A parent or guardian
Someone who has known you since childhood
A mentor or teacher
An employer or coworker
A spouse, partner, or close intimate friend
Someone who does not consider themself a loved one
RED
The form is one page long. No back. Just a front. It should be longer. There are six copies of the form, all different colors. Like I’m working my way through the rainbow to the end where I’ll finally find peace.
Red. A parent or guardian. I meet my mother for lunch at the little bistro down the street.
She’s an anxious person, and it is hard for her to find her way in this part of the city. She wanted to meet at the McDonald’s near her house. But I wanted to stay in my neighborhood, and this place has outdoor seating.
It’s summer. It’s nice. While the rest of the world burns, it seems like Minneapolis holds onto normal temperatures and we’re still living up here in a bubble. Some flooding. The last two epidemics, yeah. But no fires, no heat days. Just a cool 85 degrees.
Mom sits down, her lips already pursed. She crosses her legs. She looks around at all the people, like they’re going to laugh at her. She hates going outside. I need to make this count for her.
We order food quick. I make sure she knows I’m paying. She asks if it’s okay if she gets a pop. I say yes. She asks why I’m wearing my mask around her. “Do you think I’m infected or something?”
“No,” I say. “We’re just being really careful.”
Before she asks anything else, I take out the red form. One sheet. Five questions after the initial information fill-in-the-blank. Rachel Wendy Coleson. 59. F. Mother. Etc.
“So you’re doing it,” she says, eyeing the paper as I put the other colors away back into the folder with the logo of the hospital on the front. REVISION LABS, TWIN CITIES.
“I am,” I say.
“Well, I think it’s smart,” she says. “Therapy hasn’t been working, and how many years have you been doing that? This seems cheaper, even with your copay.”
I swallow. “They want you to answer this form, and I brought a pen…”
“So,” she says, taking the paper form over the wire metal table and giving me a wry smile. “I can just write, ‘I want her to give me a million dollars’ and that’s okay?” She says it like a joke. But there’s something behind her words that sticks out like needles hidden in carpet. I should have asked my father. I should have parents who don’t smile like that.
But this isn’t a revision for her. It’s a revision for me.
“Sure,” I offer a very uncomfortable laugh.
She takes out her reading glasses, puts them on her face, looks down her nose, and scans the form. “Well, this feels like a trap,” she says. “You’re not gonna like anything I put on here.”
“Like what?” My mind is already whirring. There’s never knowing the depths of how much Mom’s truths are going to hurt.
“Like…can they…change anything?” she says.
I nod. Because I need to know the truth. “There’s a place at the bottom, after you answer the questions about the current draft as they call it…what is now…who I am now…where you can write your top three, from most important to least important.”
“Just things I would change about you?”
“Things that would make life easier for me,” I say.
She taps the pen to her chin. And then writes, a little too fast, three things.
She passes it back. She sets back in her chair. Bracing for me to read it. I know every muscle in her face, every twitch in her body, I’ve been translating them like runes for survival since I was a child. I know she wrote something that will curdle my blood.
The doctor said it would be best if I don’t read anyone’s answers until the end.
My therapist said that it might shed some light if I do.
I had already agreed, within myself, that I would read them before the end, but not in front of the person.
And I would not tell Sadie about any of this until it was already finalized and I absolutely had to get her to write in her own answers on the blue-colored copy.
But the way my mom is looking at me.
I have to look.
- Liza’s life would be much easier if she was happy with her given gender. That’s my biggest wish.
- Liza would be a wonderful mother, if she actually wanted to be.
- We couldn’t afford to fix her teeth.
None of these come as a surprise. But the fact they’re written on this sheet…I remind myself the doctor said if there was a real reason for concern, my therapist could sign off and get a request negated. I know my therapist will have my back on number one. But…
“You shouldn’t be surprised,” she says.
“I’m not,” I say.
And that night, I will probably think of a thousand things to say beyond that. But right now, I’m just dead inside.
At least she wouldn’t have me give up Sadie.
ORANGE
Ryan has known me since I was in the third grade. He has a shit memory and we haven’t spoken for a few years. But we always seem to come back to each other whenever we have a moment and come up for air from our busy lives.
I’ve mailed him the orange sheet. He texts me to let me know it should be arriving today, back at my house, all stamped and sealed and ready.
