I felt safest when I was unwitnessed by other people. I could move outside of society’s gaze, outside the grip of cultural prescriptions and interventions. My hair could run wild, I could dress androgynously, I could be covered in mud. Being in the culvert or the forest was a chance to move amphibiously, to shape-shift, to creep, to oscillate like algae in a riffle, to be neither a boy nor a girl and have no particular identity at all.
