INTRODUCTION

Most of my life I've felt I'm the wrong sex, and even the wrong species (with severe chemical sensitivities, I can't eat most human food, or even stay in many human structures). But gender and species dysphoria isn't quite the whole story. You see, I have this persistent feeling I'm under cover--hiding my real identity and origins, even from myself.

I decided to sit down and draw this out and feel this out. What emerged surprised me: I see myself as a small animal's soul that's been reincarnated for half a dozen lifetimes now in human bodies. But this isn't reincarnation Hindu style, reincarnation as a sort of spiritual promotion. It's just disguise--or perhaps adaptation would be fairer. The best I can do under adverse ecological circumstances.

What I'm really feeling is... eco-dysphoria. A small tree-cat exiled by time, in the Land of the Junk Food Monkeys.

THE TEXT

Once, I lived in the canopy's light-- hummingbirds, flowers and fruit, far above the jungle floor where ugly creatures shuffle in the gloom: ground-bound hogs. And men. Back then I had great long-lashed eyes to pierce the green depths and fine silk fur to shed the rains. Shaggy fragrant bark was my lover, my mother. I was happy, in the green. Sudly, sadly, I'm in a bar. Heels now and a drink but I'm still out of my element.

The element is tending bar. (We lack the budget for delirium tremens pink. Sorry. Gray's all you get.) I smell smoke. A rainforest burns in my paw. Amazonia? No, Virginia! Six lifetimes now, passing as one of these apes. Tobacco fields bleed raw red clay into creeks. Our jungles, cut for drugs. I want my tree-- just my tree--

A NOTE

Brazil and Virginia? Yes, Virginia, there was a rainforest. It's easy for Americans to forget that once the whole Southeast was a vast subtropical forest nearly as dense and rich as Amazonia. And it was cut by druglords, though legally sanctioned ones: tobacco plantation owners! Its soil was poisoned, exhausted, eroded; its natives murdered, enslaved or pushed off their land. Sound familiar?

--Chris Wayan

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