Sadie won’t see that Ryan has written me, because Sadie doesn’t get the mail. I do. Sadie is at work on her computer inside the house when I check the box and there it is. In this day and age with postal workers being shady, I don’t know why Revisions wants us to use the fucking snail mail but here we are. Just some junk and an overstuffed envelope.
I rip it open.
I just have one thing. Liza is super standoffish. If they could just trust people more, I think they’d be happier.
And there’s something that twists in my stomach.
A memory, of Ryan punching a wall and leaving homecoming. The two of us hanging out at the park dome, him saying my clothes were too baggy. The time he got drunk and called me, saying it was my fault I was alone because I never gave the good guys a chance.
I put the orange copy with the red copy.
YELLOW AND GREEN
I can hit two in one.
I work at the high school where I graduated.
After work, when the students have finally straggled out of the music room, I meet up with the band teacher next door (Mr. Carson, or Tony), and then Mrs. Rhodes joins us from the English department upstairs. Because Tony is band and I am choir/vocal, we have a connection that comes from being in the spring musical trenches together year after year. We don’t go out for coffee. He doesn’t know my real pronouns. He hasn’t seen my house. But I know he’s been cheating on his wife with the guidance counselor and loves watching the sun come up over the parking lot at 6 a.m. In the same vein, he knows that when the kids are gone and I think no one is listening, I’ll improv on the piano to get my feelings out. He knows that I miss my grandma every day. He knows that sometimes when the kids cuss me out, I go into our shared office and cry. It’s an intimacy between teachers on the front lines.
Mrs. Rhodes told me to call her Rhonda years ago, when I started working here. But Rhonda Rhodes will never be a peer for me; she’ll only be my senior English teacher with the horn-rimmed glasses of undiscernible age. Like a mythical demigod that Odysseus comes across on his travails. Above humanity, beyond comprehension. As an adult, I was horrified when I was sitting in the faculty lounge one day and she came in holding her pantyhose in one hand and her shoes in another (Don’t ask, she’d shot off, before dodging into the bathroom). Other than that one incident, I was still Liza to her. She was still Mrs. Rhodes.
This is all to say, if there are coworkers and teachers I trust with knowing I’m going to Revisions, these are the two I can trust not only to not judge or ask prying questions, but answer truthfully. They know me, sides of me no one else did. I admire them. They know what it means to be a teacher.
So we sit down in the practice room behind Tony’s and my classrooms, make the keyboard a makeshift table, and each take a bench or a small stool to circle up and fill out the worksheets.
“Seventy-two?” Tony snorts as he peers over at Mrs. Rhodes’s yellow copy. “You’re not seventy-two.”
“I am,” she said stiffly, the same horn-rimmed glasses bobbing on the edge of her wide nose. Tony shakes his head.
“I’ll be long retired by the time I’m seventy-two,” he says, going back to his green sheet.
“Now, Miss Coleson,” Mrs. Rhodes says. We still haven’t decided on what to call me. She used to call me Liza. Just Liza. But now my role here at school is Miss Coleson. Or Miss C. Maybe she calls me this out of respect, like she knows I don’t see myself as an equal. Welcome to Mt. Olympus, Miss Coleson. Miss. Coleson. Miss. “I’m sorry I don’t understand this, what is this?”
“You can’t tell me you haven’t seen Revisions ads everywhere,” Tony says, scribbling while he talks.
“I just don’t understand why they need to know what we think,” Mrs. Rhodes said.
“Capitalism, probably,” Tony says. Still scribbling.
“Well, I chose you because you know me,” I say, honestly. “You had me as a student, so…just maybe write down the things that you think would help me focus?”
“You were an exceptional student,” she says.
Tony scribbles. A part of me wants him to say I’m an exceptional teacher, too. But he doesn’t. There is a worm inside me that eats away at a hole, making it bigger and bigger.
“Okay, well, was I a happy kid?” I say.
“As happy as any teenager is,” she says. “You’re such a pretty girl, I don’t understand why you’re going through this.”
“It’s not plastic surgery,” Tony sniffs.
“So I don’t write down anything physical?” she says.
“You can if you want,” I say.
“Oh really?” Tony laughs. A joke. It’s a joke. I force a laugh, too.
“Well, I suppose it would make your life easier if your hair wasn’t so curly,” she says. She pats her own curly hair, short and tight to her head. “I know it can be a bear in the morning, and sometimes…well, to be honest, you look tired sometimes. That could make things easier?”
