Thoughts and observations on amateur trans fiction, and an intro to what I read and write.
Greetings,
Since I'm somewhat new to both BigCloset TopShelf and writing the type of fiction in this genre, I wanted to take a moment to write this post in order to share some observations and explain my tastes/preferences, literary inclinations, and overall creative M.O., as it were--that is, what I'm all about as a writer (and reader). My intention is not only to sort of introduce myself briefly out of the shadows and elaborate on what it is that I most like to read, but to let any potential readers know what to generally expect from my work, including that which is already here and any further stories that might be uploaded in the future. As mentioned, while I've browsed the stories here for some time now, I'm pretty new to this website, which I can tell obviously has a long-established and flourishing little culture all of its own. Whenever necessary, please be patient with me. ;-)
Something important to know about me right out of the gate is that I tend to approach the themes of this niche (broadly speaking, trans fiction) in a rather different way from many and perhaps even most of my fellow authors (and readers?).
Overall, I mostly enjoy reading and writing what I think can be best described as 'slice of life' (which is not to say entirely aimless or mundane, per se) stories, especially those that focus on relationships, whether they're set in a real-world type of environment or more speculative (such as science-fictional, for one example) realms. (With maybe a few exceptions, epic, super-elaborate fantasy and action-heavy adventure-type stuff just isn't really my bag.) While plot is undoubtedly important, I think it could be said that I'm mostly character-focused in what I prefer to write and read. From both perspectives, I'm most interested in stories that really delve into and explore the nuances of characters' hearts and psyches, ones that skillfully and subtly use pathos, plot devices and such to bring their personalities, worldviews and overall 'makeup' to the surface.
So, within that little thematic set, what's the difference in my approach?
I've long noticed that most of the authors writing in this vein, about trans narratives and experiences, overwhelmingly seem to focus on the process, the process of...well, becoming. This is vague enough that it could almost apply to fiction of any kind, and perhaps I'm not articulating it well, but I mean specifically with respect to "transness". Very often the central conflict of these stories revolves around a character's yearnings, attempts, or decision(s) to live authentically as herself, as a member of her true gender, and they typically cover in great detail the process of 'transitioning' toward that goal, or simply figuring out and exploring one's gender deal in the first place. It makes sense that this stage would be seen as particularly fertile ground for literary expression and the growth of character dynamics. After all, what more overt and straightforward means of developing a character could there possibly be than that of transformation into a different gender role? It's no surprise that the demand for these imaginings is high, either. For many--myself included--reading and writing serves as a coping mechanism through which to process and come to terms with one's own tribulations, and for many people in the earlier stages of this with respect to gender, I'm sure that fiction of this kind serves simultaneously as inspiration and vicarious escape.
However, speaking for myself here, that kind of thing isn't really part of my "literary MO". Personally, for many reasons, I'm much more interested in stories about characters whose gender status is already just 'taken for granted', in a sense, at least by themselves if not always others around them. Make no mistake, the women in my stories do experience internal conflicts and struggles with self-acceptance--often in ways that *involve* their transsexuality--but it's never about that component of their identities in itself. That's why I write about characters who are outsiders in multiple ways beyond just that (their trans status). Often their sexualities are a point of contention, part of what they've yet to accept about themselves fully, and the unusual circumstances in which they find themselves further highlight these narrative nuances. I like to explore the indirect and longer-term consequences of their identities, self-image and choices in their self-actualizations, though not in a necessarily obvious or linear way. In other words, I really like to read, as well as write, about trans girls and women who simply are. They might need to grapple with some issues that result from it and how it defines their place in society, but they know who they are and are living as such. Personal preferences even aside, I find this to offer more potential for originality in expanding the ways in which these backgrounds and experiences are portrayed, and also find that it allows me to give a voice of sorts to perspectives and types of experience that might otherwise go underappreciated.
So, while I certainly understand the reasons for its popularity and ubiquity, that aforementioned type of 'transition/gender emergence/acceptance fiction' just honestly doesn't interest me terribly much--again with exceptions, but at least as a writer. Without meaning to be unduly disparaging here at all, I suspect that a lot of amateur writers choose to work within this paradigm in large part because in many ways it's an easier template to hone their craft within. As mentioned, it has a preset sort of path outlined for character development built-in, and it's centered on a common denominator of demographic experience, which renders constructing plots and narrative elements more accessible. That's fine--we've all got to start somewhere, though some authors reach a point where they can do this especially well (yet another reason I tend to branch out--anything that's been written that extensively has probably been done better!).
As a relevant tangent off of this topic, I must also definitively establish that (if/when I do continue writing and uploading stories here) you'll never see fetishy-type material from me. My characters have their kinks, interests and 'inclinations', naturally, but what I'm referring to is stuff that frames one's femininity and gender status as a novel fetish object in itself. That's definitely not for me in any capacity. I imagine this is pretty obvious from the above and that I don't need to spell out further what this might include, but since so much material is painted with this kind of brush I just thought I'd declare that upfront in the interest of being clear.
A few more individual quirks to mention. I do write (and read!) explicit sexual content, erotica, but outright raunchiness isn't at all what my sensibilities are oriented towards. There's a definite, easily recognizable difference, IMO. When it does arise, I greatly prefer it to be in the context of romantic relationships or those that are at least loving, caring and (emotionally) intimate in some way, even if unconventionally so. And it needs to be woven well into the fabric of the story and developing relationship itself. Also, you'll probably never see hetero anything in my stories. I pretty much exclusively write about lesbian themes and dynamics with Sapphic undertones (if not overtones!)--that's just me; in some regards, I write what I know. :-) Age regression and the 'inner child' is definitely a pet motif, as is tender maternal-type nurturance. Mental illness and disability are themes that I also like to touch upon as well, as yet another aspect of marginalization that characters must contend with. I love the sweetest, most warm, adorable and feel-good fiction you can imagine, which is a lovely escape sometimes from life's travails. :-) That said, I do sometimes dip my toe into icier, murkier waters and portray much darker themes and realities as well, as is likely evident from the couple stories I have up so far.
That's all I can really think of off the top of my head for the time being. Just some rambling thoughts, and a little map sketch (of sorts), of my creative terrain. If you're stumbling onto this blog post, what I write sounds interesting to you and you haven't already, I encourage you to check out the stories I currently have up and leave comments if they resonate with you in any fashion and you're so inclined! I hate to unabashedly self-promote, but as a new writer of only solos (...thus far) in a small subcategory, it seems to be easy to get quickly lost in the shuffle.
--Amalia
Aurora is an intellectually precocious, depressed high-school senior at an existential crossroads, with a wounded heart and an intense inner conflict that leads to alienation, repression, sexual frustration and self-loathing. Aurelia is a nurturing, empathetic, emotionally sensitive, congenitally blind classmate who fast becomes her closest confidant. Together, these two special girls take solace in each other, cope with their respective challenges and ultimately find intimacy and fulfillment.
You are Aurora. You’re newly 18, sort of a senior in high school, and profoundly sensitive. You’ve loved spiders from a very early age, when you begged everyone not to kill them, and have a pet tarantula. You were diagnosed with early-onset cyclothymia which seems of late to have morphed into full-fledged clinical depression. You wear long turquoise coats even indoors, usually paint your fingernails green, midnight blue or black, and currently spend much of your time daydreaming the hours away and gazing at your shoes in the old linoleum hallways, drifting almost wraithlike through a reality you intently forestall inhabiting. You’re passionate about photography, sculpture, and watercolor painting.
You began speaking in full sentences remarkably young, you could count and had a grasp of basic arithmetic by the time you could walk, and you wrote and understood both short poetry and simple programs in three different languages by first grade. With a voracious curiosity, you blazed through years of curriculum in a fraction of the time it would ordinarily take most kids, wowing teachers who were mostly unsure what to do with you. You have a specifically prodigious talent for the natural sciences and molecular biology in particular, though you seem to lack the zeal for it that everyone expects you to have. You technically started attending college classes in that subject when you were 14, but recently you’ve been considering going to art school when you graduate with your class, much to your professors’ consternation and your parents’ displeasure. Your depression symptoms have sadly taken a significant toll on both your motivation and cognitive abilities, to the point where you’re now taking a break from university-level coursework and STEM subjects altogether.
You opted to be mainstreamed into the standard public education system in the first place because you wanted the opportunity to be able to develop normal socialization with your age-peers, instead of being accelerated years ahead with all of the interpersonal challenges that would entail. Your parents supported your choice wholeheartedly, not wanting you to be any more estranged from other kids your age than your many differences would inherently render you. As difficult and controversial a decision as it was, this paid off. You’re very fortunate to be woven like a vine into a tight-knit, eclectic, wonderful group of friends. It seems almost unreal sometimes, like one of those cliques in feel-good made-for-TV teen movies.
You are also a non-operative transsexual woman. This is not a subject or aspect of your identity that you like to speak of often. Primarily because, even now (maybe even especially now) nobody really gets it and the increasingly charged nature of the whole zeitgeist around such matters is such that it always invites a slimy slew of uncomfortable questions. You are 100% a woman, a very feminine (if darkly so) one at that, and you despise being lumped in with the “nonbinary” or the “genderqueer”, or having anyone put asterisks on your sex in any other fashion. What you despise even more vehemently is explaining why this is the case, why it’s so important to you, and alienating everyone in the room. You just happen to have…well, you’ve devised a quirky plethora of terms and ways to conceptualize it over the years, but…a penis (along with all the other organs that typically accompany it), that you’re fine with keeping intact in its present state indefinitely.
When you were very little your parents almost missed the reality of your actual gender because of this. As in so many other arenas, you manifested it early, and violently insisted on only wearing the right clothes, pleading, throwing tantrums in the store and raising a thousand red flags. They did a lot of research, but, at the time, the prevailing view of your condition, especially in children, was largely focused on genitalia. For you, it goes without saying, this was problematic. They asked you, albeit in a sensitive and age-appropriate manner, how you felt about what you had down there. You responded honestly and this perplexed them, and the therapists, and the pediatrician. The researchers, whose radar you were already on by virtue of apparently being what they termed ‘highly to exceptionally and globally gifted’ found this all quite interesting, and those very intellectual ‘gifts’ served you well here as they made it easier for you to assert yourself to adults and be taken seriously. Drawing upon this as much as your tiny self possibly could, you were able to convince the ones who mattered of your legitimacy. Thank god.
You absolutely knew you were a girl, simple as that, but it was always part of your body map in an abnormally normal way, and you never saw it as undermining your femaleness. Just there. Just fine. The only problem it posed, in that pure, innocent stage, was any implication that it had any implications for the rest of you.
Further complicating all of this is one undeniable, inconvenient, shimmering, terrifying fact: you are a lesbian. You tried from puberty (which, fortunately, you were allowed to go through in the right direction the first time around) to deny it, your burgeoning same-sex attraction, and especially how it made your body respond, because naturally, you were utterly horrified to think for even an millisecond that you had anything in common with boys. All of a sudden you began to wonder if it would be a problem and if it did call into question what you’d forever known at the core of your soul. The very thought was humiliating, and so it was when anything began to happen between your legs. Since you were on hormone therapy, such things, unspeakable things, only occurred under…exceptional…circumstances in a certain new mental and emotional space, and couldn’t be explained away as random and meaningless in the natural course of pubertal development, the way they could for your male counterparts.
Online research over the years turned up extraordinarily dreadful historical context that impaled your self-confidence even further, like a dagger through your heart, hammered in with thick cinder blocks of some of the ugliest concepts and least accurate terminology imaginable: autogynephile. Heterosexual transvestite. The Man Who Would Be Queen. Then the self-proclaimed ‘radical feminists’, declaring every woman with the misfortune of being born the way you were ‘male’ and ‘rapists’ for ‘appropriating’ womanhood, with extra outrage reserved for those who dared to call themselves ‘lesbian’. Conservative pundits taking it a step further by trying to stoke fear about the imaginary phenomenon of “predatory men” “crossdressing” in order to have access to “vulnerable young girls” in public restrooms. Holier-than-thou trans bloggers, ranging from slightly older than you to middle age, openly questioning and throwing other women under the bus behind the veil of quasi-anonymity their keyboards provided, with a large portion of them disavowing anyone who would choose not to have genital surgery, and quite a few disparaging their female-attracted compatriots as well.
On top of all of this vitriol were pages upon pages of discussion threads with lesbians angrily ranting at great length about how they shouldn’t have to feel pressured to date or sleep with trans women and how it should just be obvious that they wouldn’t be attracted to that. Some swore up and down that this had nothing to do with being ‘transphobic’, yet talk of ‘different socialization’ and ‘male entitlement’ never went seriously challenged. The concept that certain body parts could ever be feminine, the only concept that gave you a modicum of peace with your body in a culture that told you it was mismatched, was relentlessly mocked just about everywhere. Finally, the only portrayal even approaching your sexual proclivities that you ever encountered came in the form of nauseating, demeaning and unrealistic pornography that appeared to include and promulgate the gamut of false tropes about bodies like yours, catering to fetishists and conveying blaring messages that women like you are halfway-between, possessing only partial, incomplete, faux womanhood at most, that they’re alien, a raunchy novelty, a titillating taboo only appealing for the contradiction that you have never truly perceived in yourself.
You knew that none of the two-bit theories that attempted to explain your condition were even remotely true, and you didn’t understand why this was so difficult for everyone to comprehend, but the damage was done. It seemed that whenever anyone raised the possibility of someone like you even existing, it was always firmly bound up in loud, contentious political rhetoric, the vast majority of it barbed, noxious and hateful. While it had been gestating in the radio silence as soon as you became aware of the gulf between your experiences and the expected, this was how the black hole was born. You came away with the unshakable sense that you would forever be an untouchable pariah in this domain, your sexuality inherently a rapey imposition, your desires intrinsically violent and ‘male’ in some bizarre fashion (which makes no sense to you whatsoever), your gender undercut and tacitly tolerated only insofar as you didn’t actually try to assert it when deconstructed to death, your feelings about all of it invalid, and most importantly, that your body and your narrative would be anathema to anyone you’d ever be interested in and feel comfortable sharing them with.
You can’t bring yourself to fully believe any of this, as it’s so far from how you really feel, but the consensus, as devoid as it is of any real understanding, is clear in its derision. In many moments of desperation you’ve fleetingly considered just pursuing vaginoplasty anyway as soon as you’re able to, so that you can just be normal. You wouldn’t mind having different parts, per se, but that wouldn’t be authentic to your body image, and societal pressures alone wouldn’t be an appropriate motive for undergoing such a major surgical procedure. So you’re stuck, and the black hole has pulled at something inside you ever since. It’s usually in the background, and sometimes tolerable, but it’s always there.
