reading room
Parallax
From the far end of the train I am sir. Under the platform's sodium light I am miss. On the form where a box wants an X, I am error until corrected.
Change the observer; change the result.
You lift a lens; I refract. Angle of incidence, angle of you. Through your tinted glass I turn amber, through your smoke glass, ghost. Spectra are honest— the prism never lies about itself, only about the light that enters.
At the school gates I'm "young man," at the library "sweet girl," at the clinic a field on a cupboard, at the airport a code that opens a gate. When you speak, you set the key— my moving notes resolve to your tonic. Not because I changed, but because the instrument did.
Your gaze is a coördinate system; you rotate it and I transform. Project me onto your basis vectors— masculine, feminine, "other"— and call the remainder noise. But noise is just music measured with the wrong metre.
In the mirror I'm waveform— all possible selves vibrating at once, unmeasured, unremarked, whole. Step into the room and I quantise: what you call certain is only your choice of question.
So let's be precise: My gender is a matter of method, a function of distance, lighting, language, and the luck of your morning. If you must measure me, at least write the units in the margin. Admit the margin exists.
And if there is anything I can claim, it's this unowned motion— the slip of light between pupil and word. Call me what your angle demands; I will remain the uncollapsed possibility that your mouth cannot hold. Not mine, you say. Exactly. What you see has always been a story about you.
— Lilith