“I guess,” I say. “It’s up to you.”
“So what do I write?” she asks.
“Uhm…I can’t really tell you?”
“Just something such as…straight hair?”
“Sure,” I shrug.
“I feel like a fairy godmother!” Mrs. Rhodes giggles, writing down in cursive, straight hair. “Giving you a gift!”
Tony slams his pencil down and flips his green sheet around, in the same manner as a fourth grader who just wrote “farts” a lot. But after they both leave, their totes over their shoulders and them both fishing for car keys while the practice room door shuts behind them…I look to see what he wrote.
- Liza could do with a little more confidence.
- Liza should play the piano more often.
- Better posture will help with singing and confidence.
Could be worse. But something about it still churned inside me. Oh really, Tony had laughed. Better posture will help with singing and confidence. Oh really. Oh really.
I was being sensitive. Literally nothing written was bad.
I put the yellow and green sheets back in the folder.
BLUE
I’m not ready to tell Sadie.
I was going to tell her when she came down for breakfast, but now that she’s two feet away from me, pouring cereal from the bag to the bowl, I can’t say anything. The sheet is in my hand. I could slip it across the table when she sits down.
She sits down.
I fold the paper up and put it in my pocket.
“What do you have going on today?” she asks me, digging into her Cheerio knockoffs.
I shrug. “Typical Saturday.”
We go our separate ways, Sadie weeding the garden and me locking myself up in my home office. I click into the video chat room, to see that my therapist’s other client is already there. We don’t know each other, but I know his name is Noah and he’s gone through the revision.
I click on my video, and he does, too. We reveal ourselves to one another. Me, a mess in my messy office. Him, his hair perfectly parted and his Saturday lounge clothes nicer than what I usually wear to a funeral. His eyes are bright. His skin is clear. He’s had eight to ten hours of sleep. Somehow, even with the world on fire outside our windows, he is internally a tranquil pond full of dancing swans. Our therapist thought we’d get along because we’re both originally from St. Paul and we play piano. Two things that can bring any strangers together.
He smiles. “Hey, there, Liza.” He says it like we’ve been good friends since college.
I offer a smile. “Hey, uh…Noah.”
He tells me about the procedure, how they knock you out, you wake up, a couple of days to “come back online” he jokes, and then you’re home. “It does take about forty-eight hours for the brain fog to lift,” he explains. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s barely disorienting. It’s like when you wake up in the morning and have to remind yourself where you are.”
Or who you are.
“Do you miss anything about before the revision?” I say.
He thinks about it for a second, honestly, and then with a small crack in his smile he says, “I don’t listen to as much music as I did, I suppose. I used to bang on everything, shove it through my car speakers, tinker around on my keyboard…it was very annoying and overstimulating for those around me. So it isn’t so much that I miss it, it’s that it’s something I remember enjoying and now I don’t enjoy it. That doesn’t make much sense. I guess I would say I miss my snaggle tooth. It was just something very ugly but also you know, it was me. But I suppose this is also me. Everyone changes through life, even if they don’t have a revision.”
PURPLE
The last time I saw Caroline, we were twenty-three and I was moving out.
There’s something poisonous about knowing someone so well, having your heart the closest to theirs, so close you could touch souls…and then they are strangers. The tone they always took with the cashier at your favorite restaurant is now softer and kinder than the one they reserve for you.
Once, Caroline and I stayed up late in our dorm room sophomore year, throwing popcorn and drinking Baileys, watching old Kevin Smith movies.
Now, Caroline sits with a straight back at the bistro where I met my mother. She would like this place. Maybe that’s why I picked it a few days before, because I was picking it for her. Because maybe, I could show I’d changed enough to be worthy of her voice.
It had taken some messaging to get her to meet me.
I knew she was in the Twin Cities area. We both had gone to college here. We both had never moved. And yet, I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years.
When I’d moved out of our senior apartment, she just gave a wave and a goodbye and that was that. I don’t even remember the last glimpse I got of her. We were supposed to go on a road trip later that summer. We didn’t.
It wasn’t supposed to be goodbye.
Sadie wouldn’t care I was here. Caroline had never been with me. We had been sisters. And yet, I hadn’t told Sadie where I was going.
Because there was no reason to see Caroline. Unless I wanted to unearth fifteen years of pain.