Nearly everyone who had been observing you since your formative emergence seemed to take for granted that you’d be straight, into guys, if they even bothered to consider your sexuality at all. Being perceived as a child prodigy was also advantageous here, as there was a general presumption that your mind would be elsewhere, that you wouldn’t be concerned with such mundane things. Your whole deal with respect to that other little issue was weird enough, and you desperately wanted to blend in with the other girls as much as possible, so you kept very quiet about your Sapphic inclinations. The potential consequences were far too scary and overwhelming. Although you were allowed to be yourself and live as such with the necessary medical interventions to ensure that your body would develop properly, heaven forbid, if they knew this, everyone might start doubting the validity of your gender. Other girls might be uncomfortable around you. You could be ostracized.
Sex ed in middle school was exceedingly awkward from the first day, and you used the loophole that the district had to let parents opt out (though usually for religious or cultural reasons) to bail on it. Though this went unspoken, yours understood why, and used the excuse that you already knew all the basics there, since you’d been reading at least high school-level biology textbooks since you were nine. They simply told you to feel free to approach them if you ever had any questions, and that was that.
You started dating boys who expressed interest in you as a freshman, here and there, nothing serious of course, and nothing physical, just going out. You eventually stopped with that, and told your mom it was because you needed to focus on your studies; otherwise, none of this has really changed that much to this day. You probably wouldn’t overtly deny it anymore if pressed (more out of resigned apathy than genuine self-acceptance), but you still hide. You feel, disquietingly, like a disgusting, impossible, impostor freak some days, and you still bury these feelings so far into your subterranean subconscious that you don’t even allow yourself to experience them most of the time.
Nonetheless, it’s starkly the deep-down truth: you’re attracted to other girls, wholly, passionately, exclusively. And not just any girls, either. Only other feminine, gender-conforming ones, like yourself. Masculinity in any form simply holds no real appeal for you, aside from a hollow complementary validation of your own gender role in social situations and contexts. This would be beyond challenging to explain even to avowed ‘allies’, most of whom are still struggling to grasp the other glaring, idiosyncratic nuance of your identity. So you don’t even think about being in a situation where you’d ever have to try. You keep it to yourself and cry at night and occasionally even etch thin crimson lines into your arm with a razor after fantasies of softness on softness. A few times a week there are the dreams, your breasts, hips and lips pressed into equally shapely, spongy counterparts, your thick, waist-length dark curls intertwined sensuously with your unidentified lover’s silky strands. You wake up hot, cold and flushed all over, trembling and mortified, curled reflexively into a defensive ball of self-consciousness and clutching the tangled covers on the verge of tears and abject horror.
On a better note, a much better note, there has been a shiningly positive development in your life recently. Her name is Aurelia. It can also be spelled with an accent on the second syllable, Aurélia, and occasionally when feeling whimsically elegant she does sign it that way. You think it looks all the more beautiful with that accent.
Aurelia is a beautiful girl. She projects an image of serenity and brightness in whirlpools of motion. Her physical appearance continually reinforces this. Her long, mostly goldenrod hair with natural auburn and dyed mahogany streaks, slight starry smile with the slightest intimation of mystery, and perfect pastel complexion all radiate something indefinably warm and vivifying and immaculate. But it’s her empathy you notice most. Her personality is a tender membrane that morphs with seemingly effortless ease around the dispositions of others, honing in on and somehow shielding their inner selves from the sharp shrill secretions of their insecurity. Amazingly, this quality comes across even in minute interactions witnessed from a distance.
Aurelia also happens to have been blind from birth. You were the first of your circle to meet her, about a year ago, when she collided with you in the east hallway as you were rushing to a home economics class on the other side of the building. Quite adept at navigating the school with her sweeping white cane, you were the only person she’d ever bumped into during all four years there. It was her free period, and since you had more-or-less completed your sewing project early, you decided to just skip it and chat in the atrium. That was the beginning. As it turned out, she had classes with a few other members of your group, and over the next year they also got to know her, though nowhere near as well.
With her compassionate listening skills and your quietly frantic need for a supportive ear, what with your fast-approaching existential crises, you swiftly become close. Since it’s senior year, you already have over a dozen college credits and don’t actually need to be there, and since she knocked out almost all of her graduation requirements by taking grueling courseloads, there is plenty of time for protracted mutual convalescence in the eye of this storm of impending decisions, pressures and responsibilities. Your school operates on a block schedule, and certain days out of the week you barely have any classes at all. Both of your mothers are proud that you’ve made it as far as you have, and anxiously expectant for the future but preoccupied, so you’re permitted plenty of time to breathe, slack academically and gather yourselves in these languid months.
After school in luminous slivers between afternoon and evening, and even sometimes in the middle of the day, tucked into disused corners of the library or at one of your homes, you confide in each other in undulating murmurs of striking sincerity. You confide in her about the built-in pressure incessantly paired with your academic aptitudes, and your nascent doubts about pursuing them. You mention how you’re feeling burnt-out, almost like an impostor, and how you’re a bit uncomfortable with the idea that you must dedicate your life to something you just happened to be good at so early. You tell her that you’re happy just doing art, discovering the unexpected joy in engrossing yourself in something so subjective, and about how fulfilling it is to have an endeavor that you always have to work at, from the beginning, a staircase of skill that you can gradually ascend in your own time and on your own terms. She understands and goes so far as to tell you that she admires you, both for your talents and your courage in taking your own, new paths, which makes you light up with a pride and pleasure you’d forgotten.
She opens up to you in halting tones about submerged, masked anxiety, generalized and social, and the paradoxical challenge of being the girl everyone goes to for advice while faltering and so uncertain of how to navigate the tapestry of rapidly shifting realities herself. She also elected to be mainstreamed early on for very similar reasons, which even with technological advancements and substantial accommodations has not been easy, and the near-universal rapport she has with the other students that know her is one of her proudest achievements. You commiserate, referring to your own issues with anxiety, and give her tips about techniques for managing it that you’ve found helpful.
Expectations are a recurrent red thread linking your confessions. Positive, negative, expectations others can’t even perceive or realize that they project onto your atypical states of being. Over several yawning days, she unravels something more personal, cautiously yet with unvarnished honesty. She discusses how she sometimes feels like everyone’s perceptions of her are distorted, and shoehorned into one category or another, without her ever having a say in any of it. Oftentimes unintentionally insensitive people expect less from her off the bat—patronizing, acting amazed that she can do even the most fundamental things for herself, all the while barely masking their clumsy preconceptions under something saccharine, but obviously stilted and artificial. By contrast, those closest—her parents, instructors, mentors and so on—seem to consistently expect more, as if by giving her the tools to circumvent her limitations throughout her life, they’ve equipped her with superpowers, capabilities that must be actualized constantly lest they start to fade or go to waste. She admits this is exhausting and exasperating sometimes.
You have this in common, high standards to live up to in an inundating maelstrom of adolescent searching, as you reach for authenticity and some semblance of your own hopes, dreams and visions for yourselves going forward. This establishes the basis for a rich and rewarding friendship, as you become confidants serenading each other in a symphony of sympathy, both finding something in each other’s company you were missing in between your relative social acceptance and yet inescapable status as outsiders nevertheless. Something about her just makes you feel so natural, and comfortable in your own skin, revealing tense defenses you hadn’t even realized that you were putting up with everyone else before.
As your relationship briskly outpaces the sluggish crawl of time (‘senioritis’ is real, and you’ve both caught a bad case of it), you both share even more private and delicate things. You divulge that you’re having mounting difficulties keeping all the plates in the air as your depression symptoms become more prominent, balancing your social life and secondary avocations with even the minimum of schoolwork and planning for college. You admit that you feel like you’ve failed miserably somehow, that you can’t shake the notion that you should’ve been much farther along by now with the proficiencies you displayed so young. She listens and consoles you, patiently you think, but never making it out to be a burden on her.
She discloses some of the nuisances that come with her disability, confessing that while she feels like she has to play ambassador, receive them nicely and gently correct them when necessary, her patience is diminishing for strangers’ probing questions and misconceptions, which she secretly regards as tiresome and terribly annoying. A lot of the time she mischievously makes a point of discussing this, a little loudly, while you’re on the city bus back home or to go out for lunch together in the early afternoon, sitting close with her cane neatly resting in front of her or between you, since it’s in transit that she most commonly encounters people who decide that their prying curiosity overrides basic respect and politeness. This makes you smile, and despite your usual preference to just blend seamlessly into the crowd, it’s far from embarrassing. You even encourage her little tirades, delighted to participate in her finding her voice that way. “Oh, how inspiring!” She’s tired of being ‘inspiring’, and in your own ways, so are you.
It’s through this very topic that you eventually learn she’s lesbian. Despite the depth of your amity, the intensity of your closeness, the subject doesn’t come up, though you know she’s single and (to your relief) never says anything about guys. You don’t really give it much thought, but somewhere in the back of your mind you vaguely wonder if maybe she’s just ace, when out of the blue one day she says something sandwiched between snarky cathartic laughter to the effect of …and you know what’s really irritating? She elaborates that one of the questions she often gets asked is how she could possibly know or have figured out her sexual orientation, by people bewildered by the concept and lacking an essential understanding of how that works.
You immediately get how ridiculous the premises of that question are and laugh with her, but she still drives it home, going on about how vastly different men and women are in ample ways aside from the visual, and concludes by saying that she never even struggled with it, always being drawn to how lovely and melodious women’s voices sound and the softness of their bodies. I know what I like. You recede and get very quiet when she says that, blushing fiercely and not knowing what to say, but after a few moments you admit that you’re lesbian too, before gracefully but quickly changing the subject.
A short while later, you muster all of the courage you didn’t know you had to disclose the other thing. After all this time, you’re hardly inclined to believe that she’d reject you as a companion or otherwise be ignorant of or awful about it, but on the other hand, the amount of time you’ve known her and how intensely invested you are in the friendship makes it all the more petrifying. You’ve been wrong, very wrong about people’s reactions before, and you can’t even fathom how much it would hurt and how empty you would feel if you’re wrong about Aurelia’s.
It’s so odd, you haven’t even mentioned it to her, while everyone else in your circle knows full well, even though you’ve left them to draw their own conclusions about which gender you’re into in that sense. This almost feels backwards somehow, but it shouldn’t…should it? You know that your other friends do their best to shield you from any prejudicial bile, prurient gossip and unseemly rumors that have ever arisen about your trans status, kind of protectively vetting people for you. You wonder what they think of her, and whether they’ve had the chance to scrutinize her in that light at all.
The night before you plan to do it, you agonize. As much as coming out to each other beforehand should, theoretically, make it easier, part of you has been even more reluctant since then. You wonder why. Could it be that she wouldn’t see you in that way, as a potential…girlfriend? No. Oh, no, no, of course not, no, that’s just…well, okay, it’s not that you’ve never…this is an uncharted friendship unlike any other you’ve ever had, but it’s not like that, you’re not…although it would be invalidating to be disqualified solely on that basis regardless, another stinging little slap from the world in which nobody understands or shares your paradigm, another reminder of your one guaranteed piece of inexorable solitude.
Knowing her, though, you’d never know for certain, and that would probably be the worst of it. For that matter—oh no—never knowing exactly how she feels, about your narrative, your impossible identity—no, your double deviancy—could prove poisonous to what you’re building together in itself. You’ve never expected anyone to accept this part of you on your own terms, which is why you’ve kept it so closely guarded. She didn’t say anything about…genitals, though, that wasn’t how she framed… I know what I like. Hm, yeah. Anyway, that’s moot.
You actually slap yourself hard on the left side of your face as these eddying ruminations encase your head, partially to punish yourself for letting your thoughts descend into such territory and partially to bring yourself back to the reality of what needs to be done. You’ve struggled with neurotic, obsessive thought patterns like this for a long time, and you take a deep breath while remembering what your mom told you: Pause. Take a step back. Wipe the slate clean and simplify. That leaves you with the simple, mature realization that you must go through with it. In fact, it’s now or never. As afraid as you are now, logic dictates that if you don’t, become even closer to her and then it does happen to be an issue in one way or another, it will be all the more earth-shattering.
What little sleep you get, in between waking up in a cold sweat every few hours, is wracked with nightmares: Aurelia abandoning you in her tactful, courteous way, just drifting apart and leaving you for other friends, you walking through a bleak, misty landscape of barren trees alone, you hugging her shadow while something hard and painful is pushed into your chest.
When you arrive and greet her in the morning before your only two classes of the day, you nervously mention that you have to tell her something important later. She acts a tad confused initially that you would have to announce that beforehand (since you’ll be spending most of the rest of the day together anyway), playfully tries to tease out what it might be, but nods (for your benefit, as it isn’t something she does automatically) and says okay when she realizes how serious you’re being. You’re really committed to this, now.
Later that afternoon, you’re sitting across from her in the finished basement that has turned into sort of a secondary living space for you. You stiffly stare at the floor and your hands are shaking as you explain it—poorly, you’re sure, and all out of order. She listens even more intently than usual with her characteristically magnanimous expression, making little sounds of affirmation whenever you pause. Though so much of what you’ve shared with each other likely falls into this category by default, you impress upon her how confidential it is and must remain. You know her well enough now to be able to read her subtler reactions, and she seems almost surprised, maybe even a little…disappointed? You could drown in the silence. Oh, no, no, please. You can feel yourself sinking into your chair as you want to just disappear, vanishing permanently from this world and living memory.
You don’t hear yourself say anything, but you must, because she snaps out of whatever limbo she’s in and promptly reassures you, saying that she completely understands, is well aware of the condition (even though you’re the first trans girl she’s ever met in person, as far as she knows), and that she doesn’t think of you any differently in the least. You’re fairly positive it’s all sincere. Still, something seems…off. She feels far away, seemingly distracted, almost as if this wasn’t what she was expecting, as if she was anticipating something else when you built it up that didn’t come to pass. There’s a nebulous undertone of confusion in the air that contradicts her assurances.
She asks you: since you’ve been living as completely as yourself for so long, think of yourself as just another woman and hate being differentiated due to your background, then why did you decide to tell her all of this, and why was it so important for you to tell her today? For a minute you fear that she’s annoyed to be the newest recipient of your most intimate secret, the way that she phrases this, but there’s nothing hostile or acrid in her tone. You clarify that you needed to know how she felt about it in general in case it changed anything, and that it’s yet another way in which you were dealt a strange hand that weighs on your mind.
You mumble almost to yourself in thought that being able to transition and be yourself at an early age was a double-edged sword; you were spared the indignity of having to grow up into a body that wasn’t yours under a gross male mask, but it also means that no one knows unless you tell them, and that can sometimes feel like tiptoeing through a minefield given how opinionated everyone seems to be about it these days. You find yourself bitterly saying that it wouldn’t be an issue at all if you just had surgery, for then you’d never have to think about any of it again. This isn’t even true, but for whatever reason it’s what slips out.
