First Dance Lesson with Selkie in North America

K. Iver

Creative Nonfiction

THE SURGEON ASKS if I really want my nipples gone. Oh yes, I say, Make me a seal! She laughs and I compliment her fresco’s lush vegetation. From her office in Western Massachusetts, two hours from my house in Eastern Massachusetts, I head straight to Smith College, my first campus visit, two years after my first book release. I’m 42, have studied Halberstam’s theories of queer time and failure. I read for 45 minutes to an auditorium where Sylvia Plath likely sat. Undergrads of her pedigree listen to poems about growing up queer and working class in Mississippi, a first love with a trans person lost to family intervention, then to suicide. I’m uncomfortable reading them in 2025 while trans youth are losing health care and friends my age are denied insurance claims. I’m becoming well, while the voice of these poems has no floor or ceiling to their grief. 

It’s too late for me to be a boy is a line that might want a home in a poem. 

The surgeon’s office takes six weeks to file my insurance. I call the third week and a receptionist says they are waiting to hear back from Blue Cross. In three more, the surgeon’s husband answers the phone and says the receptionist has been dishonest and my application was overlooked. The surgery won’t happen in May—September if I’m lucky, when teaching starts. Before learning I’m an animal, I would’ve monstered them all, blamed them for a first swim bare-chested delayed until December. But, for now, I do have insurance and it will pay for the surgery. In contexts both historical and present, that is a luck beyond. 

My friend Jordan just learned they’re a plant. I believe them and add the most playful illustrated sun and fluffed-up cloud, then I remember plants are organized sun-and-cloud. We met in a recovery group for people who self-abandon in relationships. Jordan’s willingness to reach past what’s in their way astonishes, especially when what’s in their way is desire. When I praise their commitment to themself, they say, I want a good life! They’re 13 years younger than me and ahead in willingness. 

In one of our meetings: a grounding in reality exercise. The first sentence I relax into: Remember the edges of your body.

The most famous selkie story: Three seals leave their skins off for a while to sing in their female form. A man sees one he likes and hides her skin. According to Scottish and Irish myth, when a selkie’s skin is stolen, they’re easily tricked into marriage. The man and the selkie marry, have children, and years later her son finds the skin, tells her about it. She leaves the family for the ocean. I’m team selkie but have heard Jungian analysts discuss the children’s abandonment as an unnecessarily tragic part of the transformation. I used to think my parents should mend what they wounded and I leaked that wish onto other painful relationships. Humans come out with more need than other species. Mishandling such need before a personality is formed has far-reaching consequences. The orphaned can go one or two ways: 1) become impenetrable, overly self-sufficient, protective; 2) become containerless, dependent, disintegrated in selfhood. A neuropsychic clinician reported I went the second route. I often date people who took the first. 

When I dream, the setting is always travel. 

They likely look to others for their reality, the psych report said. Data shows they do not feel real. 

My friend E. says she has the nervous system of someone who should have been born pre-industrialization. More hammering than feudal times, some factory smoke from a distance. And you, she says, you belong in Year Two. 

An acupuncturist who starred in my poem “Who Is This Grief For?” uttered many tough-love-isms the poem leaves out. One was emphasizing my body’s energy as rootless: any amount of wind topples. A solution: feet on the floor at sunrise. Why aren’t your feet on the floor at sunrise? she’d say on the following visit while peering in my mouth. 

I used to sturdy myself by looking at buildings. Straight lines that don’t exist in nature. 

I used to lie frequently and outrageously. 

My agent sends an outline of a possible memoir. “Here’s the container,” he says. “Not a bad title for now.”

When reading an original draft of “Who Is This Grief For?” that included Why aren’t your feet on the floor at sunrise, my friend Kaveh wrote, “Lean into the obsessiveness of these repetitions. That’s where the juice is for you.” 

Before recovery, I had no self-motivated routine. Outside grooming, meeting deadlines, daily habits were ones of excess. Working out, writing, meditating, had to be long and seasonal. Priority went to fast-dopamine-yielding activities. Consume > Produce. 

Obsession is one way to anchor the unsteady. A nihilistic lens is another. 

They likely put themselves in situations that prove they’re damaged, the neuropsych clinician reported. Outlook negative.

Jordan makes positivity look cool. They can easily access the abundant, ecstatic. Since meeting them, I go on daily treasure hunts for what makes me want to live. Our intersections feel significant: Irish Americans growing up without generational wealth, a femme to masc arc, boy4boy leanings. I’ve learned the hard way that shared experience doesn’t mean safety. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything. In this friendship it’s a care portal. They’re preparing to stay with me after surgery, then drive to their first semester of their MFA at Michigan. Glossy green leaves, yes, and I also think of them when I see videos of baby bears running fast, climbing successfully. 

