About a Boy

About a Boy - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: The years I lost.

After the tests had confirmed that I had extreme memory loss, the people that came to visit me were limited. And those who did visit me were told that especially if I hadn't known you in 2009 that I wasn't likely to know you then. My 'new' friends were really good at doing this. Especially Susannah, the girl who had been holding my hand.  

Hearing what happened for the last 4 years of your life from the perspective of another person is a pretty weird thing. It's a pretty scary thing. My sister was apparently who I talked to the most during the last 4 years of my life. It quickly became apparent that I had told her everything. That seemed like me.

It was kind of like listening to a story with a character who is doing all this stuff and then you're like, 'hold up - I’m the character.' 

My memory stopped in June 2009 and everything after that was blank. Here's what I missed.

Miya and I had spent a summer together. She had gone to acting camp and I had gone to soccer camp and while away we had written ridiculously long letters. When we both got back I invited her to my family lake house in Maine and with the large amount of land up there we had disappeared everyday and hadn't come back usually till late at night. That's all my sister could tell me and I wished she could have given me more details but apparently I hadn't wanted to tell her the stuff they did because the memories were so special that they had to stay between Miya and me. I laughed because that sounded like me too.

At the very end of the summer Miya had started texting this boy and it had been going on so often, even when we were hanging out together that I had been a little bit upset by it. Apparently that was when I started talking to my sister. Pretty soon Miya started acting a little more distant with me and pretty soon we had had to talk. You know the bad talk. Well that talk really sucked apparently because instead of 'it's not you it's me' or 'it's been great and I love you but...' it was 'we need to stop pretending and grow up'. That was the gist of it anyway.

It took me a while to get over this news; I didn't really get it at first. I wanted to talk about it a little more but I realized that even more than that I wanted to know what happened next. I had spent my sophomore year trying to make a new best friend and I had done a good job at that. Amanda was my next best friend apparently but even though I flirted with her she hadn't really caught on and we had just been really good friends. I had gotten mediocre grades that year and the next year I had decided to pick up the pace. One of my New Year's resolutions that year was apparently to keep a journal so the next day my sister got it for me. I had gotten better grades and started getting leadership roles at school. I had made another friend called Taylor and she was 'tomboy' and gay like me and we acted like boys together. Apparently Taylor and I were still quite good friends but she was starting college in Canada and was there with her mom. According to my journal my junior year in high school was one of my best.

My senior year I had been a school prefect and gotten good grades and run the newspaper and gotten on the top soccer team and had been reasonably popular. I looked at photos of these years and the birthday parties looked like they had been awesome but there was no sign of Miya in any of them. Obviously we had just disappeared out of each other’s lives. I still looked for her in the pages of my journals though in hope that I would find some sign that we had made up or that what we had had meant something to her. There was nothing however. 

Something I haven't mentioned yet is what my sister called my transition to male. It's quite a big part of the 4 years that I had missed so I thought I'd explain it in a whole separate chunk. Apparently I had started watching videos by people on YouTube that were ftm transgender and started becoming fascinated with it. I had told my parents that I wanted to talk to a therapist a few months later and I had done just that. According to my sister my parents had taken it quite well. 

 After a year of therapy I had been diagnosed with ‘gender identity disorder’ and I had started my transition a few months later. My sister had brought my laptop with a bunch of video diaries that I had taken throughout my transition. I spent a good week in the hospital bed just catching up on memories and reading journals and looking at photographs. It was like piecing together a puzzle. It was definitely the weirdest thing I had ever done and the doctors were telling me I was being incredibly brave. Once the time had come to release me from the hospital Susannah came to pick me up.