She reaches out and lightly squeezes your knee before placing her hand over yours. It’s kind, but she seems to be mulling something over and questioning herself, which is decidedly out of place and unlike her. It’s giving you a ton of anxiety—it’s all a lot to take in, granted, but you can’t decipher her very well right now and you’re floundering. Is she just telling you what she thinks you want to hear, or responding this way out of pity, only to make her true disdain known later? Were you wrong about how close you were getting, was this an inappropriate admission at the wrong time that she doesn’t know what to do with?
She gingerly asks if you ever plan to have any surgeries. You’re taken aback—where did that question come from? Oh, right, probably because you just ran your mouth about that when you shouldn’t have. You’re staring right into the vortex of the black hole as you say this, but you honestly answer no, never. She smiles enigmatically and sits back, pursing her lips in thought. Great.. You might panic. You ask her if that changes anything, if that was the wrong answer or if she thinks you’re aberrant and freakish for that. You feel like you’re about to cry, thrashing around in deep water for lack of a lifeline. No, not at all. I’m sorry; I was just wondering. Did I upset you? You abruptly take a deep, quavering breath and sigh, not knowing how to answer that. Are you upset? Not really, not yet anyway, but you’re…a minuscule spider dangling from a fine silk thread, exposed and at the mercy of anyone who might pass by and send you flying in any direction.
You both rise from your seats and she looks like she might hug you, and you could really use a hug, but then…doesn’t, as if conflicted, performing a short calculus to herself and changing her mind. You lead her back up the stairs and she heads home to do some homework, leaving you somewhat rattled. It could’ve gone worse, and it’s weird because she reassured you and was understanding about it all things considered, but it could’ve gone better. Just…in all the years you’ve divulged it to select people and with the spectrum of responses it’s garnered, no one has ever reacted that way before. She wasn’t confused about what you were telling her, so much, and she didn’t seem put off by it, but something was still awry in a way that you can’t pin down.
She calls you later that night—in lieu of a text—to tell you how brave it was to share that with her and how privileged she feels that you trusted her, which helps calm you down and puts your mind more at ease. She apologizes of her own accord and without any prompting for the way she reacted, which surprises you as you didn’t think it needed any apologies, imploring you to please not take it the wrong way or think she doesn’t understand, accept you as you are, sympathize or care. It takes you off guard how fraught she sounds. She says that she was off-kilter because she had and still has something unrelated to tell you of equal importance, though she never specifies precisely what this is, and nothing comes of it.
Aurelia’s main interest is in psychology, and she’s fascinated with early childhood development. She reads classic books on the subject by Piaget that you sporadically discuss with her in between classes and over lattes during an overlapping free period in the late morning, whenever you don’t use it to sleep in. Unsurprisingly, she volunteers often and enjoys working with children, and she touches on how sad and constrained it makes her feel that she’s never considered a viable babysitter (though her parents’ friends have occasionally indulged her by letting her ‘watch’ their older children, who she knows they lecture extensively beforehand, such that it ends up feeling like it’s the other way around), as well as how discouraging and embittering it was to be brusquely turned down for a summer job as a camp counselor. As upsetting as it is to be discriminated against like that, she feels like she can’t exactly argue the point, since even concentrating with all of her other senses operating at full capacity she wouldn’t be able to perfectly tell what’s going on at any given moment, and that could lead to unsafe situations for little ones in her care.
Something exciting that this leads into, though, is the sphere of your ‘little’ activities and games. Just as everyone had always assumed you were somehow ‘above’ or…outside of ordinary romantic and sexual feelings as you matured, your intellectual precociousness as well as all the focus on your gender identity led to having a childhood that was muted in any conventional sense of the word, another of the many near-paradoxes of your peculiar life. Though you were able to be a little girl and enjoy the associated accoutrements and activities to a degree, the emphasis was always more on ‘girl’, not ‘little’, and adults (mis)interpreted your cognitive maturity as indicative of emotional maturity and a desire to act grown-up that you never had to nearly the same extent. They meant well, and you enjoyed the special feeling of extra respect from grown-ups, but it left you somewhat bereft of and unconsciously yearning for the age-specific facets of your girlhood.
From what you gather, Aurelia’s childhood was maybe even more comprehensively focused on skills-building and learning adaptations for independence than most visually-impaired kids, also because of her intelligence. It was clear to all of her caregivers that the girl possessed an acute intellect, a thirst for knowledge and keen insight, and so she was subjected to a highly rigorous regimen intended to ensure that her sensory limits wouldn’t hold her back.
Neither of you really regret how everything played out, and you’re both grateful for the competencies that the ways you were raised endowed you with, but you still miss what you missed out on. At the threshold of adulthood, you’re powerfully feeling this wistful emotion without a name, a void of lost nostalgia for things that never were. So you roleplay together.
Usually she’s the mommy, reminding you to do your homework on time, giving you little stickers as a reward, fixing you healthy snacks and teaching you pretend games, and sometimes you’re the mommy, guiding your little blind girl around, brushing her hair, helping her explore the world with her sense of touch and reading bedtime stories to her over the phone. Sometimes you’re playmates, having tea parties and playing with your dolls and stuffed animals. Her favorite is a stuffed unicorn named Mari that she’s had since she was (chronologically) little. She still sleeps with Mari, and she rubs her horn when she’s feeling upset or anxious, imagining that it has magical powers to soothe her and point the way through dilemmas. You have a mini-me doll who even wears a tiny replica of your square, purple, horn-rimmed glasses, and you make up stories about their adventures together through fantastic realms, replete with inside jokes and allegorical elements of things that bother your ‘big’, near-adult selves. It feels so right to let yourself be nurtured by her, and she’s so cute when in the little role—the persona only a slight emphasis of traits in her day-to-day personality, it seems—that it makes your heart ache, in a good way.
It becomes a game in itself to see how much you can get away with while being little together in public, without anyone noticing or thinking anything’s amiss. When you’re out shopping one day, browsing around at the local discount store that has a bunch of knockoff back-to-school supplies on sale out of season, you buy a small plastic backpack that reminds you of Aurelia. It’s designed for an elementary schooler, with a glossy picture of a white unicorn against a colorful tie-dye background. When you give it to her you dare her to wear it for an entire school day. It’s a dicey proposition because she’s visible and patronized enough as it is, and people could assume either that she’s intellectually disabled too, a special-ed student, or that she obliviously grabbed the wrong one because of her lack of sight. You both know this, and seizing the opportunity to outwardly embrace her inner child, be herself and make a tongue-in-cheek statement of sorts against these condescending attitudes, she accepts your challenge, showing up to school the next day with the unicorn portrait riding comically high up on her shoulders and grinning impishly. Seniors do silly things all the time anyway, but to both of your surprise, it goes over perfectly, with even the most popular girls making genuine comments like “Hey Aurelia, cool backpack. Really brings back memories. Those were the days, eh?” before dashing off to their Advanced Placement classes and extracurriculars to cram into their college applications.
Around this point in time, the other girls, both your in-group and her various acquaintances, definitely start to notice how inseparable and how different you both are in each other’s presences. It would be hard not to take notice of how much you’ve been acting as a sighted guide for her recently, walking her to her classes and around the building, with her hand clutching your arm just above the elbow. She’s always been extremely independent with cane travel, rarely letting fellow students guide her if at all, so this is conspicuous. They also notice the way you look at her, the dreamy amethyst glint in your eyes as you gaze across the cafeteria or approach her. They can’t help but observe how closely she stands to you, the girl who keeps her coat on inside to extend her bubble of personal space and who preemptively shuffles out of everyone’s way long before they pass, as well as the curious way her frame relaxes and perks up at the same time before you even announce yourself.
A few whispers and smirks circulate—nothing malicious—and a couple members of your coterie even tease you a bit, but for the most part, you’re an invisibly visible pair. If one of you were a guy or even slightly more masculine, it would probably be obvious to the entire school that you’re an item, but her disability in conjunction with your skillful translucent blending and vestiges of reputation as the removed intellectual, in addition to the fact that you both present femininely, all make it practically impossible for most to recognize you as anything other than platonic friends.
Even between you it’s never explicitly verbalized that you’re a couple, that conversation doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t matter—you instinctively and ingenuously slide into that dynamic anyway. The magnitude and type of concern for each other’s well-being reaches far beyond what would occur between all but the best of friends, and your porous boundaries with each other are another dead giveaway, not to mention the adoring little gestures. You exchange flowers you’ve picked from time to time and wear them in your hair until they wilt at the end of the day. Every so often you do her nails for her and she jokes about trying to paint yours. You even learn how to use a brailler to write her notes and letters—love letters, essentially—bound with ribbons she enjoys the texture of.
Physical affection comes to be embedded in your interaction so naturally that it feels like it’s always been there, and you can’t remember exactly when it started. You hold hands on the bus and while leaving school whenever you’re not being a sighted guide, and tenderly caressing and tracing little patterns onto your arms seems to be one of her favorite things to do with her hands while deep in conversation. Your perma-slouching, hunched posture is abysmal, and she mock-sternly reminds you to sit up straight while pressing on your lower back. You play with each other’s hair even when you’re not roleplaying as mommy and little girl, and while the school officially has a strict policy against PDA, it’s irregularly enforced, and you sneak quick kisses on each other’s cheeks all the time.
One night the darkness is all too much. Not only have you abandoned the fields you did have decent ability for, your art isn’t even that good, and you’re still in high school at 18 years old. You should’ve been a professor by now. You’re not even tutoring, volunteering anywhere or contributing in any way. You’re just lazy, undisciplined, and self-indulgent, that’s what the problem is, must be. And to top it all off you just have to be wondering what Aurelia tastes like and if it’s as anything like her smell, a fantasy that gallops away with itself and causes your nether regions to stir. You’re revolting, you know that? Get ahold of yourself. Okay, you think, I will. You grab a razor blade from under the clock on your nightstand and carve more than slice. When the adrenaline wears off you’re almost shocked at how deep you went, and when the tears finally come you let them drip over it to sting even further, salt in the wound, exactly what you deserve.
It’s too hot to wear long sleeves the next day, and you get looks, predictably, and a few cloying questions. You give halfhearted explanations just to satisfy them, though everyone probably suspects the truth. You’re so numb and out of it that you give different excuses to different people—an accident on your bike, a run-in with a cat, a fluke mishap while helping your dad with home repairs—and by the end of the school-day you can’t even remember who you told what to. Whatever.
When you’re reclining on the couch with Aurelia in her living room and listening to the next chapter in this neo-noir murder mystery audio play you’ve both been captivated by, she sidles up next to you and goes to rub your arm, stroking her fingers right over the injured area. Instantly she stops, sits bolt-upright, frantically feels over it again, takes your arm in both hands and raises it to her face. She plants a flurry of little kisses around it, adorably, but clearly alarmed and concerned for you. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask, just holds you so tightly you can scarcely breathe. You sit together like that in huddled stillness for an indeterminably long stretch until the sun illuminates the windows with its last, vivid, blinding flashes of light.
Despite her nonexistent vision and inability to directly behold them, Aurelia encourages you in your artistic endeavors, which needless to say you greatly appreciate. She hangs the watercolor attempts you give her up in her locker—sometimes overlapping this with your age-regression roleplay, receiving them as a mother whose little daughter painted pretty pictures for her. She wanders around with you as you take photos with the expensive film camera you’re renting, and eagerly agrees to be a subject when you ask if you can take her picture. One day she poses in front of the huge plexiglass windows that look out over the field that the sports teams and marching band practice on, wearing a pretty floral-print top with fitted jeans, her cane extended, beaming with such understated splendor it leaves you breathless. Reciprocally, you read articles in Scientific American Mind and chapters in textbooks about pedagogy to discuss with her, and wear the little bead bracelets she makes for you. You even write an English paper for her that she put off until the last minute, and it’s a fun, naughty little exercise to study and try to emulate her style as much as you’re able so as not to raise any suspicions.
The black hole at the center of your galaxy grows. For some reason, in spite of how much better you’ve been feeling about things overall (offhand episodes with sharp metal objects notwithstanding), in spite of everything fun and nurturing and resplendent you’re orbiting through and nesting in this year, you can feel it at your back more and more, sucking in all the dust from the disks and clouds of emotion you’re ignoring and threatening to turn you into human spaghetti should you cross its imperceptible event horizon. Something very old and very toxic is giving you chemical burns, and there’s this feeling of hitting a brick wall—not in your studies, not in your hobbies, not even, really, in your depression, though certainly there’s that too.
In truth, you know what it is on a level you’re just not permitting yourself to dwell in, though you can’t articulate it even in your internal monologue. Your thoughts keep circling back to Aurelia. She has lifted you up more than you ever could have imagined in the throes of your decay, and yet this sharp, nasty shard of emotion is not only enduring in the corridors connecting your heart, mind, body and self-image, but seems to be worsening. Disconcertingly enough, you feel more isolated than ever with it, mired in alienation that really should’ve expired by now. You almost trip in a pothole as you walk across the rain-drenched parking lot in your clunky teal galoshes while pondering this. When you get home, your spider is lying on its back, molting. You chuckle sardonically, whisper I’m with you there! under your breath, and take a snapshot.
It’s Friday evening and you’re finishing up with some prints in the darkroom. This little alcove, hidden in the back of the art room in one of the older, yet to be renovated sections of the school, is one of your favorite quiet places of refuge, as an introvert who needs to periodically recharge. Particularly at this time of day, it’s deserted, and you can take as much time as you need, losing yourself in the placid tedium of developing and tweaking your photos. You’re one of the last students still here, the sun is low in the sky, and the custodians are vacuuming the halls. You stretch and check your watch. You lost track of the time and you’re not even sure if you’re allowed to be here at this hour, so it’s definitely time to go.
You head out one of the side doors, which locks behind you, and feel around in one of the inside pockets of your A-line jacket. You lean against the building and take out the embellished silver cigarette case you found in an antique shop, removing one of the 120 mm, slender white cylinders and lighting it unsteadily. This is one remaining secret that you have all to yourself, unbeknownst to your friends, to your parents, to Aurelia. It’s something you took up a while ago to unhealthily cope with the stress of it all, and the focus and mental clarity the nicotine provides is a bonus. You feebly try to justify it to yourself, pointing to the irregularity with which you indulge and the fact that you’re not addicted, but subconsciously, its harmful effects are part of why you even do it at all.
