by Samuel Clark

I live in a place that is both outside and in. I know that I’m outside because of the winds. Because of the birds. Because the light pours in through the metal meshing and warms me like hot tea. Because when the sun goes down and the moon starts up again—starts with her poetry and monologues and one woman shows—I’m there to behold the whole thing, the glow of her through the screen, illuminating.

I know that I’m inside because when the rains come, I’m left with the scent of petrichor and nothing else. That what few bugs get in are inconsequential to what grows inside me, while the ones that want to land and the ones that want to drink fly thwack into the walls that are not walls.

I know that I’m in an inside-outside place because that’s where the boy comes from. The real inside. He splits the doors down the middle and steps out with his watering can, a dusty blue, and pours water into the dirt packed inside me for the flower inside me. He holds one of our leaves and says, “You’re my favorite,” and I don’t hear him say it to any of the other pots or any of their flowers, so I know that he’s telling the truth.

“You’re my favorite too,” I say, which is also the truth, but the boy says nothing back. This is the tragedy of our relationship—that he cannot hear me, but that I can hear him.

. . . 

The boy doesn’t look like any boy I’ve ever seen, but I believe him when he tells me he is one. There are two more people on the inside that don’t refer to him as him, which confuses me until I realize that the boy’s boyhood is a secret he’s shared with me only. I’m flattered until I remember it’s because he cannot hear me speak; that he chose to tell me has nothing to do with trust.

Yet I do not hear him say this to the other pots with their soil and their flowers. I do not see him cup the tips of their leaves and ask things like, “How are we doing today?”

Sometimes the boy will step out not with a watering can, but with a phone. I know it’s a phone because I used to live on the inside-inside. He talks and talks and laughs and laughs, but then his voice gets low and his words turn to code and he starts looking at everything, everywhere: over his shoulders, through the doors to the inside, out to the neighbors’ fences, eyes round with heavy caution and something from the wild, the look of an animal who knows he’s being hunted.

After one of these conversations, the boy does something new. He sits down at the table that is my home. Pulls up a chair. I watch him rub the space between his eyes. He carries purple bags beneath his pupils. “I’m going to lose so many people,” he tells me. “They’ll never see past the person they met when they first met me.” He opens his eyes and looks right at me. Not at my flower, but me.

“That’s silly,” I say. “One can be one thing and still become quite another. After all, look at me: I used to be a teapot.”

. . .

Being a teapot was a job that I never felt qualified for. I would watch as the family of three brought the teacups to their mouths—the intimacy of lips pressed against porcelain rims—how they’d blow the steam from my sisters and sip. The teacups were so good at being teacups. The saucers excelled at being saucers. But I was never that delicate, never that in tune with the tea. I wanted to be. I tried really hard. And the saucers and the teacups were extremely kind, extremely patient. They liked me and I liked them. We sat in our cupboard and chatted, protected from dust by panes of glass, but the imposter syndrome was always there, sitting inside me like a used teabag.

And so it made sense when it happened. As afraid as I was, it made sense. When the boy’s mother picked me up. When her hand slipped. When I crashed to the rose-petaled linoleum, my spout cracking, boomeranging away from my body and across the floor of their home—pieces of me spanning the distance. And the boy who I didn’t know was a boy, the boy who never looked at me before, the boy who stopped his mother from throwing me out, who took me to the place that is both inside and outside, filled me with soil and a flower just for me. “Now this feels right,” I told him. “This feels exactly like what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Of course, to say it wasn’t scary at first would be a lie. That there was a period of adjustment was undeniable. I went from living in a place of protection—the cupboard and its glass panes, the shadowed space where my sisters and I exchanged stories—to sudden exposure to the elements, the world outside loud with animal sounds and storms, cold winds that blew in through the mesh and ruffled the flower inside me. Screaming neighbors. Honking horns.

I had a family and then I didn’t. The saucers and the teacups remained in their cupboard, locked away from me forever.

“But now I’m friends with all of the pots and their flowers,” I tell the boy, and I smile because it’s true. He is still at my table, still rubbing his brow. “It’s the perfect fit and I’m happy. I’m happy! I think you will be too.”

But he doesn’t respond, because that is the tragedy of our relationship—that he cannot hear me, but that I can hear him.

What drew me to rewrite Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Teapot” was its theme of transformation. I wrote this while still in the closet as trans, and while living in a house that remains deeply transphobic. My safe haven during this time period was the screened in porch, where I did most of my writing, surrounded by plants that I’d water every other day.

During this part of my life, I couldn’t fathom a future in which I got to live comfortably, publicly, where I would ever be able to safely come out. I’d read all these stories from other trans folx online about how worth it it was, even after losing people, how much happier and confident they were in their bodies, their lives, their overall wellbeing. It’s not that I didn’t believe them—I did—I just couldn’t imagine that outcome for me. I wanted to reflect that dynamic between the boy and the flowerpot. The flowerpot has undergone their transformation. They’ve been through the worst part and made it to the other side, happier and more comfortable in themselves, but the boy doesn’t speak the flowerpot’s language; he can’t hear what it is they’re trying to convey.

He will one day, though. Trust me.