I originally was going to start this by writing ‘I don’t remember how to blog’ and then, suddenly, I did. I was shelving cds at my library job two days ago, and it’s like I had this brief moment where I fell into my old writing voice, as soft as the sunset that filled the large second story windows.

This is the only library I’ve ever worked at that shelves cds by full alphabetical order—band name or first and last name of artist, and then the title. The shelves are chest high, the top surface of them peering over the shelves, casting all the cds in shadow. There are few lights in this corner, save for desk lights for the tables, so I get to slowly peer and squint, pull a cd out to see what the band name is, narrowing and narrowing down until I find where exactly the CD I’m shelving goes. The thrum of the electricity, the traffic below, the train in the distance, is the only sound and between that, and the low light, my thoughts are finally on something else other than Big Topic Discourse or my own anxieties.

At the interview for this job, my (now) supervisor showed me around the library. “You prefer Tor, don’t you?” I was startled. I hadn’t included any of that in my resume or application. She tells me, she worked at the library I used to volunteer at, pre-pandemic. And she remembered that I’m Tor, and remembered, it seems, based on how easy the onboarding went, and the kind of questions she asked, that I’m non-binary. Only once has she ever had a need to talk about me to someone else. “They’re our new on-call” she said, without missing a beat. No hesitation marks, nothing that indicated she was doing the hasty thing of thinking one pronoun and correcting for the other.

The other day while at work, someone said hi to me so faintly, I didn’t quite grasp that she was still trying to get words out. “Hi Tor, do you remember me? I used to work at [same library I volunteered at].”

Shelving CDs, I think about this—I think about how I see myself as a shadow. As someone without weight, who does not rest on someone’s mind enough to make an indentation that they can then access again when they see me. I do not know what it means that people remember me, or that they remember details about me.

I am vampiric with my reflection in others. I attempt to see myself by the way others eyes cast a light on me, to find my form by how my body inhabits the world and people make judgements about my body inhabiting the world, in order to attempt some sort of picture of myself, but it’s not there. I don’t know what I look like. The image in my head is a compromise with the dysphoria: it neither looks like how I want to look, so that I am not *so* startled into a dissociated breakdown every time I see myself, neither does it look like how I actually look, because when it does, the dysphoria seems to slice through my sense of self through my body, leaving it floating at separate from my skin.

So when someone remembers me, I don’t know how to place it. I am empty, and invisible, I inhabit a space that people walk around without realizing why they’re walking around. They only intuit that there is mass here, they do not see it. That’s how I see myself. And maybe that too, is a compromise with the dysphoria; maybe it is because yesterday I was at a holiday party, and my other supervisor (my supervisor’s supervisor, to be precise) waved me over to sit at the table with her. “This is Tor, she’s one of our new hires!” she said to the people who sat down at the table with us. We wear pronoun ribbons under our name tag at this library. It’s optional, but I’ve got one: black bold text on a green background that says MY PRONOUNS ARE THEY/THEM/THEIRS.

Maybe the bus ride home when the dysphoria turned me into a scurrying shadow trying to claw its way out of my body it was begging me, “please, see, we are a shadow. We are a shadow and no one can see us.” Don’t remember me, not if you’re going to remember me like this.

Two days ago, though, I was shelving cds. In one hour, I shelved only the Pop/Rock cds up to the letter K, and that’s only because the entirety of the D’s I had to shelve were all the Doors we had checked in at the moment, and there were no E’s. The sky had lost all of its blood and now was quiet, and dark, and asleep. My shift was over, it was time to push the cart to the elevator, and go home.

And I was, for one brief moment, the kind of person again who could think slow, meandering, reflective thoughts. And here I am now, with a moment and a space to write them.