A Personal Collaboration

If you’ve been reading the comments here, you might have noticed conversations I’ve had with someone named Li.  Back during Covid social distancing, she and I debated about regulations and personal choices in the U.S. and Sweden (hint: we did not agree). On reading about different types of RVs and slides, she suggested a slide that extends the roof to add a second floor (pretty sure that won’t work). On reading about what Tracy’s jobs are on the road, she point-blank asked, “Shelly, what do you do?” 

To say that Li thinks outside the box and speaks her mind doesn’t begin to describe her.  She challenges me, yes, but really she challenges the world, and I love her for that. Well, I simply love her, without any kind of box or category or label.  Li defies labels, all but love, which she has recreated to be more than I knew was possible before I met her, 20 years ago. 

And how did I meet a Swedish transgendered activist, retired electrical engineer/entrepreneur, trauma-survivor, rabble-rousing politician, parent and wife, and my forever friend?  Online, of course.  I had a tiny freelance editing business when Finn was young, and Li was a client. To suss me out as an editor for a personal book she was planning about transitioning, she hired me to do technical and ESL editing for electrical documentation, and I swear that was the hardest damn editing I’ve ever done. 

When I said Li thinks outside the box, I meant that Li doesn’t recognize boxes: all endeavors are a blank slate for her. She has dyslexia, and her English is a special Li-variant. She never uses third-party standards or templates or follows the lead of anyone.  Add in the fact that I know nothing about electrical engineering, and I gotta say again, that was a struggle.  Well worth it, as I must’ve passed the test, since Li then hired me to help with a string of personal narratives, a fictional manuscript based on her transitioning, a book of poems, several websites, basically her public personal before she started her activism.  

As we worked together over the years, me having to get in her head to figure out what the heck she was trying to say, and us collaborating with a graphic designer and artist to create new ways to say it, I learned that you can feel very close to someone who is very other than you. The fact that we challenge each other adds to the intimacy, somehow. 

And there is intimacy; this isn’t some untested internet friendship.  Li has stayed with my family at our home in West Virginia, I’ve stayed with her and her wife in Sweden, and we’ve had adventures together in the Channel Islands. 

One big lesson I learned from Li is that every story of gender transitioning is different because every human is different.  That every love story is both different and the same, because every human is different and the same, ultimately. 

It’s a concept I’m still learning; Li is ahead of me of me here.  Our professional relationship has morphed into a friendship where I keep my mind and heart open to difference and sameness and new definitions of love.  Heck, to no definition, no defining, no boxes.  Just love. 

This is all to introduce you to piece of fiction Li was inspired to write when she saw photos in a blog post here, recently. She wrote it, I gave it a quick copy edit, and the result is a sweet little story. Much sweeter than I would have written, but, again, difference is part of our friendship.  

Li suggested I post it here.  To me, the real story is what’s above.  

Within

By Li Sam

I like early mornings. I don’t know why exactly, but it might have something to do with that bit of chilly breeze that comes along just before the sun shows itself over the horizon. Maybe it’s the silence of being utterly alone. For whatever reason, I  always go for an early walk, and that day I set out before anyone in the house or even the neighborhood had woken.

It was a good morning, a bit misty, which I like. The road ahead looked the same as it usually does, with more space on the right, so that’s where I walk. I was passing a house and kicking a bit of shrubbery that was in my way when my foot stepped wrong, like on a ledge under the shrub’s branch.

So, I fell. Not bad, but I did hurt myself, bumping the side of my forehead on the rubble beside the road’s hard asphalt surface.

“WHAT THE HECK!” I thought (and worse). “What was that?”

I stood up quick as a weasel, and just as angry I looked around to see what had made me fall. 

What I found was something like a pothole.

“Okay!” I thought, a bit calmer, tying to cool down. At least I could blame my injury on something. But what, exactly?

As I studied the pothole closer, wasn’t there something in the bottom, like a paving stone? It wasn’t an ordinary concrete block, though. In fact, whatever this was was very different. The stone looked ancient, like it had been polished over centuries by many feet. But whose feet? And if it’s a step, where does it lead?

That wasn’t the end of it being strange. Amid the rubble and brush, the stone was swept clean.  

Now I was no longer mad; I was downright curious.  

To get a feel for the surface, I tentatively stepped down with one foot, and that’s when I heard the soft sound of a happy child giggling. It was a playful giggle, as if the child wasn’t hiding as much as enticing me to come along.

I stepped back in surprise, but the giggling stopped, so I went down again and bent some branches back to see what I could see.  I could hear that giggling child again, now even happier, perhaps as a response to me finding another stone that might have been leading into the shrubbery, like an ancient path. 

“Okay, this is too strange,” I thought. And I was turning to leave when I heard that child quietly whispering, something like, “Oh no!” as if they were worried, which made me stop.

