November 2024, at the UPS Store on Bergen Street

The trees should have withered months ago, but everything is too green. I walk the dog past a magnolia on our morning route and find one last leaf still attached to its branch. I tell the dog to growl at it, as if she can intimidate the leaf into a timely death. As if this can fix an eighty-degree day in November, or last week’s brushfire in the middle of Prospect Park. The dog pisses on a mess of roots and blinks past me with whale eyes. I follow her gaze to the branches and see them: buds. Magnolia buds. Creamy white and six months early, premature mouths gulping the air. More than the brushfire, more than the leaf that won’t let go, this is what terrifies me most: an organism so lost in time that it doesn’t know whether to fade or bloom.

I remember a forager on Instagram who made a video about cooking with magnolia flowers. She showed the viewers how they tasted like ginger and could be baked into cookies. Pillowy! she cried, sucking sugar crystals off her thumb. I want to wrap my teeth around the buds and pop them off the tree, let the heat stretch to my molars. I want to groom the branches bare, a cat smoothing last drops of membrane off her young.

I skip lunch and speed-walk to the UPS store to notarize the paperwork that will legally change my name. An orange tabby lounges on a stack of boxes. He chews his paws and glares at his customers, all of us with sweat stains printed to our backs. The notary tells me to wait; she can’t find her glasses. I can’t see shit! she yells to her coworkers. She finds a pair of frames in the back of a drawer and picks them up by her fingernails, steadies them on her nose, opens her palm for my papers and driver’s license. At each page, she licks her index finger and nods. My jaw locks with questions I don’t ask. Are you seeing these forms a lot right now? Nod. Are you wondering why I want a boy’s name? Nod. Are you scared? Nod. My questions are irrelevant: she can’t see shit.

The papers are from the courthouse website, printed the morning after the election. Instagram flooded with trans people warning each other about what to do next. Do it now, they said. You’ll regret waiting. I know I want to change my name, the same way my body knows to smell for peonies in April. I know the timing isn’t right, because when I first saw the ashes billow over Prospect Park, I thought they were snowflakes.

It was always going to be my grandfather’s name. I don’t care to be like him—I don’t care for family legacy much at all—but he was a watercolor painter who turned every object into its own ocean, and for that, I think he would have understood transness. The name is the first layer of skin under a snowboot blister, baby soft and rose pink, sending a sting from ankle to neck if touched too early. The notary stamps the last page. I can deliver the forms to the courthouse, or frame them, or let the gas stove lick them clean. A piece of paper could mean everything. A piece of paper could mean nothing. The orange tabby gnaws an overgrown nail. My stomach winces. I pay four dollars and wait for the receipt, slipping a coin of candied ginger out of my pocket and onto my tongue. My mouth full, and warm.