This is risky, as you’re still on school grounds and far from the unofficially designated, tolerated smoker’s pit, but to hell with it—it’s late, nobody’s around, you’re of legal age, and the administration here is pretty lax. You take several long, slow drags, holding it in just long enough for it to really start to burn in pins and needles at the bottom of your lungs, and exhale in controlled but aggravated streams toward the sky, whose magenta beauty you aren’t noticing and which you might even want to deliberately poison if you were. As you let it fall from your fingers and grind the remaining glow into the pavement with your boot, your mind drifts back to the projects you did in elementary school about the dangers of smoking. How ironic. How tragic. How commonplace. Oh well.
Weekends are mostly spent with your friend group, who are swamped with full schedules of college-prep classes and who don’t have the luxury of all the spare time during the school week, though Aurelia still texts you frequently, vibrating your phone, which you go scrambling for to their amusement. You feel a twinge of guilt at having drifted apart from them this year, but they’ve been so busy that you’re pretty sure they don’t hold it against you. Still, in the first place, you decided to stick around for senior year instead of buckling down and graduating early mainly for them, and since you’ll all geographically disperse soon after graduation, you try to reconnect as much as you can as the semester comes to a close.
You’re in ‘little mode’ one day when an exciting idea for this occurs to you. You could throw a get-together…perhaps…a slumber party? You had group sleepovers a few times with some of them in years past that were super entertaining, and they’re easygoing and goofy enough that they’d probably be cool with it as a final send-off to reminisce about old times and say goodbye to high school. You could have it downstairs on the last day of school after everyone’s done with finals, make some hors d’oeuvres and…hmm, yeah, that just might work. You can show that you still care about them, and they deserve and would most likely appreciate a way to decompress after the taxing year they’ve had. Of course you’ll invite Aurelia—actually, you could even sort of co-host it together if she’s alright with that, and that way they could spend time with her in a cozier setting and have the opportunity to see how you both interact together outside of school, as a…couple? Yeah, that.
You’re walking around a strip mall headed towards a new café that’s supposed to be good when you pitch it to them, as a fun trip down memory lane, a way to celebrate the end of the year and mark the end of an era. You’re a little afraid that they’ll laugh in your face, but after a few enthusiastic “Oh, we should!” and “We totally should!”s later and comparing exam schedules back and forth, it’s set.
Unlike at the “sleepovers” you all had when you were younger, the other girls now seem to be actually sound asleep, arranged in a matrix of futons, sleeping bags and makeshift blanket-nests on the floor. Since you’re hosting, you have the luxury of a mattress, an extra-wide memory foam twin that your parents helped you drag down there. The faint glow of the TV screen in standby mode casts a calming shadow over the mess of popcorn bags, plush toys, board game cards, controllers and video game cases on the carpet, forming a comforting, silly picture that makes you smile. It had been so much fun, gone so well, and indulging in your nostalgia like this had enabled you to feel totally free and contented for the first time in months, possibly all year. Just as intended.
But, unfortunately, your mind is now restless, and sleep seems a distant possibility, at best. Part of it is the spun-up energy you still have lingering remnants of from the whirlwind of frenetic festivities earlier in the evening. Also, though, now alone in the dead of night, those persistent worries, anxieties, insecurities and apprehensions about yourself, your plans, the future and everything else are beginning to come creeping back in, swirling around in a wired blitz. You want to be able to get up tomorrow, have brunch, hang out and send everybody off, so you take your sleep medication. It’s prescribed as-needed only when absolutely necessary, but it always makes you feel much much better, quieting the storm and giving you a little slice of euphoria in repose before fulfilling its actual purpose and inducing sleep.
As you stare up at the ceiling and wait for it to kick in—it never takes very long—you hear a slight shuffling sound out of the complete, humming silence, which startles you for a split second before you realize that someone’s probably just getting up to go to the bathroom. And then Aurelia is standing over you. Strange, you thought she was asleep, as she’d been lying down quietly for the last couple hours, but you suddenly realize that you’d sort of lost track of her towards the end, which is puzzling in retrospect since she’d been clinging to you even more than normal all night. She hadn’t even said good night, which was unusual, especially considering how she’d been texting you that with *hugs* and little hearts on a nightly basis. She must be coming to do that. Or maybe she’s having a hard time finding her way around without waking anybody and just wants some water or something.
You sit up, perhaps too fast, and feel a warm, electric rush. Your medication must be starting to work. She’s clad in burgundy satin pajamas that manage to look gorgeous on her regardless of their older, slightly anachronistic style, and in the amber glow of the little night-light you still have plugged in she looks absolutely…angelic. There’s no other way to put it. You gaze at her in awe for a second, and all you can think of is how magnificently stunning she is in this moment, how otherworldly-wonderful she is and has been to you in every way, and how much you feel for her. Meds or not, all you want to do is seize her in your arms and tell her all of this until your voice is sore. It doesn’t even cross your mind how she could’ve gotten over to you safely from the other side of the room, as she doesn’t have her cane and instead just has her arms out, feeling around to get her bearings in the way that—you finally have to admit—you find incredibly sexy and alluring in itself.
She finds the edge of the bed, steadies herself with a hand on your shoulder, and sits down next to you, so close she’s practically in your lap. She asks you how you’re feeling in the kindest tone, attentive as ever, while brushing her hand gently across where your hair meets your face. Your throat goes dry. Maybe you’re the one who needs a glass of water. She tells you how great it was to see you so unreservedly happy tonight, and how pretty your laugh sounds—which astonishes you and makes you blush as you’ve always thought it weird, too nasal, and hers is the trillingly mellifluous one. You giggle together, as soundlessly as possible while shushing each other, recalling highlights. That distinct, unmistakable warmth in your core is expanding to permeate your entire body. She squeezes your hand and you feel like you could be transported to another universe.
When you tell her you’re having trouble sleeping, she enfolds you into her arms and starts moving back and forth in a motion that confuses you at first. She’s rocking you to sleep. This is exactly what you need and so sweet that a tear comes to your eye, and you relax into it. You wonder if and hope that she’ll get into bed with you and snuggle as you both slumber through the remaining hours of the night and, at this point, most likely well into the morning.
Amid all these delightfully comfy feelings, though, snaking through your nerves so organically you barely notice, is something else, something more. She smells wonderful, like clean linens fresh from the dryer, but slightly different than usual tonight. There’s a hint of a tantalizingly acidic, musky, almost floral fragrance, but you can’t tell if it’s actually emanating from her or merely an amalgamation of various scents in the room and your own imagination. Her figure is so, so soft, her curves maturely molded into supple flesh that is cushioned in all the right places. It isn’t that you’ve never noticed, it’s just that you’ve never let yourself soak it all in like this, basking in the brilliance of her rays. Your body feels like clay being blissfully kneaded by the most heavenly hands on a lightly swaying manually-operated potter’s wheel. At the same time, however, you can hear your racing heartbeat in the back of your skull. Come to think of it, her breath, the other rhythm ebbing back and forth around you, is getting shallower. You’re ultra-relaxed, immersed now in gelatinous tranquility, yet you still don’t feel ready to fall asleep.
She stops rocking you and repositions, clutching your shoulders and swiveling to face you, so that your noses are almost touching. The light is dim but you can see into her eyes. There’s a spark of uniqueness, still a resounding echo of her in these eyes that can’t see, their milkiness somehow all the prettier and more enticing. You’ve always wanted to tell her how special and attractive they are, just like how mesmerizing it is the way she gets around with her cane, and how all of this ignites a scorching, simmering something within you that feels very deep-seated even though you’re only now discovering it. But you’ve always felt so ashamed of these impressions, worried that you’d be ‘fetishizing’ her and guilty of the same blundering transgressions she complains about. You’re vigilant, perhaps too vigilant about this because, undoubtedly, you know what it’s like to be fetishized for your physical differences.
In this surging instant you feel more vulnerable than you ever have in your life. She kisses your forehead and your heart melts to match your body. She repeats the adorable little flurry of kisses she sprinkled over your scars cautiously over your face, knowing exactly the map of your features. And then, before you even know what’s happening, your lips are fused together in a white-hot flare of passionate radiation, and she is tentatively urging your tongue into her mouth with gentle but definite suction.
After a balmy eternity you separate with a jolt like magnets suddenly pulled apart, and she deftly slips out of her pajamas while lying down by your side. You don’t register exactly what she asks—something like Are you okay? or Is this okay? or both, but you manage to whisper-croak out a timorous quivering yes. She finds the hem of your long aquamarine nightdress after groping too high around your thighs, gathers it in her hands and pushes it up. She begins to explore you, patting the deep hourglass curve of your waist, gliding her palms over your breasts, still under cloth, and sliding her fingertips gently down over your exposed torso to reach and trace your waistband.
And then you fall off the ledge. Without warning you suddenly become conscious of the tight sensation of swollen, bulging fullness just below where her index finger is drawing a border, and you remember that, at least in this context right here right now, you’re defective. Probably even repulsive. The colossal stone words and phrases you read on the internet come crashing down on you, crushing your arousal with the devastating weight of others’ hangups, misconstructions and biases. Your whole being goes as cold as dry ice with a bolt of pain through your ribcage, and a halting sob immediately follows a single stream of tears down your cheek like thunder after lightning. No later than you can inhale sharply for the next one, she catches you, swiftly bringing her hand up to cup your face, so hastily she almost stabs you in the eye, while tunneling her other arm under your back to hold you.
You silently scream at yourself from the inside out, saturated in roiling, throbbing anguish. Why can’t you just be…pure? Why must these desires course through this body, polluting both, everything? Wherever this is going, you want this with every fiber of your being, but you want it, want her, as yourself. You don’t want to be any of those appalling monstrosities that invoke the ire and inimical exclusion that is seared into your awareness whenever you’ve felt what you’re feeling right now.
Aurelia makes a sympathetic little hum of concern and nuzzles her head into your side. She grasps your hand, which is quaking in fear and shame, and asks, her breath hot on your earlobe, whether she crossed a line and whether you’d like her to stop. No, you reply, not at all and that’s the problem. You sniffle and someone in the room turns over and sighs, but doesn’t awaken. A tide of tacit realization washes over your parallel frames, and Aurelia shifts to kiss the moist film of tears now covering your face. To your amazement she whispers that you’re safe, that it’s okay, and in a brief acknowledgement of your scared, bruised little side, that you’re still a good girl, always, inducing another deluge of tears, but very different ones. She hesitates, wanting to respect your boundaries and trying to gauge your feelings. She tugs at your nightgown and you pull it over your head, removing it completely this time.
The electric luminosity returns to your body with a vengeance as she runs her fingers carefully through your hair, breathily tells you how beautiful you are, and cups your breasts in both hands. So much pressure builds everywhere when she circles her fingertips around the little bumps on your areolae that you arch your back and stifle a moan. You have to clasp your palm over your mouth as she flicks her tongue over your nipples and engulfs as much of one breast as she can fit into her mouth, suckling soothingly as if trying to breastfeed. She rubs and massages you through the fabric of your panties, and you almost groan in kneejerk protest, but it feels too incredible to resist. Shhhhh. It’s okay. Just let yourself feel. As she squiggles around and readjusts, trying not to fall off of the bed or make too much noise, she tightly squeezes your leg between hers and you can feel that the layer of white cotton clinging to her labia is soaked through. You slowly pull her up into a secure embrace and press your thigh into her, eliciting an inaudible whimper as she rolls her head back and lets her mouth fall open.
At some point she positions herself under you, wrapped around such that you still feel like you’re being held, and it’s your turn to explore and fondle her. Her hair is especially shiny and satiny tonight. You graze your lips, cheeks, fingers and the back of your hand over this pale, smooth skin you’ve dreamed of caressing for what seems like a lifetime. Waves of goosebumps break out across the areas you drape in your touch. You reach the petite V between her legs and rub her folds through the damp material, striving to stimulate her clit indirectly. You must be doing something right, because she lifts her hips off of the mattress and is using one of your pillows to muffle her sounds of pleasure.
Your sleep medication is now definitely working, and you’re aloft in a holographic slipstream of images, textures, and dulcet sounds. You’re both completely nude, now, panties removed and entangled somewhere in the sheets. By this point, you would think that nothing could surprise you, but the next words, uttered almost noiselessly, do just that. May I absorb you? At first you’re not entirely sure what she’s asking, sit up on your knees after a few dumbfounded seconds and move your fingers towards that precious valley, but she shakes her head once exaggeratedly and grabs your wrist to stop you. Mm, did you change your mind? That’s ok… No. May I absorb you a different way? And then it hits you. Are you sure? She pulls you in close to whisper in your ear, like a little girl telling her best friend her secrets. Mmhm. Please? But I don’t want to pressure you if you’re not comfortable…
May I absorb you. What a perfect way to ask, a simple question that speaks volumes, telling you that she, that someone finally, understands you completely in how you engage with this. Those words are a key to unlocking so much that you’ve kept concealed, sequestered away for so long you feel like you’re going to burst. Your long eyelashes moisten yet again, and you would swear that she can tell how lovingly you’re gazing at her, in an almost telepathic intuition.
You chew on your bottom lip, still hesitant, not wanting to hurt her or compromise your integrity as the woman you are, but looking down at her darling form writhing in desire, into the slightly crossed, beautifully clouded eyes of this incredible girl you adore who sees you so lucidly despite her inability to literally see the physical world, the only person you’ve ever trusted this much, whose affection and acumen is as crucial to you as one of your sensory organs, you feel like you can’t say no, wouldn’t want to. The acidic caterwauling of those shrill voices in the back of your mind—telling you you’re disgusting, deviant, worthless, male, invalid—grows ever fainter. Okay, sweetie. Okay. You kiss the tip of her nose just before and both gasp sharply in unison as you enter her and she absorbs you.
The moment that happens, your benevolent countenance shifts again into a place of tremendous vulnerability, even helplessness. You feel like you’re diving headfirst into very deep waters. A mollifying caress down your spine remedies your residual fears. Hmmmmm. I’ve got you. Shhhh. Good girl. She holds you from underneath, and starts the rocking motion she used to lull you—at the time, it seemed—towards sleep. Just like in the dreams that so tormented you before, your breasts are squished together in a pillowy union, your curves are perfectly connected like puzzle pieces, and your tresses are entwined in a haphazard web. The velvety walls of her womanhood feel exquisite enclosed around you, like a microcosm of the way it feels to be cuddled in her arms, warm silk. Though part of you still can’t believe you’re doing this, you feel so…at home, and never more comfortable with yours.
As fluid and graceful as everything about her normally is, her stifled moans are staccato as she approaches climax. As you notice it’s immanent, the script flips again and you feel extremely maternal, coming out of yourself and the sensations flooding every centimeter of you to help her experience this. The temperature seems to rise in a desperate crescendo as she pulsates rhythmically, involuntarily around you, and you cup the side of her face like a doting mother during her orgasm. Feeling wholly satisfied with this, you go to withdraw from her, but she forcefully yet playfully pulls your hips back into her, hugs you tightly, and traces the swirling, delicate, deliciously aimless patterns onto your back with her index finger, which sends you over the edge. You can’t hold it any longer and you’re in free-fall, but for once, not alone, and not into the abyss. Torrents of indescribable sensation cascade through your whole, complete, unquestionably female body, and your quivering pulses induce another peak for her, though the invisible, iron shelter of her protective embrace never wavers.
