Trash blew in a whirlwind behind the Exxon sign as I looked out my apartment window and wondered if I really wanted to leave the city. Cars honked at the light on my corner and a motorcycle ripped its engine nearby. The breeze carried dust and exhaust into the bedroom through the screen and the sunflowers I bought two days ago for my altar already withered, their petals pruning at the stem.

A vision of me reclining against the plaster wall in front of the gas pumps across the street wearing my boots and straps appeared to me as I considered all that was available to me in NYC from the window of my apartment. I had a uniform prepared for when I finally started letting myself make money: black leather platforms with silver mirrored heels, black leather micromini cut to the coochie, and black elastic straps rhinestoned and crisscrossed down the legs, spiderwebbed across the ass, hips, dick and torso. I changed out the crop top I wore to accommodate different colors and banners—fag in black or slut in pink, white and blue, for example—but all had sparkle and were cut short enough to show the trans symbol tattooed on my sternum. I also wore the symbol on a chain I got in a pay-what-you-can deal at a market at Rubalu and dangling from the earring I got as an early transition signifier, in case there were any room for doubt between my mohawk, flat chest and faint stubble about what I was. I like for the genitals to be like the surprise Kinder puts in chocolate, a prize you get for unraveling me to the center. Strange to think I used to let people do as much for free.

A siren wailed passed the window toward the Pulaski bridge and my mind returned to the apartment that I now had less than two months to vacate and 35 cents with which to do so. 47-16 11th Street had been my home through four years of excruciating transformation, and I found myself then in a peculiar in-between. The old life was gone—blown to bits by a combination of faith and mania—and the new one began in the same alcove of my living room, curtained off against the searing summer sun that baked the third-floor apartment in the wet heat of the new hottest July on record, where I once sat hunched behind three separate computer screens for hours on end and now awoke to words I had written in states of supreme inspiration on the walls. “Trust divine timing,” one read. “You’re an ICON,” said another. “Go be an ICON.” Weed from the dispensary down the block had begun to sour and taste like gasoline and while I smoked it much less than I used to, I still smoked it daily. The companion that rang my doorbell unannounced on a weekend I had asked to be alone was much more thoughtful than the previous lot that ignored my wishes in one way or another, and I had one again, nonetheless. I was still not making income. And my time in the apartment was almost up.

It was not that money-making opportunities weren’t available to me—I had moved beyond that realm of belief—it was that I seized up in the face of accessing them. I now knew about Lucky Strike, the metal bar for go-go, Topaz Lounge behind Affirmative Home (the first club I attended in NYC eight years ago) for stripping, and the booths at the back of the video store under the train tracks for full-service work, or dick-sucking for civvies. I knew others worked the parties I attended in Ridgewood and Bushwick, brought clients to kink events at the dungeon in Chinatown or the basement on Brooklyn’s 5th Ave, or even turned tricks in various unofficially designated public spaces around Washington Square where I once sat with my law school textbooks and cried on benches in front of the dog park. Then there were the online opportunities—Kinklife, Visit, Searching—and any number of other platforms I could use to advertise the body I had so lovingly rebuilt in the last four years I had spent healing into myself. Then of course there was the Exxon across the street. I had seen people meet their clients from my window once I switched my vigil to vampire hours, and the prospect of becoming what my cousin Caitlin once called a “trucker rat” opened up to me once more. It was one of the ways she survived her years in Arizona when multiple drug convictions had her state-bound and strapped for support. It was also how she met the last of her boyfriends that I knew before she died. These are just the options I care to list.

Why then my refusal to take advantage of them? Was it insecurity about my ability to entice payment? Lingering shame about the law career I had blown up to engage in this line of work? Fear of clients, the police or the christian god of my youth? I could say it was any one of those things. I could say it was punishment for the lifetime of sexual assault for which I still blamed myself and that, despite my best efforts, continued tentacle its way into my day-to-day experience through my malleable (or obliterable) boundaries. I could say it was because I had intuited that the solution to my financial woes (which at that time had me saying daily prayers over my mail that I not find a Con Edison shut off notice in the pile) and my ticket out of NYC could be found in sex work’s divine economy and I was not prepared to know just how much of a hand I’d had in my own suffering, let alone how much I could do to end unnecessary suffering altogether through the sheer power of commitment to my own delusions. I could say it was any one of those things.

You should know that I am an exceptionally well-practiced liar so believe me when I say that any one of those reasons would be at least part wrong and the true reason, buried within the many layers of this story, is more sinister and has greater collective implications than you are likely prepared to hear about just yet. Besides, like I said, this is not a true story.