Safe in the Black Sand

2

It's hard to think back on childhood, to compare life now to life then—to realize just how twisty the roads were that brought us from past to present.

We were in middle school. As far as I knew, we were two brothers on the sidewalk. But I didn't know very much yet.

"I want it," Josh whispered.

I was confused. "Want what?"

Dad was walking in front of us, murmuring to himself, half in our world, half in his—as always.

Josh pointed discreetly toward the store display window, behind which hung a tall red dress.

"That," Josh said, looking left and right like an undercover agent. "There, in the window."

I saw the red dress but looked for something else, anything else. Seeing nothing, I said, "You want that?"

The conversation now felt subversive.

The dress obviously stayed in the store window that day—for Josh, a forbidden apple. Dresses, lipstick, polish, heels...these things weren't advertised to her body type.

We talked more when we got home behind a closed bedroom door, away from our parents.

"Josh—I just—I don't get it," I said, more confused than I'd ever felt in my life.

Josh wanted a dress. It felt unreal. Had we not shared our childhood? I obviously had secrets of my own—I liked boys and didn't talk about it with everyone, but my close friends knew, and so did Josh and both our parents. Mom and Dad had reacted fine when I told them I wanted a boyfriend instead of a girlfriend. But what Josh was talking about now felt entirely different.

"Think of it this way," Josh said, trying to help me understand. "Most women are born girls. But some aren't. They're born boys. It just happens sometimes... And I'm pretty sure it happened to me."

"Pretty sure?" I asked, double-checking.

She smiled. "Very sure."

"Like, really sure?"

Josh laughed. "Yes. Positive."

I felt like I was missing something basic. "But is that even possible?"

Josh laughed again. "Well—yeah. Hello."

I wondered if maybe Josh was like me. Maybe he also liked boys instead of girls and this was just a roundabout way of telling me. "Do you think you're gay?" I asked.

Yet again, Josh laughed, even harder than before. "This has nothing to do with that."

I felt so confused. She was my brother, my shared blood. We had gotten chicken pox together, gone to the same schools, been raised by the same parents. We shared so many things—toys, clothes, friends, genes. And now she was telling me she was actually my sister?

How could I not have known?

* * *

I told her she would probably get beat up if she wore a dress to school, which might have been true—or not. Now, in retrospect, I can see I was only projecting my own fears onto her. I was such a coward back then. The truth was, I didn't want to see my brother in a dress. I wasn't ready to accept that my brother was my sister.

And I was afraid of how Mom and Dad would react, especially Dad. Though maybe it wouldn't be so hard for Dad. He was used to his reality being questioned—like the time Dad told me Ms. Jakintsu gave him a Mexican figurine.

"No," I'd told Dad that day, shutting him down. "That didn't happen. Ms. Jakintsu isn't real. How many times do I have to tell you?"

I remember how he stalled by looking for his coffee. He always kept coffee nearby. The rituals that made up his coffee consumption—the reach for the cup, the wafting with his nose on the rim, the long sip—it all felt like a defense mechanism, a way to stall and give himself time to think up something to say.

"You know, Jax," Dad said after his long sip, "people thought the Earth was the center of the universe until Copernicus said it circled the sun. They thought he was hallucinating. They called him a heretic. Can you blame them? He was changing reality! That's how they felt. But reality wasn't changing, just their understanding of it. Eventually people gave in and let the sun become the center of their universe. But that didn't last. Now, when we look out, it seems like we're in the center again. Galaxies are rushing away from us in all directions. But we know we're not in the center. We can't be. Because there is no center. It's just an illusion."

Dad liked stringing sentences together, like a spider spinning a web. Often, the sentences got so tangled up it became impossible to argue back. I think it was a tactic.

"Look at Hubble," Dad went on, his thoughts still lost in space. "We see galaxies rushing away, but rushing into what? No telling. We're rushing faster and faster into something and we don't even know what it is. That's our reality—for now. Until the next big update."

He took another long sip of coffee. Then he mused, more to himself than to me, "Have you noticed that every discovery makes us smaller? Reality only gets bigger. We're more and more a microscopic pinpoint all the time—a tinier and tinier grain of sand among all the others on a cosmic beach. Maybe one day we'll discover we don't even exist at all!"

"Dad—" I interjected, growing impatient. But he cut me off.

"It's true!" he insisted, looking desperately into my eyes. "In Genesis, God says Let there be light."

"So I've heard," I said, waiting for him to make a point.

"God made the light on day one then the sun on day four," Dad went on. He looked harder into my eyes, peering somewhere behind them, deep into my brain. "Where was the light on day one coming from if not the sun? It's Earth's only light source."

So often when we'd speak like this, I'd end up feeling lost, swept up in his abstraction.

I tried my best to answer. "The Bible was written a long time ago," I said. "People were just trying to make sense of the world. They didn't have much to work with."

Dad smiled, as if I'd made his point for him.

"People need stories," he said. "We're made of them. Stories are mirrors we hold up to the world, some beautiful, some ugly. And reflections can be surprising. I say this because—imagine for a minute what it's like to have a brain like mine. I see things you can't see—like Ms. Jakintsu. She may not be real to you, but she's part of my story. So when you tell me she's not real, it's actually you who sound crazy to me, like you're telling me there's no sun in the sky. All I ask is for you to be patient with me, and to remember your truth is just one of many."