Securely fastened around you as the big spoon, she sleepily mutters that she loves you. It’s the first time it’s ever been said outright, and the loveliest thing about it is how it’s clearly a supremely redundant afterthought.
You are now Aurora and Aurelia, the moon and the sun, snug amidst your mutual friends, the stars, and this realization floods your heart with an incalculable happiness. Awash in an authenticity you’ve never before known and profound fulfillment, your spiraling mind flashes forward with divine apparitions of the future: vigorous applause at each other’s college graduations, taking your vows before a gorgeously traditional altar in a breathtaking ceremony, repeating “in sickness and in health”, quavering with love. All the friends in your group beaming at the reception. Aurelia becoming a school psychologist and counselling at your old high school. You getting hired on as the art teacher in between research grants.
And the very best part is, because the Goddess has apparently taken mercy on you, all of it comes true. All of it.
Author's Note: The central theme of this story is something that I imagine will resonate with very few--though for those who it does resonate with, it is my hope that it will give a voice of sorts to something profoundly felt and yet so rarely expressed. The impetus for this story was relatively simple: I wanted to write what I desperately wanted to read and couldn't find. In any case, I hope you enjoy regardless.
A maternal young woman and her very special big-little girl, Leah, share a wonderful and restorative day together at home and the park, learning and exploring some interesting things along the way.
Author's Note: Since I have a handful of longer forthcoming stories in the works, one of which in particular deals with very emotionally heavy, complex, and terribly sad issues and realities, I wanted to post a lighter, saccharine little tale (yes, there are more serious references here as per the cautions, but they're minimal and are addressed only briefly in hindsight) beforehand about one of my very favorite themes in the whole world. :) While exploration of the inner child is present in nearly everything I write, I was inspired to run with this by Maggiethekitten's phenomenal TGIF, which touched my heart more profoundly than I can even describe and brightened my universe with its magic. Enjoy and please do comment if the mood strikes.
The young woman in the long, pale blue nightgown squints sleepily and brushes the grogginess from her eyes with the back of her hand, with a delicate grace all the more elegant for being so evidently unpracticed. She rolls over and glances at the digital alarm clock on her nightstand: 7:30 am. This is earlier than she normally prefers to awaken, but today is special, and so she reorganized her schedule and made sure to take a strong sleeping aid the night before, in order to set things in motion and approximate the sunny diurnality that will be necessary for the next several days. She doesn’t dawdle or hesitate before getting out of bed as usual, but instead stretches her slender arms over her head, yawns, swiftly hops right up (though in a slightly hunched-over position) and shuffles to her vanity, propelled by a charmed source of extra energy that makes her scalp tingle a little with excitement and portends a magical day.
She grabs her bronze oval-frame spectacles, the ones that emphasize the matronly twinkle behind her kind eyes, and puts them on in one smooth motion. She pauses briefly to check her reflection in the mirror. Her long chestnut hair is a little disheveled, but remarkably silky and put-together for having just slept like the dead for seven or eight hours. Her milky complexion somehow simultaneously makes her look younger and older than her actual age, a soft, taut and youthful glow punctuated lightly with the beginnings of etched-over smile lines and other wrinkles of the kind normally only visible on a woman in her 40s. There are a few miniscule pinpoint scars dotted across the area below her lower lip, but they’re not noticeable from any reasonable distance. The whole effect gives her a warm, benevolent appearance, with a round face you can trust and a countenance almost anyone would want to take refuge in.
It’s time to see if Leah’s awake, and the woman glides down the hallway to her makeshift room with straightening posture. Bright sunlight is streaming effusively through all the windows, and the illumination is especially pronounced in this mostly empty space only sparsely furnished as yet with the largest pieces—bookshelves, bedframes, dressers, couches and such—and unpacked cardboard boxes. She isn’t slated to permanently move everything into this spacious condominium for a little while, but it’s perfect for what she has planned this week with Leah. For the time being, it can be theirs, a safe place to breathe, explore what aches so badly to be actualized, and just be.
The young woman breezes into the room where Leah slept, half-expecting to have to wake her little one by cupping the side of her face with a gentle hand, but to her surprise, she’s already up, wide awake and happily milling around on her memory-foam mattress. She appears to be exploring her own feet with babyish enthusiasm, curiously wiggling her toes and pinching around them, one of her fuzzy socks removed and tossed aside. “Good morning, cutie,” the woman beams, scurrying over to sit on the edge of the bed, cluttered with a mélange of simple plastic toys and stuffed animals. “It’s time to wake up!” Leah babbles happily and wraps her arms around the young woman’s neck, glomming onto her small frame like a baby koala on its mother’s back. The woman runs her freshly-manicured nails down Leah’s back through the white T-shirt fabric, and sings her their morning song. “Wake up, wake up, time to rise and shine and face the day…” Her nasal voice cracks with a slight scratchiness; it takes a moment to find sometimes after periods of disuse even only as long as a single night. She finishes by squeezing her little angel into a hug, kisses her forehead and faintly tickles her sides, bringing forth a fountain of squealing giggles.
Strewn across this young woman’s vanity are an assortment of parenting magazines and guides for activities to do with kids, with good ideas highlighted and circled, but she has never given birth. Nor is her little star, the adorable Japanese-American girl writhing in effervescent joy on top of the covers, adopted, at least not in the strict legal sense. Chronologically speaking, though she’s often mistaken for a middle-schooler, high-school freshman or even a preteen, Leah is 23 years old, and perfectly intellectually and developmentally abled. In fact, she is—or was—a bioengineering student at a fairly prestigious university—the same one where the young woman with the oval glasses worked until recently in the bursar’s office—burdened with overwhelming pressures academic, psychological and familial, and hampered by significant mental health issues resultant from the consistent strain on a psyche more vulnerable than anyone around her seemed to recognize.
Shortly after they met, the pair became quickly besotted with each other in a most peculiar way. Something was special about their connection from the outset, and while they ate lunch together daily for months and evolved into very close confidants, her friendship with Leah had developed quite unlike any the young woman had ever experienced. It was a dynamic impossible to distinctly label back then, replete with sharing very personal tribulations and secrets and lifting each other up in rejuvenating comfort, but it was not conventionally romantic, nor sisterly, nor the type of platonic friendliness between peers on an equal level, and vastly more loving and affectionate than a mere mentorship. Though she was only Leah’s senior by barely a decade, she had immediately felt very protective of her indeed, and eventually grew greatly frustrated with the way this poor sensitive girl seemed to have slipped through the cracks in everyone’s radar to struggle and suffocate all by herself under a weight greater than that of the massive backpack on her shoulders.
From when she had first entered the office, Leah was ashen and slumped with exhaustion, drowning in deluges of responsibilities she had just fallen or been nudged into via various well-meaning but oblivious people who couldn’t see the human being straining to keep her head above water, the fragile woman behind the impeccable grades and stunning CV who probably hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything at her own pace or a choice in the accomplishments that defined her from the day she was born. That was part of why she had prompted such protectiveness on the part of the young woman, who had initially helped her disentangle some convoluted matter involving overdue fees and several different sources of financial aid. As was her curiously juvenile appearance, which at first blush caused most strangers on campus to presume that she was either a child prodigy of some sort or simply the daughter of an older student or faculty member.
Even beyond that, though, something else was different about her—from the holographic purple plastic lunchbox she toted around and the unicorn folders she carried her paperwork in, to the overalls she wore over pastel turtlenecks and the Winnie-the-Pooh characters dangling from the zippers on her backpack, all of which everyone who was aware of her actual age merely wrote off as quirky alternative fashion choices, rendering her strangely invisible. While most graduate students—especially young, socially-conscious Asian-American women in male-dominated fields who endured such condescension, stereotyping and worse from many angles as it was—would have been highly irritated if not outright offended at being mistaken for a child over and over, Leah sparkled when other adults addressed and patronized her under that assumption, as if it was making her day. Needless to say, the older-but-still-young woman then behind a desk at the bursar’s office took notice of every bit of it, and their unique bond flourished.
Like the young woman in the pale blue nightgown who teases her with an impromptu game of peek-a-boo by pulling the blankets up over her head and yanking them off, Leah is transsexual, a girl with the exceptional problem of having been assigned the wrong gender at birth. Because of her naturally feminine features and the hormone replacement therapy she’s been sporadically receiving since high school, nobody has identified her as anything but a pretty girl with a cutesy sense of style for years. Except, that is, for the parents who still obstinately refuse to accept her as their daughter despite every outward sign imaginable, and who hide their wounding stinging-nettles bigotry, acidic demeanors, impossible expectations and fiercely controlling nature behind a convenient curtain of supposedly entrenched cultural specificity. Which is, in the view of her genuinely maternal defender, as well as that of a handful of dejected would-be friends who tried to connect and spend time with her in normal, age-appropriate ways over the years only to be rebuffed by the punishing activity regimen and bizarre draconian rules to which she was obsessively subjected, a crock. Cultural considerations aside, they clearly exhibit disordered personalities, and the parenting practices that Leah is only just beginning to unravel as abusive edge on being indicative of clinical narcissism.
Between all the awful levels of their total lack of acceptance and the misfortune of being incorrectly perceived as a boy, Leah never got to have much of a girlhood to speak of, not even really a faded ghost of one with any of the unconditional adoration, validation and opportunity to play that every small girl requires for nourishment before the tumult of adolescence in the course of blossoming into womanhood. It is precisely this that the young woman crossing her eyes under her spectacles to elicit peals of laughter plans to rectify—today, this week, and for as long as her little star wants and needs, to heal and feel loved. She thinks it could be a long time or even forever, given how intensely Leah’s tender and hurting little soul has yearned for this and how deeply her girlishness extends well past the superficial. It’s obviously different, but nearly analogous, she was startled to realize, to what the gender issue is like, prior to transition, for women such as themselves. At least, it's...an interrelated type of near-dysphoria, a kind of being at the core that doesn’t outwardly align and manifests in acute spirals of pronounced distress.
After a steep downward series of severe disappointments, and the increasingly unbearable pressure coming to a head while having to contend with several intersecting sources of stigma that a rotating list of SSRI antidepressants prescribed by the university clinic with a dismissive wave and a yawn did nothing to abate the searing pain of, culminating in a harrowing hour pacing and staring over the edge on top of a six-story parking garage, Leah crumbled like desiccated clay. She had cried for what felt like hours in the arms of the young woman in whose embrace she’s now grinning cheerfully, who had held and rocked her and dotingly wiped her face with an entire package of tissues. Afterwards she had gone so far as to drive her home, run her a bubble bath and build her a blanket fort in her off-campus studio apartment, stocked with plushies, coloring books, a portable TV and a stack of Disney and Miyazaki movies, into which Leah had retreated for a week straight while her faithful, motherly companion stayed with, waited on and kept careful watch over her. Ever since, their relationship has explicitly taken on the flavor that had always permeated it before.
Subsequently, with repeated assurance that her wellbeing was of the utmost priority, that it was okay and completely understandable to falter sometimes and that she deserved a serious break after everything she’d been through, contrasted against the haughty apathy of the robotic professors and blatantly self-centered classmates in her department, Leah had to radically reassess everything and face the reality of desperately needed modifications in her grown-up life. She had finally, mournfully realized that her toxic parents were probably never going to come around in any of the ways she needed them to, and took the immensely brave and terrifying step of disconnecting from them altogether. She also quit her job as a TA, and took an indefinite leave of absence from her Master’s program to focus on recovering her sanity and figuring out what kind of future she truly wanted for herself. It is a scary but exciting and unbelievably refreshing time of uncertainty, newfound freedom and drastic changes in the lives of both women, but all the adult decisions to be made and footholds to find or forge can wait, for now is the gleaming interval eked out in the eye of the storm, of escape and vital respite no less important in starting to turn right-side-up what is upside-down.
Promises that she would get to be her little self again under the guardianship of the caregiver who constructed it were all that coaxed Leah out of the sanctuary of pillows and sheets that was her fortress after the breakdown. She wasn’t quite sure yet what that little self’s favorite age was to be, however, and so in shyly requesting another week as soon as possible to be a little girl full-time, she suggested the idea of a day in which she could fluidly progress through all the stages from infancy to around 10-12. That day is today, and she couldn’t be happier.
Having felt a haunting sadness at the way her circumstances prevented her from actualizing her natural propensity for motherhood, the young woman who had astutely spotted and encouraged her relished the notion of “adopting” and continuing to nurture and help little Leah be herself, and accepted the role with a humming heart. So they are now mother and daughter in the ways that matter most, and Leah feels contented and safe in a nevertheless unfamiliar whirlwind of feelings that the lady in the pale blue nightgown is her Mommy who loves her and will take care of her always from here on out, and that’s that.
After a final tap on her darling nose with the tip of her index finger, Leah’s Mommy shifts to stand up, but clumsy hands yet to learn fine motor control skills paw expectantly at her clavicle. “What is it, sweetie? Oh, are you hungry?” Baby Leah gurgles and clutches the collar of her nightgown, trying to pull it down. “Are you sure? Hmm…it’s so early, but okay, hold on…” The pale blue nightgown is made of a stretchy material, but it also has buttons on the top that its wearer carefully undoes. Her breasts are small and kind of conical, but feeling her baby daughter’s lips latch on around an areola, she feels an indescribable surge of self-confidence and has never been more elated to have them. While Leah tentatively suckles, now cradled in her lap, she nuzzles the top of her head in a wooly torrent of oxytocin, and closes her eyes while ripples of blissful tingly sensations overtake her until she almost feels sleepy again. She wonders if it’s possible to induce actual lactation somehow in the future, and eagerly files that prospect away as something to research later.
Leah reluctantly pulls away after a few minutes of nursing and hiccups, and satiated with her time as an infant, she begins to feel something shift in herself towards being slightly older, though still thoroughly dependent. “Alrighty, let’s get you dressed,” her Mommy says, and retrieves a pair of white socks with scalloped ankles and gray panties with tiny flowers printed on them from the top dresser drawer. Uncertain of where her baby girl is in the developmental spectrum at this moment, or whether she even knows, she asks, “Can you put them on? Or need help?” Leah hesitates for a second and lies down, wanting to bask in this balmy helplessness for just a moment longer. “Need help?”
