The words curled around me in the timeless present of the Rhiz, where we were always stretching toward our ancestors and the old ways, and toward our future beings and the ways to come. This was the place that I had longed for, before I knew it could be real. I thought of Stone, and how we could soon enter the Rhiz-Port together, and swim in the lake, emerging loose and unbothered.

How improbable, how strong, these pathways toward collective good, I thought.

Mar’iah stood near me. She now wore a necklace with a sprig of lavender. She handed me a crystal stylus and pointed to a page of names.

She began, “To be an Operatrix—”

“—is to slip in and out of rooms, to pass one sheath of information to another, to wear one’s finest style, to have one’s missions set against all the missions that the habitual world might demand, to love the darkness as one loves the light,” they all chanted.

I looked at their expectant faces, and my wrongness was finally revealed as right.

And I signed.

Acknowledgments

Finishing this book certainly upended any remaining fantasies about writing as a solitary pursuit.

With gratitude to friends and professors at Columbia. To Lucy, Kathleen, Matt, and Naima for being there in writing and in venting. To Paul, for your humor. To Ben, for your care with language.

To Matthew Sharpe and Lisa Cohen at Wesleyan, thank you for encouraging my weird, queer writing.

Thanks to everyone at Art Farm, the Watermill Center, Queens Council on the Arts, Women & Performance, and Insight Meditation Society. Much love to all who have been a part of Trans at Rest, especially Grey, Như, Ita, Lorelei, An, Charlie, and Eli Ryn.

To dear friends who’ve kept me going in the salty times and the sweet times: Jaffa, S.O., Wendy, Yarden, Carla, Janel, Ariele, Weston, Elissa, Riitta, Elisa, Tara, Nicole.

To my family, for growing with me. Mom, for sharing your love of reading. Al, for listening to all my ideas. Dad, for giving me the sense that it all connects together.

To Violet, my faithful companion.

To Ady, for being there and showing me new ways.

To all my sources of inspiration and nourishment: Nic Fleming’s BBC article about plants using fungi to talk to one another, Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, Blood Orange, psilocybin mushrooms, Janet Mock, Tourmaline, Thomas McBee, Dean Spade, Andrea Lawlor, Jordy Rosenberg, Tara Brach, and the list goes on.

To Emma, for your hopeful intervention and literary care.

To Sarah Lyn Rogers, Sarah Jean Grimm, Megan Fishmann, Rachel Fershleiser, Katie Boland, Wah-Ming Chang, Samm Saxby, Laura Gonzalez, Roma Panganiban, Michael Salu, and everyone else at Soft Skull/Catapult and Janklow and Nesbit who helped this book enter into the world.