When he looks in the mirror, he’s not quite sure what he sees. A puzzle forced into a final shape, a fine painting with the dimensions not quite right. It doesn’t make sense, the way his lips curl into honey-sweet swirling forms or bony hips protrude from thin, unexercised legs. It doesn’t make sense how a seemingly-developed jawline become moon-smooth, glistening in the dim glow of midnight.

And there’s an ache in his chest, yes, and a dull sting under his arm from where the stretched and worn fabric of his binder allows tiny metal hooks to dig into soft skin. Shifting slightly, he shifts his arms and rotates his shoulder. The muscles there feel right, but not from the binder. It’s like he’s been sitting too long, staring at walls and contemplating his own existence. At least, the part of his except that is him, the part that sticks out like a sore thumb when he’s telling his mother his name is Damien and not Diana.

But, in the messy silence of a room that is cluttered like his brain, dry lips and often blinking eyes are clear signs that both those words and the words he needs to, has to say are like fantasy creatures on the horizon that do not exist in this world.

Biting his lip and running his tongue over the cracked, desert-like skin, he tests it in his mouth.

“Mom, I’m a boy.” Inhaling his sorrows like air he can’t breathe, he pulls away and sits back down on the bed in front of his mirror. It looks right when he says it, but the sound is warped like a broken record, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating in his head forever and again.

Taking a deep breath, he sits up straight and runs his hands over each other before placing them on either side of his legs and fixing the mirror a determined gaze. “I’m a boy.” It’s a little bit stronger this time, but saying it in person is different. A mirror can help him practice but it will never prepare him. Sinking backwards, he lies on his back and stares at the ceiling.

A few fingers curl around the fabric of his comforter, the one with the bunnies that he’s had since he was young. It’s not really right for him or who he is, but maybe the pink bunnies on a purple and white background aren’t so bad when the fabric can keep him locked onto this world like a cord attaching an astronaut to his ship. And so, with his free arm, he covers his eyes with the soft skin of his forearm and tries to ignore the pain under his arm that’s going to leave a red mark and he knows it.

Thoughts spin like planets in orbit around his head and the room, in turn, spins around him. Hopeless, you know that? You’re hopeless and you’ll never tell anyone and you’ll die a grandmother in gingham dresses. A spurt of air escapes his lips and he removes his arm before turning onto his side and looking at the dolls on his shelf. They’re the ones his great aunt gave him before she died and he knows that his mother will never let him remove them, no matter how often or with with what persistence he asks.

But they don’t belong here. Not in this room, not in his life, not in his soul. Neither do the pastel yellow walls or the large queen-sized bed frame with ornate white decorations, making tic marks of wrongness on his bound and compressed chest like ugly scars. It has to change and he knows it, but it will never happen with quiet questions asked of his mother in the morning or notes slid across the dinner table to dad before he returns to his room to do homework.

Slowly, he rises from his position and stands in the wreckage of a messy room too messy to matter. Other thoughts have consumed him these days, driving him to mindless clutter just like the clutter in his own mind. Furrowing too-thin eyebrows, he picks up one of the dolls and frowns at it. “You suck.” For a moment, he thinks. Then, convincing himself that these impermanent things are just cracks in his own surface, he shakes his head and places the doll back on the shelf.

A small fire in his eyes, he quietly opens his door and slips down the gently creaking stairs to an empty kitchen that looks like it belongs in a dollhouse. The garbage bags are under the sink, as always, and he grabs an extra large one because, god knows, he’ll need it, he’ll always need it. Melodies from a long time ago sink down into his stomach, stones in the abyss of change. Still, he slinks up the tan-carpeted stairwell, down the hall and back into his all-wrong room.

After closing his door once more, the boy blinks his eyes once, twice and then his hands are gripping the pastel lampshade on the side of his bed and throwing it into the bag as quietly as he can. It’s hard at first, but it slowly gets easier as plastic dolls and chiffon formal dresses fall into the thin plastic sack and out of his life. Each time he does it, something loosens in his chest, despite the binding, despite everything.

Almost everything goes. Ninety-five percent of his clothing, discarded like tattered rags. Hair ribbons, too-expensive lipsticks that his mom made him buy, American Girl books about Me and My Body that carve nausea into his stomach like deep rivers of disgust. All of it goes crashing into the bag until it’s almost full and he feels an emptiness and some sort of mix of loss and incredulity in his brain that culminates into what can only be called relief.

Porcelain is like ice in his hand when he touches it this time. The doll’s face is painted on but he thinks that maybe it’s trying to communicate to him some sort of sorrowful understanding. These are the things he cannot escape.

When the doll smashes into the wooden floor of his room and shatters with a less-than-satisfying crunch, he decides he doesn’t care who wakes up. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter anyway. When they come, I’ll just say, “now you know, now it makes sense.”

“Now you know,” he whispers through the cracking sound of a new doll, blank faces morphing into jagged puzzle pieces that, ultimately, remind him of himself. Why do they do that? Why do they remind him of his own being and the too-tight binder and long hair in a braid because, god damn it, it’s the closest he can get.

Despair consumes him. It swallows him up like a river of emptiness and the voices of the current tell him he’s wrong, all wrong, wrong in the wrong body, in the wrong life, in the all-wrong room.

Letting the last doll tumble out of his grasp, he stumbles to over to the dresser and runs dried fingertips over the polished wood. Right there, right behind the last book on the left as always, is his razor. It’s not small, it’s the one from the kitchen that slides out of a handle if you push it. And maybe it’s detrimental to him, but today it just feels friendly.

The open blade hovers over pale skin; it’s a plane trying to land on the incorrect landing pad, a spaceship about to go into orbit but still breaking through the atmosphere. He’s shaking, now, more than usual, more than he can handle. And maybe the shaking is what does it, what makes him change his mind and fall back into himself.

Instead of touching down on the skin of his forearm, the razor flings up with his hand to the braid at the base of his neck and starts sawing at it. It’s just impulse, but the moment the jaggedly-hacked 6-inch braid hits the wooden floor, so does the razor. All he can feel now is relief, but it’s relief like he’s falling and it might break him.

Shaking uncontrollably, his legs fail and the ground comes to meet him like maybe he’s dead and this is heaven or hell or whatever kind of place a freak like him goes to. Leaning into the side of his bed frame, he looks around at the wreckage of broken doll’s-heads and a bag of things to burn; these things culminate into pride, maybe, or guilt. Either way, it doesn’t matter. A freak like you would do something like this.

Slowly, a tiny smile creeps onto his face and he chuckles for a few second before suddenly stopping. One hand reaching up above him, he pulls the comforter down onto the ground and around him; comforting and maybe a little bit incorrect, it keeps him down to earth as he’s floating back to space and looking at his reflection in the mirror and wondering how it got to this.

Bare feet and scrunching toes, fidgeting on the floor, he closes his eyes and starts to cry. Tears like moonbeams drip down the face he wish didn’t look the way it does. And then he’s sobbing loudly, brokenly, with a too-high voice and too-red eyes and leftover mascara from school leaving stream-lined creeks down his cheeks.

When his mother bursts in because of the noise, he doesn’t turn to look at her. She’s yelling and trying to step through the mess, gesturing wildly at porcelain dolls lying in scattered pieces across the floor, but he doesn’t care. He can’t. He’s too busy staring at himself in the dirty mirror with what is maybe the moon’s reflection on dirty marks but is probably just wet tear markings on his skin.

With a tiny, tugging smile and brightening eyes, he decides that the short hair looks good on him.