“Mm…hm,” she mutters almost inaudibly, as her sole remaining sock is already being whisked off. Last night before bed Mommy explained how these socks were only for sleeping in to keep her feetsies warm, as the special fuzzy fabric would be dangerously slippery to walk in across wood floors. She wiggles her toes into the fresh socks like an earthworm burrowing into soil, paying no mind to how that might complicate the task. When finished, Mommy goes “Up! Up! Reach for the sky!” and thrusts her hands high up in the air. Leah mimics the movement by holding her hands above her head, letting Mommy pull the T-shirt off. The young woman pauses and clears her throat nervously before slipping her fingertips under Leah’s waistband and removing her panties, and as they come off, she sees the hint of a pained shadow cross her little girl’s face, every muscle in her body tensing up, her bottom lip quivering a bit as she turns her head away to stare uncomfortably at the wall. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her little one was reacting to getting a shot or had accidentally stepped in something icky. Poor thing. “Aw, sweetie, it’s okay. I know. This’ll only take a second…” In one fell swoop perfected from years of changing her dolls when she was little, she sweeps the clean ones on. “See, there you go! Much better.”
Leah relaxes and smiles again, then jumps up and runs excitedly over to the closet, almost colliding with the door in her enthusiasm to select an outfit. “Careful! Now, let’s find you a dress…” She seizes her filmy, fancy princess gown, the one that Mommy had ordered for her all the way from Japan as a surprise, off of its hanger and holds it out proudly. “Oh, no, sweetie, I’m sorry, I don’t think that that dress will work today.”
“Whhhhhyyyy?” she whines, and dashes back over to the bed to bury her face in the pillow.
“Because, sweetie, it’s not very practical. We’re going to the park today and I’m afraid something will tear or stick to it. We don’t it to get ruined, now do we?” The young woman knows that Leah will be older and extremely well-behaved at the park in any case and that nothing is likely to soil it, but, although taken off guard, she suspects that this is cathartic and plays along. Her voice is patient and sympathetic, without a trace of anger, and the burgeoning conflict is forgotten instantly. Leah bounces back—literally—and sits at the foot of the bed. “Now, let’s pick a different one. It’s going to be hot today, so I think these two are good.” Mommy reaches into the closet and withdraws two different cotton sundresses, one with big yellow sunflowers and a black-and-white checkered one. One in each hand, she asks, “This one? Or…this one?” shaking the hangers to differentiate them. Leah can’t decide—even her big, grown-up self has had lots of trouble making decisions recently since the doctor pulled her off the Lexapro—and points first to the checkerboard dress.
“That one! No…that one!” she says, pointing to both at the same time.
“You can’t wear both, silly girl! Which one? Come on, we don’t have all day! How about the sunflowers? This one’s more summery, don’t you think?”
“Yeeeeah. Sunflowers.” Leah pads over and Mommy slips the sunflower dress on. She produces a brush and runs it a few times through Leah’s thick, long and beautiful but rather low-maintenance jet-black hair.
“Okay, now Mommy has to go get dressed. Put your shoes on and I’ll be right back.” Big Leah has a whole bunch of different shoes, but little Leah definitely knows which ones she wants to wear. Her feet were just tiny enough that she’d been able to find the white Velcro sneakers in her size, and on the bottom there were cool blue lights that actually lit up! Now maybe about 5 or 6 and quite capable—she already knows how to read, thank you very much, even though if she had to tie her shoes she might have some difficulty—she straps them on and twirls in front of an imaginary mirror.
Meanwhile, the young woman in the pale blue nightgown exchanges it for a burgundy blouse and ankle-length sand-colored maxi skirt, feeling the wave of relief that’s never gone away at the sight of her reflection as she changes. Renewed by estrogen, her skin is radiant and healthy, and all the fat is distributed where it should be to shape her curves. Remembering something, she takes a lonely prism off of a bare shelf and heads to the kitchen, where she packs everything they’ll need today into a small green backpack, aside from the picnic blanket already in the trunk and the prepared basket in the fridge, containing a thermos of iced herbal tea, untraditional onigiri filled with honeyed apricots instead of anything pickled or salty, and cucumber and cream cheese bagel sandwiches. She gathers some additional snacks—a few pretzel sticks, and green apple slices coated in lime juice to prevent them from oxidizing. Despite teasing that they were far too sour for so sweet a girl, the Granny Smith apples were Leah’s favorite. A few books to read by Satomi Ichikawa, a kaleidoscope, binoculars just in case, and art supplies, including a sketchpad and an assortment of colored pencils and oil pastels. That should do it.
Having wisely donned a sunhat, Leah emerges from the hall clutching her caterpillar. Bright green with round segments, lots of legs, a smiling face and yellow antennae with felt balls at the ends, the caterpillar is her very favorite stuffed animal that she cuddles whenever she’s happy or sad and means everything to her. Mommy doesn’t know where it came from, but suspects that it may be the only one she had since big Leah was little. She moves its head with hers to look around, standing on her tiptoes, and asks politely if there’s anything she can help with. This Leah is about the age she usually is by default when little, somewhat quiet, reserved, intelligent and thoughtful. Despite not having been allowed any leeway whatsoever for misbehavior the first time through, she still tries to be the best-behaved, most responsible and considerate little girl she can be, which tugs on her Mommy’s heartstrings and makes her tear up with grateful devotion.
Although her big self’s experience doing so in college went all awry and turned out to be super stressful, little Leah also loves to learn, and her Mommy delights in teaching her new things to broaden her golden perspective, particularly introducing her to complex concepts in a simple, comprehensible fashion to spark her curiosity. Of course, somewhere in the part of the back of her mind that grown-up Leah has domain over, she holds this knowledge already—however, when her little self learns it for the first time all over again, something wondrous happens and it seems so much more novel and interesting.
Mommy shows her the triangularish clear object she’d noticed and examined the night before, holding it up to the luminous rays of light coming through the window above the sink. “Look, Leah, remember this? It’s a prism. I couldn’t really show you last night since it was dark and cloudy, but look what it can do!” She angles and adjusts it carefully, and a beautiful rainbow appears on the kitchen counter.
“Wowww, it makes rainbows?” Transfixed by how pretty the colors are, Leah stares into the glass and passes her hand through the chromatically dispersed beam underneath, as if attempting to see if she can catch the rainbow. She then ages up a few years to inquire in a clear, impeccably articulated voice, “How does it do that?”
“Well, you see, light that we see as white is actually made up of many different colors—all the colors of the rainbow! When it passes through a prism a certain way, it gets separated out into these pretty colors, which are called a spec-trum. There are some rays of light in the spectrum with colors we can’t even see, too. Real rainbows—the kind that appear in the sky after it rains—happen because water droplets in the air separate sunlight out into its spectrum like this prism here.” Leah’s mom-teacher thinks to herself that this is perfectly appropriate for today, because her little star, her sunshine is radiating lots of beautiful light as well, and that bright Leah-light is comprised of a full, dazzling spectrum of ages and stages of all different frequencies that she is helping big-little Leah refract. It’s sometimes visible as one or a few colors, and sometimes all together in a brilliant white beam, revealing the most maternal and shimmering parts of her muliebral psyche that hadn’t before seen the light of day. Today is all about beholding the breathtaking resplendence of that rainbow.
Leah slowly absorbs all this new information with her head adorably tilted to the side. “That’s interesting! But why can’t we see all the colors all the time? Why do we need a prism-thingy…or, raindrops?”
“It’s pretty complicated, sweetie, but that’s a very good question. Light is actually waves of energy, and…well, it’s hard to explain without teaching you a lot more stuff and drawing out diagrams, but would you like to learn more about light soon? We can go to the library and check out some books on it sometime if you’d like.”
Leah nods three times with a big goofy smile, stands up on her tiptoes again and leans in to get a kiss from Mommy. The young woman sets the prism down on the counter and presses her lips to her forehead, feeling so warm and lovely inside that she hardly knows what to do with herself. “Alrighty, my smart girl, we definitely will. But for now let’s get to the park, yes? I think I’ve got everything all packed up here.”
When they exit through the front door of the home-to-be which already feels like home, there is a middle-aged lady perched on the stairs leading up to the rest of the complex, anxiously alternating between sending text messages and gazing off into space. When she sees the childlike girl in the flowery sundress whose age she can’t quite place (dressed like an elementary student, looks about tall and developed enough to be a teenager at least or maybe an adult, yet has a stuffed caterpillar tucked under her arm?) she half-raises an eyebrow and looks to her cohort, the bespectacled woman toting a picnic basket who she has spotted a couple times carrying boxes in at all hours of the night. But when Leah says “Hiiiiiiiii!” in a singsong voice and gives an exaggerated wave, her expression morphs into a compassionate smile, everything suddenly and wordlessly clicking together for the woman on the stairs about what this girl’s deal is, and the two women present who are adults in spirit as well as chronologically exchange a kindly, knowing mutual glance and nod.
Leah climbs in the back seat of Mommy’s silver sedan—she’s big enough not to need a booster seat, but still has to ride in the back, in the safest spot behind the driver’s seat. She’s quiet on the way there, contemplating everything she learned about prisms today, and when they arrive at the park she feels closer to her oldest little selves. “You know how you said there’re colors of light we can’t see, Mommy?”
“Mmhm, yes, sweetie, what about them?”
“Is one of them UV? I remember learning somewhere that the sun has ul-tra-vio-let light which helps your body make Vitamin D which makes your bones strong. That’s why it’s important to go outside sometimes. I didn’t know what ultraviolet means, or what it looked like, but…”
“Yes, that’s right! Good girl! It sounds like you know a lot about this. Ultraviolet is one part of the spectrum beyond what our human eyes can see, so it’s invisible to people. Some animals can see it, though. And too much ultraviolet radiation on your skin can give you a sunburn and be very bad for you, but you’re right, we do need a little from time to time.”
As they traverse the gravel path to the wide grassy area sparsely occupied by other parents and children playing Frisbee and setting up picnics like they plan to, the blue lights on Leah’s shoes glittering as she skips along, the mother-and-daughter duo observe all the gorgeous flowers and point out different plants to each other. This section of the park includes some haphazardly-placed community gardens, and most of the pretty flora and vegetables are marked with small placards that indicate their scientific and common names. When they reach one that says Tomatoes - Solanum lycopersicum, Leah bursts out in a fit of giggling.
“Mommy look!” Her voice is a tiny bit quieter and more subdued, because a large group is passing by and she doesn’t want to draw too much attention, but Leah can hardly contain her amusement. “There’s no tomatoes in there! Do those look like tomatoes?” Her Mommy glances over to see what she found so hilarious, to find that she’s right—there are no tomatoes of any kind in sight anywhere, and right behind the sign is an abundance of tiny bluish-purple flowers growing through and outside of the section. She chuckles and readjusts the backpack, thick fluffy blanket and picnic basket.
“Hmm, I suppose they ought to change that sign, huh?”
“They’re pretty though. If ultraviolet was a color we could see, I think that’s what it would look like,” Leah says definitively.
“Well, not quite, sweetie, but they are kind of a purple-violet color. They’re called periwinkles, if I remember correctly, and their color is called periwinkle too. I don’t think they’re supposed to grow there! As a matter of fact, I don’t think they’re native to anywhere around here. They’re what they call an invasive species.”
“In-va-sive? Sooooooo….ummmmm…how did they get there?”
“Yep, just means they weren’t planted there on purpose, but people just brought some in nearby a long time ago, I guess. From there they just kind of make their own way. They seem to like it there, and they’re pretty cute, so it seems like the gardeners just leave them alone.”
“If they’re not on purpose, then that means they don’t belong to anybody. So, um, then, can I pick some?”
“Sure, sweetie, I don’t see why not. Just a few, okay?” Leah squats down and picks a couple of the eye-catching flowers. She tucks them behind her ear and they continue along.
“Speaking of ultraviolet, some flowers look very different in ultraviolet light,” Leah’s Mommy explains. “I think these periwinkles stand out a lot more, for example. Because bees can see it, it helps attract them to pollinate. I think I remember reading somewhere that some flowers even have parts that light up under UV almost like little runways to show them where to land!” They stop and lay out the picnic blanket under a big shady tree. Some of the leaves on its droopy branches almost get caught in their hair.
Starting to get hungry, Leah sits down criss-cross-applesauce style while her Mommy unzips the small green backpack and takes out the extra snacks. She ravenously munches through an apple slice and most of the pretzel sticks while Mommy sets out paper plates and the rest of the food, giving her caterpillar a bite of all the apple slices. They enjoy their lunch of sweet onigiri and cucumber sandwiches, and Mommy realizes that she forgot to bring any teaware or even disposable cups. Leah loves tea parties at all her little ages with spoons, sugar bowls, saucers and honey dippers, but today they have to make do with just the lid of the thermos, which they share to drink their raspberry-flavored iced tea.
Tummies full and satisfied, they lie down on the comfy blanket for a while and look for shapes in the clouds. Less lethargic after having time to digest, Leah sits up and wants to try and find butterflies and look at birds through the binoculars, then plays with the kaleidoscope. She proclaims that she wants to make her own kaleidoscope, and then that she’s bored. Since her little one seems to be bursting with too much physical energy to sit still enough to read or draw yet, Mommy teaches her some hand-clapping games. Kneeling across from each other, they clap their hands on their thighs and together in synchronized rhythms while reciting funny nursery rhymes about girls named Mary Mack and Miss Lucy and one about something called “pease porridge”. That’s the first one Leah masters, and they say the words perfectly in unison while adding more steps to the pattern:
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine—days—old!
Leah doesn’t like peas one bit and takes umbrage at the idea of nine-day-old porridge made out of them, so they decide to change it to “Leah’s porridge”. With all the rhymes she starts off extremely uncoordinated and her Mommy has to be very patient, taking her wrists in her hands and guiding her through the clapping motions, but she quickly adapts and combines them in an accelerating frenzy of thigh-claps, hand-claps, together-hand-claps, ground slaps and finger-snaps. Sometimes as they go faster and faster even Mommy gets left and right mixed up and it devolves into a giggly noodly mess of rubbery arms, stinging palms flying everywhere and falling over.
Finally tired out enough to settle down, Leah snuggles into her Mommy’s lap, their backs supported by the tree trunk, and works on drawing some pictures in the sketchbook with the oil pastels while Mommy idly plays with and tries to braid her hair. She uses the colored pencils for anything requiring finer detail.
“Do you remember all the colors of the rainbow, Leah?”
“Um, red orange yellow, green blue violet, and…uhh—"
“Do you remember the other one? There’s one more!”
“Ummmm…purple?”
“No, honey, indigo. I guess it’s kind of a weird one you don’t hear about too often.”
“All done!” she announces. “For you, Mommy.”
Giving up on the braid she was attempting, the young woman takes the sketchbook and raises it above Leah’s head to look. “What did you draw, sweetie? Let’s see here.” She adjusts her spectacles. It’s a picture of what are obviously bumblebees, cartoonish but skillfully detailed, with fat little fuzzy bodies, cute faces and circles of some sort around their heads. Behind them is an indistinct yellow-red-orange jumble of scribbles.