In mid-July, the surgeon left a voicemail informing me of a cancellation in late July. Could I take that spot? In the hospital bed, I am uncharacteristically worried about not waking up. I’ve had more than a few surgeries but at this moment fear is big in the room. The worst-case scenario: someone will forget and leave the nipples. Dr. Johnson tells me about her June vacation in London. I hadn’t been in many years. Not since I was married above my tax bracket living vicariously through my partner’s success and following him to places the world hadn’t hitherto allowed. I remember our peak London experiences. Seeing Mark Rylance float across the stage as Olivia one night and play Richard the III the next. I’d never witnessed anyone die so believably. Had no idea Shakespeare had written comedy into the character until Rylance looked up at me before showtime smiling and winking. My thoughts are as fast as my fear. I try relating to Dr. Johnson. Did you see any plays? No, Harry Potter World. I wonder how many other gender-expansive people will hear about J. K. Rowling the day their body changes. When the nurse wakes me up, I ask if the breasts are gone. Yes. The nipples too? Yes. I weep and she worries aloud something is wrong. Some cancer patients, which I am not, can wake up sad. She checks the chart to make sure the surgery was elective. Not until this moment am I conscious of how much I wanted this chest.

I have said yes to people I didn’t like. Not long before surgery, I met a British man for dinner. He was overdressed for a cafe, in a red velvet jacket and heavily cologned. The first fact I learn: Westminster for high school. If I’d found him attractive, the historic power differential might be hot. An older fact floated between us: his family and others like it being the reason mine and others like it are in America. He invited himself to my place. The train to Boston stopped running after dinner. He invited himself to my shower. I made the couch for him, some tea. This was an improvement. An inventory of choices before improvements reads like every frustrating horror scene in which the victim, in action, wants to be caught. 

A name is a skin. 

My great grandfather settled in north Mississippi, a long drive from water. I grew up in the small house he built, was given his last name, “Kelly,” after he shed its prefix “O” for a wood mill job. My original last name: “Daniels,” its long-gone prefix: “Mc.” For publication, I dropped them both. Before she married, my mother’s mother was an Iverson, son of Iver. Predictable that the gentlest person in my family had a non-colonized, viking half. “Kelly” means warlike. “Daniels”: god is my judge. 

Transition can be a shedding: of heavy fabrics, jewelry, makeup, heels, hair, breast. “K. Iver” allowed a psychic shower but it continued the family’s voluntary erasure of ancestry, its particularities I had no access to in my childhood home. What’s left: my nose, height, myths that took millennia to be written. In a film dramatizing The Troubles, a sidekick to the family leaving Ireland says, “The most Irish thing to do is leave.” 

A week after surgery, Jordan unwraps my chest. I thrill at the mirror. A shower has me on my knees, Jordan stands outside, soaping my head. My arms protect the new wounds, the right and left hand relieve tension with pressed palms. Allowing Jordan to love me this way is exactly how it looks: prayer, baptism, mammalian care. My torso glistens with discomfort. An old homesickness finds the frosted window, crawls out. 

The fall and winter I spend teaching and resting, watching the bare branches of New England, their contrast with the snow. The longer I watch the sturdier my insides. The more they trust my skin. Students complain about how long the snow stays. I’m comforted by how long the ground can rest. I’m too fatigued to swim months after surgery. Less seal, more bear. I lie down, enjoy lying down. I end an eight-month relationship in an effort to stop all forms of self-abandonment. Decide there’ll be a year without dating. 

I used to think the solution to my chest problem was a boob job. As a ballet dancer who started young, I assumed everyone was performing inauthenticity to the extreme. Backstage, we thickened our skin with color, we smoked, cursed, wrapped and unwrapped bloody toe bandages. On stage we jetéd and bourréed ethereal. Our reward for pained effort, positive attention from a niche audience. I treated my bedroom like backstage, taking two hours to get ready for school where no kind of realness was rewarded. Sometimes I would play: mascara with short hair and a backwards white Calvin Klein cap I thought made my eyes pop. 