“Hey,” I offer. My voice is too loud.
Caroline, slim and sleek and wearing just the right clothes…a cooler version of who I wished I was…she just looked over her phone to me and forced herself a pithy, “Hello.” Her eyebrow raised and her eyes lowered back to the phone as she said it. Like it took everything in her to shove the word out.
Sometimes, there aren’t big blowouts between people. Sometimes, people just grow in two different directions until there’s nothing left to see of the other.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say. I take a seat. Scoot it in too loud. Put the folder and my purse on the table. Maybe in another life, in another dimension, we meet here every week and I could ask to see pictures of her kids…or I could at least know if she had kids…that used to be our trajectory. And maybe we would be talking about the weather or the next soccer game or something other than…this.
“So Revisions, you said?” she offers.
A part of me is glad she didn’t sink her teeth into a bitter, “it’s been a long time.” We know it has been a long time.
“Yeah,” I say. “I uh…the last page, it’s…” She sighs, puts her phone down on the wire table, and leans back with her arms and legs both crossed. I lose my train of thought. She does not want to be here.
I do.
I want to see her. To know her. I wish I had been a worthy human to have her friendship forever.
That’s why Purple had to be her.
She can tell me how to be fixed.
“So the last witness I need,” I say, “is someone who doesn’t consider themself a friend. Someone who…well…is the opposite of a friend, no offense, I don’t mean to—”
“No, no you’re right,” she says.
The way people move when they say heartless things. She looks down her nose as the table, like she is speaking to me but I have hair made of snakes.
I’m right.
Fifteen years ago, this person stopped taking my calls. Fifteen years ago, I started wondering why. My stomach sinks.
“Well, I guess then you’re the perfect one to do this,” I say. I pull out the purple sheet from the folder and pass it to her across the wire table, although it feels like I’m crossing a boundary by putting any limb closer to her radius. Who am I to hand her something? Maybe she won’t take it.
She takes it.
What did I do, Caroline? I want to ask. Why do you hate me?
She takes out a pen that she has in her purse. She scribbles out the information. She starts it too fast, and then ends it too slowly. A waitress comes in halfway through her writing and interrupts. She just looks up at the waitress with that smile she reserves for people she wants to like but doesn’t know.
“Oh, I’ll take a jasmine tea to go, please,” she says. “Thank you so much.”
To go.
“I uh…” stumbling, I say, “Same.”
She flicks her eyes at me, and then scribbles something else.
Finally, she sets it down on the table a little too hard. She puts a saltshaker on top so it won’t fly away. She says, “Well. Good seeing you and good luck.”
She stands.
“Wait, that’s it?” I hear myself say.
She stops, like I have gone off script. “Yes.” I have never heard an “s” sound so sharp.
“Okay,” I say. “Can you…it’s…been fifteen years.”
She rolls her eyes. “I knew this was gonna be a whole thing. Lizzie, there are people dying in the streets. The world is on fire. No one has time for your…all this.” She waves her hand.
Lizzie. No one has called me that since college, and it burns in my stomach like a warm fire. Back when I believed I could be someone beautiful.
“Goodbye, Lizzie,” she says. “Good luck on your procedure, and may you heal fast.”
She’s gone.
The purple sheet is still there.
I look to it.
L is self-centered.
L is too sensitive.
L is a hypocrite.
But again, I haven’t known L for years. The fact she’s getting this done at all makes me believe she is still warring with herself. She needs to buck up and stop leaning on others. She needs to let things go. She needs to understand the rest of us don’t think about her.
BLUE
It has been a month.
The folder sits on my side of the closet, between some old U-Haul boxes that smell like even older laundry.
Sadie hasn’t found it. Maybe a part of me wanted her to.
I can’t lock in my surgery day until I have all the paperwork filled out.
I finally hit her up as we’re sitting in the attic’s library, and she’s reading and I’m fucking around on the computer. It’s built in me like a festering electric storm. I’ve waited too long to say it, and with every time I’ve put it off, the harder it’s gotten to open my mouth.
Finally, I say, “So you’ve heard of Revisions?”
“The thing all the billionaires are pushing in ad space? Yeah,” she says. She doesn’t put her book down.
“They say they can make you happy.”
“A lot of people say that,” she says. “If it was that easy, they wouldn’t need to flood my feed with it.”