“Aww, they look so happy! And what is this behind them, sweetie, their hive?” Leah is staring hopefully up at her Mommy’s reaction, grayish-hazel eyes wide with optimistic thirst for approval.
“No, that’s the sun! They’re space bees. That’s why they have their helmets on.”
“Ohh, I see, that’s what those are! I love how you blended the colors together! And why would these space bees be on the sun, hmm?”
“Because there’s lots of ultraviolet light there!” she declares matter-of-factly.
The young woman’s chest swells with love and pride. “This is beautiful, my brilliant little star. I will hang it up when we get home and cherish it always.”
Other visitors in the park gradually ebb away, and a cool breeze makes all the leaves rustle. Leah snuggles in tightly and they read all three books Mommy brought. One of them is about a little girl whose toys come to life after her grandmother tucks her in to bed, collecting all the stars in the sky for her. By the end of the story, Leah starts to doze and wraps part of the picnic blanket around herself and her caterpillar like a little cocoon. The young woman has noticed that her sleep schedule intriguingly seems to shift towards that of an actual/chronological child whenever Leah is little. She can’t explain it, except to think that perhaps big Leah was very tired before the break and was accustomed to getting up ultra-early for her favorite class, Introductory Bioinformatics.
The sun is now low in the sky and evolving from gold to a deep fuchsia. Leah drowsily gets up and helps get everything together, but on the trip back she falls asleep again in the car. Unconcerned about anyone seeing them and wondering, her Mommy opens the back door, undoes her seatbelt for her and nudges her snoozing girl awake in the parking lot when they get home. She’s been paying much less attention to how people are looking at her and worrying less and less about what they’re thinking about her since adopting little Leah. It’s happening by accident—she just noticed today that her mind wasn’t besieged with fretful self-consciousness nearly as much as usual—but it feels liberating.
Though Leah is recharged from her nap and animated again, Mommy suggests that she get into her sleepwear for the night so that she’ll be all ready for bed when she gets tired, so she changes out of the sundress and into the long T-shirt, star-print panties and fuzzy socks she wears to bed. She admires Mommy’s sophisticated nightgowns and wonders if maybe she’ll buy her some. Since they ate such a large lunch, they decide to just have some miscellaneous snacks like cold veggie pizza left over from yesterday, Goldfish crackers and popcorn for the evening meal. Nestled in beanbag chairs on the carpeted living room floor, they play a few games of Go Fish and a special card game about prime numbers found at the edutainment store, as well as a board game where you have to assemble plastic insects and one called Don’t Break the Ice! in which they take turns carefully tapping blocks out of a platform with a little mallet, trying not to be the one to dislodge all the ice cubes and send the figurine of a figure skater positioned in the middle crashing down into the cardboard “lake” below. Leah sits on the edge of her beanbag (if beanbags could be said to have an ‘edge’) and sticks her tongue out a little when it’s her turn in an adorable display of laser focus, tapping away at the plastic ice carefully as if she’s meticulously excavating a precious gem. When someone makes all the cubes fall down, she squeals and always immediately swoops in to rescue the little figure skater, poised in a permanent twirl. She has her caterpillar give the skater many-legged huggles for a second to warm her up while Mommy sets up the blocks again.
As a now-pleasantly exhausted Leah drifts off to sleep again—having taken her caterpillar and the little skater figurine and abandoned her beanbag chair to snuggle into her lap like she did earlier at the park—her Mommy, the young woman who used to work in the bursar’s office, caresses her arm, hums her a lullaby and thinks many things to herself, in the quietude of this house-in-progress that has already been made a home. She thinks of how this is the greatest intimacy possible, a clearer, purer version of what everyone is truly striving for in the confounding myriad landscape of adult relationships. She thinks about how the longer she has taken care of little Leah and let her be herself, the more the permanent pallid veil over her sweet girl’s face is being erased, like a shaded patch of graphite being smudged and lifted from the page to make room for whimsical doodles and the text of the rest of her life story yet to be written, the pencil in her own hand this time. She smiles a crystalline smile to herself, with tears in her eyes, and thinks most of all about how sometimes, like the periwinkles, you have to make your own way, when there wasn’t a chance to be deliberately planted and lovingly raised up from a sprout with enough sunlight or anything close to the right fertilizer and you’re labelled something completely different.
With some strain she slides her arms underneath her back and lifts Leah’s limp, relaxed frame, carrying her and her cuddly caterpillar to bed. Leah’s sleepy eyes flutter open and she sighs serenely into a hug as her Mommy lays her down gently on the mattress and tucks the comforter around her shoulders. “I love you, Mommy, so much.”
“I love you too, my little star. Always and forever. Night night, sweetie. Sweet dreams.”
Sabina is a cynical, homeless young trans woman who prioritizes hormones even over such necessities as food and shelter. Deborah is an anxious workaholic with social issues and an apparent softer side, a responsible up-and-coming professional who has just had surgery. A serendipitous encounter on the subway system brings these two women briefly into each other's orbit, where they leave powerful impressions on each other and reveal vulnerable aspects of themselves through their differences, without fully realizing all that they have in common.
Author's Note: While originally intended as a stand-alone solo, I came to care a lot about these characters while writing their backgrounds, so this story may potentially serve as a prequel for something set far in the future. I'm not really sure yet. Please let me know what you think in the comments! Also, despite the decidedly realistic flavor, it isn't set in any particular city in reality. As far as time period, it's set approximately around the mid-to-late-00s or so, or possibly even a bit earlier, which may shed light on a few things (such as why Sabina lacks a smartphone). :) If it does end up being a prequel, any subsequent stories will take place at least five to ten years from this one (so...closer to present day). I might just do a loosely-connected series of vignettes with these characters set before and/or after this. We'll see. Thanks for reading.
Deborah adjusted her scarf and coughed anxiously into her shoulder as she always did when the inbound train approached hers, just pulling out of the first station. God, she thought. They pass so close. It looks like I could reach into that one. It looked to her as if there were mere centimeters between the trains as they rushed by, as if they could clip each other at any moment, and while the system was designed so that that never happened, it was her least favorite part of the commute. The little jolt of nervousness passed and she looked back up from the floor, readjusted her hold on the overhead railing, glanced at her watch out of habit and resumed staring vacantly out the window.
Another day in the city. Deborah usually thought about work when she wasn’t at work, but today her idle mind skipped right past it and drifted to the late evening when she’d finally have to go home. Home to an empty, tiny, nondescript apartment on the fourth floor of its building. At first she’d felt privileged to find one affordable on her own without taking on at least one roommate. Now, three years in, she almost wondered if that had been such a blessing after all. Then she remembered, and smiled—almost wincing—to herself. Another day, another dilation, she thought, at a loss for what to do during the next session. The procedure necessary so soon after her surgery was physically uncomfortable, yes, but what made Deborah squirm just to think about it was the frustration it entailed, confining her to bed and forcing her to slow down for a guaranteed block of time every night.
Distractions proved inadequate—reading required too much focus to effectively take her mind off of the pain, attending to work emails was too important to risk making errors and just felt wrong in that position regardless, and TV was too banal to be sufficiently engaging. The loneliness of the whole apartment seemed to echo off the walls whenever she had to dilate, and that’s what Deborah hated the most about it. Having to be alone with her thoughts. Normally she filled the hours in between extra-long workdays by attending to work-related matters, volunteering somewhere, bustling around keeping the apartment immaculately clean, knitting doll clothes—the one quaint hobby she had—and whenever possible, sleep. Damn dilation. She remembered that one nurse’s disquieting offhand remark in response to her question—"...well if that’s the case, why do you even need to beyond that week?" Taken off guard, she hadn’t known how to answer that and couldn’t even recall her response. She just knew that she needed to, and stuck with it, with characteristic diligence.
Sabina drifted in and out of the hypnogogic state she had come to begrudgingly recognize now as ‘sleep’. Being unable to fully, deeply sleep for consecutive hours was the one aspect of this life she hadn’t even begun to get acclimated to. But some level of constant vigilance was always required, and what are you going to do? She could tell by the coffee smells and influx of passengers that it was the early morning rush hour. Her eyes briefly fluttered open to see if there were any visibly disabled, pregnant or elderly passengers who needed to sit down on one of the four seats she was stretched across. Nope. Fine, then they can stand, they always have somewhere to go and sit all day, she thought bitterly, clutching tighter to her backpack. And sleep all night.
Today she needed to regroup and figure out another option, something that she wanted (unwisely, she knew) to put off as long as possible. Morning? What do such distinctions even mean anymore? No, it’s still night, it has to be, I’ll decide when it’s morning. Eventually, though, she’d have to cobble something together, and it would be off to a new adventure, yet another step around the circle in this constant scramble to secure such luxuries as shelter.
Until recently, she had been squatting at a abandoned warehouse repurposed by transient punky anarchist-type kids, and while not great, that had been all fine and well until the Asshole Crew—a group of sinister young guys and a couple young women she guessed to be girlfriends, all with aggressive, vaguely neo-Nazi vibes—moved in. So much for that. It was good while it lasted, but nothing lasted forever, so oh well. While some days she still felt hopelessly out of her element on the streets, her intuition had developed enough out of necessity to recognize when it was definitely time to pack up and move on to the next thing. Even if that meant having to infiltrate another supply closet or set up in a stairwell for a few nights. It wasn’t worth the risk to overstay in one place when imminent danger was palpable.
The presence of rush-hour commuters reminded her it was Monday. Other than try to find or panhandle enough change for some coffee, get (possibly dumpster, if there was anything semi-decent enough at the usual spots to look safe) something to eat, and begin to work on figuring out other living arrangements, that was her other definite obligation—she had to do a shot today. For Sabina, that meant something very different, but no less vital, than it did for most homeless kids in the city to whom it applied.
Another stop and when enough people disboarded, Deborah caught sight of the silhouette in the back of the train out of the corner of her eye. Taking up four seats? At rush hour? Ugh, the nerve. Some people. But when she turned to look, head-on before the new stream of passengers getting on partially obscured her view, her glare softened. It was a girl—or younger woman, rather, but to Deborah she didn’t look much older than around 17 or 18 years old, by herself, lying on her back with her knees up, her arms wrapped around a bulging, tattered backpack far too enormously heavy for her slight, slender frame.
Fairly myopic even with her contacts in (it was past time to get another eye exam, but she’d put it off with all the commotion of preparing for and recuperating from surgery and just spaced it afterwards), she couldn’t make out too much detail from across the car, but the gargantuan backpack and the fact that the girl appeared to be brazenly sleeping on the train this early in the day told Deborah that she was probably homeless. Though she knew she was making assumptions, her sympathy immediately went out to this young woman, who for whatever reason struck her as looking particularly vulnerable and displaced. Not hardened yet by the unrelenting, punishing life that no doubt awaited those who couldn’t make it in this metropolitan labyrinth. Ah, poor thing. By herself. That must be hard.
Deborah’s BlackBerry buzzed, interrupting her train of thought, and she removed it from her purse to be met with an email from her boss—confirming receipt of and thanking her for some reports she’d sent early the night before, probably having just arrived at the office—and…an invitation for another excuse. She sighed, having thought she’d never have to send another one of those after the last time. When she’d started the job, two of the other women roughly her age in the office who seemed to be thick as thieves had glommed onto her almost instantly and tried to befriend her, inviting her out for lunch (which Deborah always preferred to eat at her desk—no need to lose productivity) and drinks after work. She’d gone with them a few times, just enough to realize that all they ever really talked about was men—guys they either had dated, were dating, or, after enough alcohol, guys they simply wanted to sleep with. No thanks.
It was to the point where it was painful—more painful than dilating right after surgery had been—and nearly impossible to get through those first couple outings without either outright lying or explaining that she was lesbian, had never been involved with men and never wanted to be. But that aside, it chafed her sensibilities to have coworkers get so personal period, and even overlooking that, their personalities were just…ehhh. Not her type of friends, not that she even had a ‘type of friend’ to begin with since childhood, but this pair certainly weren’t it. Vapid, almost, she’d have to say if she were being particularly unkind. Generically urbane, the consummate ditzy yuppies with nothing even moderately unique or interesting about them at all.
So she’d brushed them off, just coldly enough to—she hoped—send the message without making enemies. She had felt unduly guilty about it on some level, even though she knew that that was silly. It occurred to her that many women in her position would dream of being so included off the bat and would probably relish such conversations as somehow very validating. It was challenging to make new friends as an adult, for anybody. Still. She avoided them as much as possible until they cornered her one day and, terrible at saying no to things, she ended up awkwardly going bowling with them or some such—though it had only been a few months ago, she could barely remember, wanting to forget—which she thought would finally get them off her back but had apparently, by the looks of her second text alert, sealed their persistence and been a great mistake. For a while there she had begun to get paranoid, wondering if they sensed anything that could reveal all that she kept hidden. That apprehension had been reignited again with this fresh invitation, since she imagined that they had wondered where she was during her time off for surgery. She was in good enough standing to be able to tell her boss nothing more than “I’m having some necessary surgery,” and get a couple weeks of leave (one paid, one unpaid), not even having to use all her vacation time, and maybe just maybe the busybody twins had pumped him for information. If that was the case, then they were probably trying to find out what kind of surgery she had. For no other reason than to pry.
A loner by nature if not inclination, Deborah didn’t take kindly to being intruded upon like this. Besides, she had much better things to do than hang out with airheads who couldn’t even pass the Bechdel test in real life. Like focus on building her career, and contributing to society whenever possible. Onward and upward. For a flickering instant, she wondered if she was becoming heartless or ruthless, not wanting to lose her humanity or become a stereotype of a white-collar overachiever. Her thoughts returned suddenly to the girl at the end of the car. I bet she doesn’t have such petty concerns. Isn’t forced to make small-talk with anyone she doesn’t care to know.
More attuned to the plight of the marginalized, she often found herself disgusted with her fellow commuters in the way they callously treated the homeless and mentally ill on the subways and how they simply ignored them outright, as if they didn’t even exist as anything but part of the interior. And then, even though it was a little tiring to have to stand for the entire duration of her route, which went almost to the very end of the line, Let her sleep on four seats now then. Sleeping on the trains, I wonder if she ever anywhere else to sleep, like tonight. It’s supposed to get pretty cold.
Shit. Now definitely, unambiguously awake—though pretending to still be asleep so no one would hassle her about taking up all this space—Sabina remembered something else that threatened to make this day even more logistically complicated. Last week, she’d made a mental note that she was running very low on injectable estradiol. She’d have to check whether there was enough for this week’s shot. If not, then shit. It was one thing she absolutely had to spend money on, fortunate to have finally secured a legit prescription from a sliding-scale walk-in clinic some time back, and whenever she had it—from panhandling, receipt-return scams, selling unusually good dumpster finds or any other incidental sources—it was often a choice between hormones (and related supplies) or food, and whenever that happened, she always chose the former.