My time not dating has an indulgent register. I look forward to my company. The following spring I pot a tall lemon tree for the living room. I sing “Les Fleur” with my friend Erin in New Orleans with none of Minnie Ripperton’s range and much enjoyment: Won’t somebody take me to the fair? Will a lady pin me in her hair? Somewhere in the twentieth repetition, I realize Ripperton beat Louise Glück at inhabiting the voice of flowers. Erin gives her first panel. I listen to her combine the scholarly and the lyrical in a letter to Bob Kaufman about incarceration and Black Feminist poetics. I, and others who love Erin, cry. At readings I perform new poems about animals: Why animals? Because the red bellied woodpecker makes me want to live. I don’t check my phone to see if a long-distance lover is thinking of me because there’s not one. I shut down intrigue from others. For six months, I’m thinking a year of abstinence might not be long enough. 

My days are full of tethering routines I’ve built for two years, beginning with meditation, stream-of-consciousness-writing, then, a daily letter from tenderness. I used to assign magical qualities to other people, would see availability, ethics, care that wasn’t practiced. I may as well use my imagination to cultivate a loving voice inside myself. To begin, I give it form, the archetypal representation of whatever’s needed: Dear foxes, owls, moss, seals, trees dead and alive, what would you have me know and or do today? I have no attachment wounding with animals. God in our image—how arrogant and, for so many, how triggering. It doesn’t hurt me to picture an owl on my shoulder telling me with his eyes to hydrate and reinspect the car before the new year, and I’m more likely to do it than if I picture someone in our image. Tender talons. Within the first month of practicing the two-way-prayer, friends noticed a difference in my mood and manner. It’s an ancient practice for a reason, here for me when I wake with a mind wanting to crystallize around despairing memories. 

The sentence, I used to think the solution to my chest problem was a boob job, does not occur to me until my new friend L says it about themselves. They’re my age and began dancing at nineteen when their sobriety journey began. At nineteen, I stopped dancing and immediately began drinking. L’s forms are modern and improvisation, ones I practiced in the summer when I could leave Mississippi. They’ve studied at Martha Graham’s studio. I’d read her autobiography, studied her work, quote her often. Like me, L’s in their first year of top surgery. When I ask what animal they are, they say bear.

L and I met in a recovery group for people of abusive families. We read aloud together theories of the false self—the addict, codependent, shame-ridden—the cost of overidentifying with it, the hope of uncovering the real self—compassionate, creative, curious. Inner children and inner teenagers and critical parents are imagined, their wounds and fears tended to. Another way to say it: pattern. Of thought, feeling, behavior to respond to impossible circumstances. It’s theorized that such patterns have their own personality, and any kind of inner fragmentation has dissociative origins. The patterns most in my way continue to frustrate. The work, I’m told, is extending compassion to, for instance, irrational fear. Remember it means well. I imagine it offering to help someone and not knowing why or how it’s harmful. I picture the fear as a scared animal. What do they need? Gentle gentle gentle. Things happened to me without my consent and patterns were born from it. Unlike the selkie and her child, there’s no change that includes rejecting them. 

A feeling, I’m learning, comes from a need; L and I practice meeting our oldest and most hungry. We chat after meetings and body double over zoom. I learn they were born in rural Manitoba, understand emotional orphanhood, the vigilance required when there’s no parent or sibling’s couch to sleep on. I get it bro, they say to my story. L’s tragedies are not mine to tell. We have cultural and ancestral differences—their mother is of mixed European and Indigenous heritage, their birth father Nigerian, raised by a Trinidadian stepfather. They’ve had access to queer city life, have lived in Korea and visited Japan where I once sought jobs in an unsuccessful effort to run away.  But our overlaps feel like dance partners having rehearsed just enough to move seamlessly while also appearing alive. 

L invites me to Vienna to collaborate with their residency project. If I go, I’ll provide text, dance in a studio again. The last time I was in Vienna was the first. I arrived with my husband, still performing femme. I slept until 4 a.m. and walked through the city at sunrise, crying at its beauty. I stood in front of paintings I thought I’d never see, ones by Egon Schiele who appeared at the end of my book. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons echoed from the city ensemble inside St. Stephen’s Cathedral where I sat, my body remembering the choreography it followed decades prior. I had desserts from old recipes at Café Central, full of hand-painted arches under which Trotsky, Freud, and Beethoven had coffee. The day before flying away, my husband and I grabbed two desserts and stored them in the fridge so we could indulge with the hotel window open the final morning. I kept the bag they came in. That winter, on my first and last trip to Ireland, I’d seen my nose in Cork neighborhoods, ate bodice cooked by a friend’s mother who had my grandmother’s waddle. On the way home, our fighting was long and observable as our age difference. I’ve not been overseas since leaving the marriage, have been careful with money, saving, and traveling only for work. As the residency in Massachusetts ends, I’m poised to apply for positions outside the US. If I go back to Europe, my gender will be unrecognizable. I’d also like to go back with internal safety. Too late to be a boy but not to get born. 

