know there is more to me that meets the nakedly outraged eye.
So my new surroundings bristled with hostility, I could feel the tension in the air.
God is the ultimate prankster, darling
He stared down upon the stricken corpuscle that limped her bewildered way through the long spindly streets and gave me the Carrer de Saint Narcis as an ironic navigational reference point.
Even in my unsteadiness I had to guffaw at that, I kept blindly happening upon it.
Have tits will travel indeed with Saint Narcissus as my patron saint.
Girona is a city without a gay bar and by Christ and his blood and ouns, wouldn’t you know it?
Again, I’d been lame in the head in my decision to travel here to the land of café solo and Almodovar.
I’d flown from one Catholic country to another; even the air motes felt like beads on a rosary as I wandered blindly through a blizzard of double-takes on my way to the Cathedral and its cache of dead Christs.
Handbag hooked on arm, in I went to bathe in the Leviathan-sized air conditioning of the largest Gothic nave in Europe, studying the gorgeous attitudes of the saints with halos the size of serving platters, feeling slightly blasphemous.
A knave in a nave, how fitting.
Being Irish I have acquired a fondness for apostasy and irreverence, so make mine a double.
Despite my nerves and the galloping sense of foreboding I try to contain with as much poise as I can muster without booze, I’m very much aware that I am transgender in this beautiful place.
It feels good and proper, besides the Spanish have a reputation for being somewhat brusque and my experience confirmed it.
I breathe in the profundity of it all, the Cathedral is a must see and I recall the long lost connection I had with the iconography on display.
I feel the wound of having to say goodbye, by letter, to my family just mere weeks ago.
Life can be truly bizarre as I sit in a pew in my short shorts and ripped Ramones tee, the sweat making my eyeliner run and dappling my upper lip with sweat.
I feel again the exquisite pain of being a soul that has survived a catastrophe or three.
And still, beneath the sorrow and regret, the unwavering belief that I did the right thing by graciously bowing out of their lives to get on with mine.
A new feeling at my core, warms a place formerly lacquered by black ice.
It feels like a bud in my gut.
Girona is a city that takes pride in itself. The streets are as clean as the sun that ensilvers them to sting your eyes so you can’t read the damn street names.
I am something of a mess as I wander blindly back onto the Carrer de Saint Narcis.
I have two dresses in my bag back at the hostel and I’m waiting for the right time to apparate as Fiona.
Let’s face it, I’ve been Fiona since I got on the flight over here, dressing up just makes my status official.
It’s coming to the point after almost three months of hormones that I’m obviously, if not a woman yet, an epicene about to flower.
I’ve orchidized myself by becoming her, I will never just take root in any old soil, my needs have become far more specific.
But that was always the case looking back; I finally have the courage to define myself.
It’s not enough to be a disillusioned blur of a person anymore.
On one of my many coffee stops, I see random holiday makers sitting contentedly over glasses of beer with froth around the rim of the glass like frills on a garter.
My tongue is hanging out to my ankles for a drink behind my veneer of insouciant weirdo.
How lucky those people are just to sit there, watching life go by, with a beer for company.
I know that one sip will organize the chaos pumping and grinding inside me, make me feel that all is okay, a liquid handmaiden to the screaming of my nerves.
It would bring short term comfort but long-term distress and as I sit there, smoking a cigarette with handbag on my lap trying to channel a Bette-Davis-on-the-Dick-Cavett-show strength of character, hoping people can’t sense my fear of everything.
And yet a concealed strength can be felt beneath the feedback I’m going through.
This is an entirely new sensation.
There is the edge of the bloody-minded about it.
I will not capitulate to my weakness, my nervousness, my appalling sense of direction or my thirst for a beer.
And I will wear the Blue dress when I’m good and ready.
On my third day drifting reluctantly but firmly down Narcissus Street I felt it.
Like the strain of a distant trombone wavering on the air, aching up through me.
Tonight, I will put on the Blue dress
I’m terrified, I’m nervous.
But tonight’s the night mi queerido.
The feeling hangs in the lacuna of my gut like a raunchy pang, my resolve so tangible you could put a beret on it.
So, alone in my six-bed dorm, I get myself ready, proud in my wild titivation.
The dress fits me to a tee, so it does.
I revel in my seldom celebrated status as immaculate clotheshorse, and I do my face and take pictures that I send to the few friends I have left from the Beijing chapter of my life.
Beijing, eh?
I’d frequent the bars and nightclubs over there dressed as Fiona but powered by the couldn’t give a shit demeanor found in alcohol as the photo below shows.
This is my first jaunt out as a sober and responsible Fiona.
Am I finally ready to own all of this?
I’d been berating myself for my lack of worldliness and my exposition as a timorous worrywart yet here I am clacking divinely into one of society’s last taboos.
The dress feels dangerous and brave on my body, a red neck-kerchief placed tastefully around my Adam’s apple.
Saint Narcissus Almighty
If the ground could slurp me up like a stray strand of spaghetti I would be forever in your debt.
I’m sticking out like a thumb in a vice as I strut in my character shoes around the streets, suddenly gaunt looking without people, speeding blind as a juggernaut with panic, finding myself careening down the Carrer to the fucking roundabout.
That’s it, I’ve already had enough.
I’m ready to go back to the hostel and rip this dress off me if only I could fucking find the damn place.
Then I felt a miracle mid-stride.
My panic scattered like a murder of crows to be replaced by a sudden calm and, do I dare say it, poise.
By the time my right heel connected with the pavement I was back in business, my wind-tunnel reveries giving way to a self-possessed sleekness of character.
Let people stare if that is their want, let them all snigger too.
That’s their issue, nothing to do with me.
I strut through the commercial melting pot of the Placa de la Independencia, a clearing of beige canopies for the refreshment of its patrons and I can still sense the stand-off between me and society but I’m surprisingly okay with it.
I’m changing both imperceptibly and profoundly with each passing day and I’m on the neon-streaked boulevard to Passing if I haven’t exactly arrived there yet.
My airing accomplished, I totter to a quiet restaurant away from the square to gather my equanimity.
I should have gone to Berlin but still my little break away has proved a thing or two to me.
Sometimes, the journey is far more important than the destination and I still have a ways to go.
But I’m finally happy.
