The male soul

I used to haunt an old version of this human form, the one the world felt entitled to, with the scandalous temptation of the calm and the ordinary. I’m greedy like that, and mischievous, too. But I can’t attribute that to my neural sex without crushing the statistical eggshells we’ve placed under my feet. Oh, well.

I’m greedy and tenacious. I left, but I came back. Why I scrambled the boxes in that poor young head, scoffed at the karyotype, laughing and dancing and tearing up the instructions, ever the optimist, disparaging the warnings and insisting, prenatally, reckless and brash, that the model in front of me, XX — warning: maturation via estrogen, was one I could operate, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps because it was the model in front of me. And anyway, those first years were mine.

I put them off for a while, those XX changes, starved that teenage body and made it practically look the part of the bastard imp I am. I’m smart like that (or maybe just greedy), and I’ll admit it wasn’t pretty for the ones who had to see it. But I wanted to live, even if my automaton looked like she didn’t.

Now the autopilot of my automaton, dutiful thing that she was, found a warm spot in that soulless space at that soulless time, and she used it like the heart she didn’t have (unless the body’s counts), found a place for me in it and promised a stasis. And a stasis she gave me.

Five, ten, sixteen years-I don’t remember too well how long I was gone, but I’m greedy and tenacious and came back at once stifled and stubborn and smirking.

I never grew up, but autopilots don’t either, and only after she had found what I needed (wonderful, calculated, dutiful gal that she was) did she step aside with a flit of smiling resignation and the closest thing to a sparkle that I’d ever seen in those gray, gray eyes. We were stuck with the next best thing, the receptors I’d so greedily laid and scattered there on arrival those years ago, calmed and sated and humming to life, tricked by our mischief and a life force delivered subcutaneously into feeling right at home.

Home. The body wasn’t mine, not entirely, but the head is good enough. Nuclei: XX, Mind: XY, Fuel: finally, finally XY.

I grew and I felt and I fought and I laughed. I had the next best thing, the mundane ecstasy of a head that I could inhabit myself, the grayness gone, and my imagination for the rest, the parts that my fuel couldn’t do, not anymore, not with XX. (I get sad about the last part, but from Autopilot I learned to put feelings — even real ones like mine — into boxes. It’s the best of both worlds.)

The body is clunky, but I’m told it looks at least a little like me.