After a second’s pause, my curiosity got the better of me and I changed my mind, which seemed to make the child giggle again, and then even happier as I stepped my other foot down now, too, bending away more branches to reveal even more of that stone-paved path.

The shrubbery was thick all around, but the path seemed to be taking me almost into a tunnel. It got wider, and I looked farther down, and there was some kind of light at the end. 

“Okay, the sun is up,” I thought, but it didn’t feel like it here. Strange, too, was that I could hear another child approaching us, sounding happy to see me even though I couldn’t see them.

I started to feel like this was a game. Not like hide and seek, but like children wanting to show me something. As adventure is also my thing, I embraced the moment by grabbing the two children by their hands, so to speak, and I let them lead me.

The path opened ahead, and for a moment I couldn’t think straight.

“What is this place?”  I asked myself, and the children heard me and seemed to want to show me more.

What I did know was that I was deep down somewhere, and the stone-paved path felt now more like a trail to follow.  

Okay, if I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right.  I pulled my cell-phone out of my pocket and started to take pictures—the children didn’t seem to mind. In fact, their touch, not exactly real but it felt that way, made me feel safe, and I didn’t want to let go.

We entered the trail properly, and the children pointed things out to me, things that I never had seen before. The scenery wasn’t like anything on this planet, and it reflected life in a way I could not have imagined.

“Was this me, my life? What are these children showing me?” I marveled.

As we continued, even more children appeared from either side of us to join us on the path. They all seemed happy to see me and moved their hands to feel mine and show me the way as we moved on.

The trail finally took us up, step by step, and opened up new views around every corner.

“It’s funny,” I thought, “these children feel so familiar, like I’ve known them all my life. But how can that even be?” I can’t truly see them, and they’re not showing up in my pictures. either.  But I, for sure, can feel them, and to me they’re becoming more and more real, right here with me.

“That bridge there,” one of them pointed out to me, “is where we all meet and visit.”

“You can come here and visit us whenever you like,” another took my hand and told me.

“There are no divisions here, we all are one,” a third explained to me as we followed the trail, and somehow, I believed all three of them.

A fourth whispered in my ear, “The water coming down from above, filling the stream, it’s what’s keeping us alive. We know each other through that water, and, you know, that water never gets old.” I believed that. too.

As we got closer to the bridge spanning above the flowing water, I felt sad in a way. That must be where the adventure ends.  

I had learned to trust my children, because I now knew that they were mine. Not that I felt I was their mother, more the other way around, that my origin, my being, was a result of them, like they were my relatives, but coming before me, not from me. I felt them like life companions, as soulmates, if you like. A kind of soulmate that never leaves you. 

“So, what now?” I thought.

In a way, I didn’t want to leave, but in another I didn’t have to. The memory, and that feeling and sense of the children I knew—I always will carry all that with me as we were one.

So, we didn’t separate. I never left the children and they never would leave me.

The last staircase up after the bridge took me out of the shrubbery and back on the road again.

I somehow felt free, not from getting out of there, but from having been there. One experience richer, you could say.

The sun was now up, and I was home a bit later for breakfast than I normally am. My husband had been awake for a while, and he came down to the kitchen when he heard me come in.

“But, what’s happened?” he asked me right away. “You’re hurt!  Your forehead is scratched and swollen.” He pointed out.

I didn’t want to tell him the story because I felt it was secretly mine. But I knew I should, so I told it in a nonsensical, funny way, a way that no one would believe. 

He laughed. “But, I know you—you took a lot of pictures. Let’s see them.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I definitely took pictures, but what would they look like now? Had they somehow been deleted, or will they still be there?

“Sure,” I said, picking up my cellphone nonchalantly.

The pictures were all there, lined up, as I swiped through to show him. No children were visible though, which was a relief.

He blurted out, “But hey, wait a minute! That’s Watkins Glen! I didn’t know you’d even been there. You’ve never told me!” Then, he asked a bit more seriously, “When was that?”

“I can’t remember. Does it matter?” I answered back as if I weren’t linterested.

“Well, no secrets between you and me, right? Check the date stamp in the meta data, it’ll tell you.” 

He sounded eager to know, so I gave him my phone so he could check for himself.  

He started to laugh.

“You are shitting me, right? That story and those pictures … damn you, that was a good joke. You had me there. Love you. Can we have breakfast now?” he laughed at me, giving back my phone.

I slyly looked at the time stamp on the photos myself. The dates spanned from several hundred years back. I smiled at myself and my secret as my husband turned away to start breakfast. 

The feeling that filled me now proved that the pictures and the dates were all true. Those children I met, my soulmates, were from various ages, and, like water in streams and rainfall from everywhere, we met together on that path in that deep valley. And I know we can meet again, depending only on if we want it or not, in this lifetime or another, on this world or one we don’t know about yet. The path will look the same, no matter what. 

The End