In a rented house in Vermont, L and I dance in the rain. They walk through both of our bedrooms with a chime. Opening the windows is forest bathing. The house has a sauna and we turn the bathtub into a cold plunge. We submerge, sauna, and shower together in our swimsuits. Both of us are committed to a year of no dating. Mine is up in November, theirs September. It’s June. We’re here to begin dancing and to be together. After booking the place and planning to meet in person the first time, we both realized the possibility of attraction and named the parameters. They acknowledged the absurdity. What are we, Christians now?

Across from them, I’m taken by their volume. When they smile, Swarovski gems appear to the left of their two front teeth. I want to lick them. Want the incisor and canine on my jugular. 

We withhold and record our sexy thoughts for our own notebooks that we may/may not share when the year is up. 

Before bed, we allow ourselves a holding. A touching of faces. When they say, You’re precious to me, I try to marinate, try not to wonder when nourishment will leave, come back. When they tug my hair, I blush. They watch. 

In the morning, my door closed, I strip my pants, shirt, underwear. Spread my legs far. If L were over me—I orgasm right as they brush by the door in their long green cotton kimono to warm the tea kettle. 

A recent strategy: wants don’t loop into fantasies. Jung distinguished between fantasy—a bottomless pit for the brain’s pharmacy that keeps one stuck—and imagination: generative, toward transformation. I imagine wants through to their end. Teeth on my neck. Then what? Nakedness in full sun! Full noon rays touching their new nipples, their armpits, my inner thighs, a threeway with nature. Then what? Tea, a talk, more want. What’s beyond more want? What happens when I’m satisfied? I know my history. Have played/replayed the regretful montages. What’s possible in desire without losing the self? Can I leave it and come back? 

In the living room, one of their books: A Choreographer’s Handbook:

Improvisation:

Improvisation is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking. 

Choreography: 

Choreography is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking. 

Ballet narrates, floats, constricts. Pull up! said every ballet master of my youth. 

Improvisation animals. New patterns my body is thinking: moss on rock, air being friendly with earth. Meeting the air as another hand. Meeting the particles inside air. I’m never dancing alone. A thought a particle, an actual place. It doesn’t have to take me out. 

Close to the cabin is the Field Center, a movement hub converted from an inn. The co-founderJared, the founder, was a graphic designer who began dancing in his forties. I just hit up choreographers and asked them to work with me and the out-there-enough ones said sure. HisJared’s steadiness and physicality of presence makes me think of a fox. I remember Mary Oliver getting on all fours in a meadow to see what a fox sees. I imagine moving and talking with that degree of integration. I imagine coming back to dance in this way. Outside the inn, gardens. A walk to the newly built studio overlooking the meadow, a mountain. Inside, a freshly built wood floor, the panels wide. L and I take off our shoes, socks. We move around in silence. I used to walk unaware of my legs. After a youth spent rising onto point from a padded floor, this barefoot-to-wood jumping and spinning is breathing from below. 

L’s prompts for me: songs and instruction to slowly travel from lying to standing. No counts, no steps. While improvising with them, I remember dissociating in the high school studio as soon as we stopped moving and the teacher started lecturing. Once, a guest teacher interrupted himself, looked at me, and said Stop daydreaming. 

Just try it every day for five minutes, L says. Five turns into thirty. Some of the past loosens in the shake. The relief of inner consolidation lasts longer than the relief of drugs. 

We watch a documentary wherein Helena Bonham Carter narrates the first months of baby animals: lion, turtle, elephant, seal. When the seal is born, the mother turns around and familiarizes the pup with her smell. Within an instant, she’s in love. The bond continues but in days she must leave the pup to the crowd of males and females who will not protect him from predators. It’s not the communal village practiced by elephants whose elders help the new mother’s baby cross a strong current by shielding it with their legs. I’m sad for the seal pup, whining for his mother and no one helping. Primates are slightly more communal but believe in meritocracy, social hierarchy, and, paradoxically, fairness. They’re alert to who has more of anything. Too many chimpanzees and they’ll group up and fight. My primatehood, a spiritual problem. Frank Bidart once wrote, Man needs a metaphysics, he cannot have one. “God” originally meant “to call upon.” To become well, I need to call upon other intelligences: snail, jellyfish, the porousness of leaves, the owl’s ability to gather night into eye, shapes of animal older than mine. 