“But what if it can?” I say. “Deirdre had it done, at the beginning of last summer. She looks great. She says she feels great.”
“Deirdre?” Sadie says.
“She teaches English at the school.”
“Oh,” Sadie says. “Okay. Huh. Well, good for her.”
I pause. “Sadie,” I say, “Deirdre doesn’t go to therapy anymore. She’s gotten Teacher of the Year. She gave me the name of her doctor…she says our insurance covers it and I checked and…I would really love to give it a chance.”
Sadie puts her book down. She looks to me. Not in surprise. But with those big eyes like she wishes she could pick me up and hold me. “I know you do,” she says. “They’ve been sitting in the closet for a month.”
“So you did see them.”
“I didn’t go poking through them, no,” Sadie says. “The logo is on the outside of the folder.”
“Well if you’d read them, you’d see how much work needs to be done.”
Sadie nods. “I looked up who needs to fill out what in order to give the doctors pinpoints to change. I’m guessing you asked your mom. Caroline. Probably Ryan. And you’re about to ask me.”
“Yes,” I say. Just yes, to it all.
Sadie nods. She quietly stands up from her overstuffed chair, forgetting her book. In her soft way, she crosses the carpeted floor to her desk. She opens a drawer and takes out a manila envelope.
She hands it to me, her socks tip-toeing across the room like a ballerina. “Here,” she says. “I’ll fill out your blue sheet. But only if you read these.”
“What is this?” I say. “I told you I checked our insurance—”
“They’re from our friends,” she says. “A couple of your students. Your brother and your uncle and your aunt. My mom and dad. Charles next door and your graduate student cohort. People who know you, and love you.” She holds out her hand. “Where’s the sheet?”
“You’re…not gonna stop me?”
“It’s your choice,” she says. “No one else’s. It’s what you want changed. Not Caroline. Not your mom. Not even me.”
We trade paperwork.
I open up the envelope, undoing the little string on top. Winding it off the pin.
It is a thick stack of all different colors of paper. Mauve and pink and aqua and deep purple and even some blank white computer paper.
Liz is a really wonderful singer.
They have been a wonderful auncle to our children. They always know how to turn anything into a game. One time they turned our table into a time machine after dinner. The kids still play the time machine table game, even after all these years.
They are exceptionally good at remembering birthdays, even without Facebook notifications.
They are always one to cry with a friend, no matter how late it is.
Video games make them smile. And their smile is contagious.
I remember when they were little and I took them to the zoo and they memorized all of the names of the animals in one afternoon.
They are brave and courageous to be themself. My daughter is worried about being gay, and seeing Liz and Sadie together has really been a life-saver.
They care about their community.
They are honest.
They don’t kill spiders.
They play really beautiful music.
They always know how to find the best parking spot.
They mask, even when no one else does. I’m immunocompromised, so I notice.
They still love stuffed animals.
They bought us baby formula when we couldn’t afford it. And when the third lockdown happened, they bought us a little inflatable playground for the backyard.
They drove me to get flowers for my grandma’s funeral when my car broke down.
They made sure I got to work.
Liz laughs.
Liz knows what it means to be themself.
Liz is kind.
Liz is kind.
They are kind.
Liz is kind.
Then Sadie’s handwriting on the last paper. A bright robin’s egg blue.
Liz, you are the sun. Please don’t try to tame that wild light. Let it glow. See who follows it to their shores.
MANILA
I was going to turn in the papers today.
Instead, I drive north. I pack my mask, my hand sani, all the things we need now to go through the world, and I cut through the chaos to find a small untouched piece of shore near the river.
I sit there, with this folder full to the brim, sitting on my lap.
There was supposed to be peace. But it isn’t here, and the thought of having straight hair or happiness in another pronoun that isn’t mine…even if I make the whole world happy, the world will still be on fire.
I pull out the manila envelope. I fish a pen out of my purse. I write my own list on the back.
A person who genuinely cares.
Someone who loves theme parks and musicals.
A queer, complicated mess who is still alive.
A wife, a teacher, an auncle.
Someone who considers themself worthy.
A human who wants to love themself.
It’s six lines long. It is the only thing in this entire Revisions folder that is written in my handwriting. So it is the only thing I take with me when I stand up, walk past the trash can, clean up after myself, and find my car again.
I follow the setting sun back home.
(Editors’ Note: “Six People to Revise You” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 62A.)
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