A jackal sees the pup vulnerable. Waits. When he gets close, the pup barks as threateningly as it can. One, two, three times. The mother swims back right after the pup is successful. This won’t traumatize him like it could a human baby. If he’s not a gay seal, if his gender doesn’t change, he’ll be one of the giant males groaning for more females in the colony. 

In this house, I am remembering the edges of my body. Desire is here but interacting with L has a texture. I am profoundly drawn to them and I don’t spill out for them. My want is unpairing from pain, urgency, myopic fixation, fantasy, containerlessness. It’s uncomfortable, but we do many things we wouldn’t if we were fucking. They’re present for my first swim after surgery—in a cold river under a fall, green all up the banks, a mountain in front of us. We walk in the forest. Spring yoga sequences in the living room. Long meditations. Writes, cooks, town adventures, tidying, talks. At night we light a hand-dipped beeswax stick. L says, a candle adds essence. I think few practices can do that. 

This time with L has likely grown into cheating on the abstinence year. Sexlessness plus desire is still a tango with its floodgates. On the phone, Jordan says, you sound grounded, clear. I don’t express feeling defeated. There’s no mistaking platonic love for friends with the lust present. Jordan: baby bear. L: big bear. 

A prayer Jordan and I say to one another: Reality please! Let me be in you! 

Though feeling defeated, returning to dance is revealing an underneath of my addict tendencies. I need intimacy and sex to live joyously as a social mammal, and I’m also hungry to collaborate, make art with. A first date once said, A writer! You must spend a lot of time in your thoughts. Yes, and alone. Aloneness is necessary, but one doesn’t stop dancing with other people, all the intimate rituals that entails, and turn out well-adjusted typing alone, however cozy the corner. The structures of my life in this small town require a lot of solitude compared to people with families, siblings, deeply rooted networks where one lives. I don’t want to be alone, and I need to be alone, sometimes. I don’t want to listen to desire, and I need to listen to desire, sometimes.

From The Choreographer’s Notebook:

Distracting the self:

How do I release my grip on the desire to do, enough that I can do?

Distracting the self: 

Being lost in music is the traditional approach. 

Being lost in the collaborative moment is another. 

Collaboration: 

Collaboration is about choosing the right people to work with, and then trusting them. You don’t however, have to agree about everything. Collaboration is sometimes about finding the right way to disagree…. When you try to agree too much with your collaborators then there’s nothing new to discover, either for you or for the audience. 

Like Jordan, I want a good life. Like many addicts, I can oscillate between overindulgence and denying myself nourishment, pleasure, intimacy, abiding joy. I went half my marriage—four years—

without touch. The hunger it created made me vulnerable. As an orphan, I can confuse the real and counterfeit, a drug for nourishment. There’s proof such confusion almost cost me my life. I weigh the risk of going to Vienna. If I go, my first year of post-op will pass while I’m there. 

You’re overthinking it, a fellow in recovery said on an outreach call. You’ve done enough work now to follow the joy. It’s also possible I can begin identifying less as an orphan. Can belong to myself the way a fox, bear, owl belong to themselves. Louise Glück wrote, What is the animal /  If not passage out of this life? I see her point but only cerebrally. When an owl once followed me in the forest after a breakup, I felt invited into this life. I don’t know what they wanted, but they met a need: to be witnessed, accompanied. The animal: what somatic practitioners assign trauma survivors to watch. The animal where reality and mystery meet. 

Before driving away from the cabin, L leaves a gift wrapped in pink tissue paper, a hand-dipped beeswax stick, double braided. Also in the bag: Canadian maple syrup and The Choreographer’s Notebook. The note inside: Dearest K. I love how you’ve taken to this text. I thought it appropriate you have this book as a reminder to keep dancing, exploring, feeling, and of our time together in our lil cabin…  If this connection continues, it will be the first gift, first note. I buy a cheap ticket to Vienna. But I also buy insurance to keep no as an option.  No matter the decision, the outcome, someone’s here. Right inside my skin. After a lifetime of floating away from them, I can access their weight. 

“Kaaaaaay!!!” 

“Jordan! I have a self!”

“I know, K!” 

---

K. IVER (they/them) K. Iver is the author of

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco

from Milkweed Editions, winner of the

Wisconsin Literary Award and was named a

Best Book of the Year by the New York Public

Library. Iver has received fellowships from the

Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the

Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Helene

Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a PhD in

Poetry from Florida State University. They are

the Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy in

Andover, MA.

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