It was a decision even some of her fellow outcasted trans kids didn’t understand, and did pose some major inconveniences, even though the bathrooms at the library were usually spacious and low-trafficked enough that she could safely set up her injections. Before the warehouse, she’d been staying at this little youth hostel work-if-you-can’t-pay-your-way type deal, which was a small step above and her best setup so far. But then the lady who ran it had found one of her used syringes, which she had to carry with her until she could dispose of them safely at the clinic or a needle exchange. There was a strict drug-free policy, and while she almost protested that they were designed for IM injection, not the kind that was even for that, she realized that there was no way the proprietor would’ve possibly believed her. In any case, even if she did, it would’ve been a humiliating conversation and she probably would’ve been kicked out regardless, so she left without argument.
It was still a priority, though, no matter what, and if anyone didn’t understand that, to hell with them. Being long-term homeless was bad enough—she at least had to weather this as herself, in the correct body, maintain that bare fundamental shred of dignity. Plus, her ability to eke out this meager existence on the seamy underside of a first-world capitalist dystopia was largely dependent on being alternately invisible and perceived a relatively normal, pretty young woman, who people were more likely to want to help and build little connections with than…the alternative, what she would've undoubtedly started to look like by now without the hormones. Her ability to get a job, whenever it eventually came to that and was possible, would be dependent on the same thing. So hormones took precedence. Period, the end.
Sabina hadn’t had surgery and never intended to, although it certainly would’ve made her life a hell of a lot easier when it came to things like access to shelters, public showering facilities (which were very tricky to navigate as it was) and being classified correctly in jail or the psych ward should the worst happen. Not even if I lived in a penthouse, as she had confided in a streetwalker of indeterminate age she’d run into late one starry night and struck up a conversation with, who had mentioned wanting to earn enough through prostitution to save up for it, struggling in part (from what Sabina could garner through the woman’s textured accent, rapid-fire slang and tendency to mumble half to herself every other sentence) because of the very last lingering boundaries she had left. It was pretty clear from that interaction that nobody would understand this either.
For her part, the hooker was stymied, her response unusually crystal clear and peppered with little euphemisms and amusingly colorful business expressions that struck Sabina as really odd for someone in that profession and at that point in life to have. “Oh really? You could make a ton of money in the industry then! Hell, hop the next bus to Cali, be an ‘actress’. That’s just what they want. My earning potential is limited! You’re pretty as fuck, I didn’t even guess you were one until just now. And you wouldn’t even have to be high…shit, you could make bank, girl! Save at least 20 grand…”
Sabina remembered being slightly angered by this, more at the words themselves than the speaker, though of course she'd never expressed as much. Actually, she had thought icily, it would probably be easier for someone like you. At least then it wouldn’t really be your body up for grabs, then, would it? You could just dissociate and go to your happy place and think of it as not really yours… What she had actually said, in a wistful, far-away sigh before gracefully walking away across the street into the park, was something like, “It must be nice to have something to aspire to, a single goal like that, even if you’re stuck here forever. Good luck. Have a good one.”
Due to many of these factors, this…situation (that’s how she had to think of it, simply The Situation) had been especially rough on Sabina. The limitation that came from her absolute refusal to enter the sex industry in any capacity was further entrenched by her deep reluctance to try and make money through the other potentially-profitable side of the underground economy, dealing drugs. She’d met a few others here and there over the last couple years who’d taken that option instead, which she didn’t understand in the least, even though it superficially appeared to command more respect in this brutal underworld than sex work. You get arrested, then what? Be in jail with violent men? Fuck that.
The omnipresent fear—nothing less than sheer terror, really—she had of being picked up by the cops made it difficult and intensely stressful just to do things like shoplift and pull minor scams, which she tried to keep to a minimum as it was. And even if it all went wrong eventually, that would be entirely on her, not some random user/customer who could snitch and put your whole life in jeopardy. Just being homeless in this city was criminalized to some extent and therefore a risk in itself that way should one happen to be discovered by the wrong people in the wrong moment. Vagrancy, trespassing, disorderly conduct…Selling drugs seemed like a guaranteed path to a hell she didn’t even want to imagine, like practically begging to be busted.
So she had to be creative to survive, but she learned and adapted and made do, if just barely. It was amazing to her sometimes what was possible in this society of extravagant abundance, and how much was wasted. She remembered how proud she had been of herself when she first learned about two-day-old bagels, still edible and yet discarded by the bag by some places, which sometimes served as her sole source of sustenance, along with chatting up café managers and asking for leftover pastries from the display case that would’ve been tossed anyway. Pretending to be raising funds and then food for a school activity with a found clipboard had worked a couple times. Panhandling did here and there, especially if she complimented people and put on a sad puppy-dog face (and even more especially with male passersby), and while not her favorite activity, dumpster diving wasn’t nearly as disgusting as it first sounded, and sometimes even yielded things like fresh produce that were still safe to directly consume. Soup kitchens run by religious charities (So what? I’ll tell them I believe in their savior or guru, no problem. Someone or something has to be looking out for me, and nobody has to know...) were almost always available.
Supply and maintenance equipment rooms and janitor’s closets in large apartment and office buildings could be a nifty little place to get some rest and shelter away from the elements and predators on the street, and in her experience almost no one ever paid enough attention to spot or challenge her. And then there were the subways, which could be very dubious at night, but a little better than trying to sleep outside, and she carried a knife in case. It was all about fluid intelligence, seeing what others didn’t and evasion, and sometimes it did even feel kind of fun and thrilling, like a game, if she could only forget for a short while that her life literally depended on success.
Scummier endeavors like outright scamming, shoplifting and such were mostly necessary to raise cash for hormones and the laundromat in addition to miscellaneous necessary supplies such as outerwear, her sleeping bag (sometimes, one had no choice but to brave the concrete jungle and ‘sleep rough’), knife, OTC medicines, compass, maps and books. Panties and socks were sometimes provided by generous needle exchanges and mission-type deals. She had once serendipitously found a pair of glasses an older woman had left behind at a Starbucks, and after curiously trying them on for the hell of it found that they made things much clearer and didn’t give her too much of a headache, so she kept them on and took off. She did feel rather guilty about that in retrospect, but what was done was done. Sabina didn’t enjoy having to straight-up steal anything or feed off the gullible, and it unsettled her beyond just the fear of getting caught. Perhaps that was something else she’d never quite get used to. A necessary evil.
And speaking of other trans and sexual minority kids in the same boat, who she had initially sought-out and tried to connect with, she was becoming highly disillusioned with how disturbingly sociopathic so many of them came across. Disappointing. Oh well. She wondered if everything about this life eventually created that in people. One justification here and there, and before you know it you’re up to your knees in dirty snow from the slippery slope of manipulation, headed down the trail towards being the exploiter. Forced to vie for the basic necessities induced an animalistic mindset that frightened Sabina, as much as she slowly adjusted to it. Something she had learned quickly and harshly from her time on the street was that, when it really came down to it, most human beings acted very much like predators and prey, and the whole façade of this lustrous thriving society was constructed around providing the luxury of feeling exempt from that grand sadomasochistic waltz at the bowels of everything. Everyone was sometimes one and sometimes the other, but the discomfiting difference was that those who were left out in the cold, as she was, did not have the privilege of being willfully blind to when they were playing either role.
As unfortunate as it seemed to have to frame it in these terms, Sabina gradually came to realize that trying to build connections with other crossed-out castaways on the fringe facing comparable hurdles didn’t help much anyway, since they usually had the same or even less than she did, no cachet of any kind whatsoever that could be piggybacked off of, and having clawed their way up to get theirs through a similar mishmash of hustles and schemes, they typically weren’t terribly eager to share.
Like any girl her age, she pined for and wondered what it would be like to have friendships, real friendships, ones not subject to the inherent ephemerality and instability of street life or the tainted by the thick, inescapable sludge of ulterior motives. Sometimes after days of little to no real sleep she would involuntarily plunge into slumber for a while and dream about what that might be like. She even envied some of the junkies for what they had with their “running partners”, though not the monkey on their backs which would always come before not only that but individual survival and comfort. Like most people her age in general, she had a strong sense of sexuality, and, while she hated to admit it, those kinds of desires were definitely part of her psyche as well. The distant possibility of actualizing them someday in a loving, brighter context was a major part of why she refused to commoditize her body and that aspect of herself, like...a old blanket she was still clenching in her hands, but from the future, not the past.
She’d long ago accepted, however, that The Situation was such that it basically precluded all truly authentic relationships—a sad byproduct of the nature of the game—and certainly would’ve rendered anything in more intimate realms nigh impossible, if indeed such things could ever be possible for her in any life whatsoever. As a result, she repressed it all down so far at first that she wasn’t even consciously sure who and what she was attracted to exactly, let alone what she would’ve wanted to do with them, though this too flooded forth vividly in dreams and the familiar semi-psychotic hallucination stage of prolonged sleep deprivation to reveal itself clearly enough. Like everything, Sabina was aware enough to know that it wasn’t ideal, maybe even the least ideal set of circumstances, maybe even totally unheard of in some ways, but also like almost everything else, it was what it was and there was no helping that at the end of the day. The Situation was never supposed to go on this long—every single day she held her breath for a break and wondered how much longer it would continue—but it offered precious little opportunity for rumination, denial and existential angst if you didn’t want to sink even lower.
As more commuters ebbed off a few stations further down the line and the car gradually emptied out, Sabina finally opened her eyes—she was totally awake for the day, and plenty of other seats were now open, so why not—and spotted the woman standing a few yards down, clinging to the railing for dear life even though her footing appeared to be perfectly stable. The very first thing her tired, bloodshot eyes honed in on was the briefcase she carried.
A worn, light brown leather rectangle almost sunbleached and fraying in places, it looked kind of clunky and antiquated among the sleek messenger bags and aerodynamic stainless steel cases that could’ve been designed for diplomats to carry nuclear secrets in on the movie set of a futuristic war. But somehow also weirdly warm, a comfy old oak tree growing in midst of metal and cement, just bizarrely out of place. Almost like something a slapdash grandfather would carry. Smartly dressed, in a starchy button-up blouse tucked into a knee-length A-line skirt, with an undersized blazer, gauzy scarf, sheer stockings or hose of some kind and short heels, its carrier was definitely a suit, she had to be, a businesswoman. Or maybe a lawyer? Something like that. But quite unlike all of the other suits that flowed in and out of the subway system in what had become to Sabina’s modified perception one monolithic current, a single streak of blue and black and white and gray, this woman stood out in the train, she stood out strikingly. ...and it wasn’t just the briefcase itself, no; this woman’s overall appearance, she rapidly realized, was a strange league apart from that of the other corporate-drone commuters.
She looked to be in her early thirties, maybe, and possibly even younger than that. Wow. Must’ve been quite a go-getter. Most of the suit-types who were women got on the train looking severe and dressed for battle—hair pulled back in a tight ponytail or bun or otherwise unnaturally styled so that it looked like a single piece of their outfits in itself, wearing cool monochrome pantsuits or pencil skirts so tight they almost seemed twisted up into buckled wire-frame figures peculiarly comical, like poorly-camouflaged agents of an alien species. This one wasn’t… like that at all. She actually gave off the dusty tan aura Sabina could recognize as humanity. How so? Her hair, shoulder-length, coffee-colored and tied back only loosely, was nice but not nearly as…manicured? Several strands fell here and there haphazardly around her scarf. Her ensemble was definitely professional, formal office-wear, but appeared neither chic nor as tight and streamlined as a new snakeskin, which had the effect of giving her figure a much fuller, softer, more natural and feminine appearance, at least from this angle.
Apart from that, her clothing style was distinctly different in still other ways. Taken in its entirety, it could only be described as quirkily soft-femme, the colors more pastel, the patterns special and endearing on closer examination. Pinprick polka dots on the skirt, and from what Sabina could make out through her smudged glasses, her blouse seemed to have a repeating print with something like a few distinct little animal figures—giraffes? penguins? cats?—over the cream-colored background. Almost something you’d see on pajamas (which a handful of riders didn’t seem to have many qualms about wearing in public). But definitely professional, prominent collar and all. Interesting. The color scheme of the whole thing, not that Sabina would really know firsthand, didn’t clash, per se, but it wasn’t a combo you’d think of as deliberately matched. Yet it worked, somehow, she pulled it off. Very interesting.
It wasn’t too unusual to see a woman like this carrying a briefcase, but something seemed really off about the image of this one in her hand, multiple components contributing to the contrast: her youth, femmey style, its rustic, old-school, dilapidated exterior, and the fact that she also had a full-sized purse strapped across the opposite side of her body. It was subtle and yet, if you looked closely enough, glaring. Maybe I’m the only one who noticed? Though she’d never given it much thought until now, it was uncommon to see women with both at the same time. When it wasn’t all in one androgynous black blob-bag, the female suits transported their stuff in one or the other, and if they had something vaguely resembling a briefcase—which was still less common in itself, for the women—they might have a tiny clutch or something that looked like it would barely hold a hair clip and a pack of cigarettes, if that, at most. Sabina squinted when the woman turned slightly to the side and noticed a stuffed animal poking up out of her purse, it looked like…the ears of a pink bunny rabbit? Huh. Must have children.
A few more stops, and the car was now more sparsely populated. How far does this woman have to go? Sabina readjusted to prevent her backpack from sliding off of her lap and, feeling almost safeguarded by it, continued to take in this strangely gorgeous passenger who had been on since…it departed again from the first station? Not a bad first sight to wake up to. She’d opened her eyes to so much worse on the subway. She was…cute (for a suit?). Yes, that was it, that described her perfectly—polka dots, animal blouse, pretty, soft colors, stuffed bunny, tattered old briefcase and all—in one word. Really cute. More than that even, she was hot. Oh, don’t go there, but I went there, oh well, it is what it is…
Sabina couldn’t believe she was allowing herself to even think this way. Her whole body flushed from her face down, with a similarly intense but much more pleasurable heat which could foreshadow some of the hot flashes she remembered she’d be feeling later in the week if she couldn’t scrabble up enough money to fill her E today or tomorrow, and she shifted uncomfortably on her bumpy plastic bed, which all of a sudden felt rigid and unyielding. Ow. My whole side’s almost asleep. Her gaze held fast to the object of her admiration, fixed with a nearly juvenile wonder, spacing out for a second…and then something petrifying happened: the woman suddenly turned and looked right at her.
Sigh, so, what to tell the meddlesome duo today? Her palms starting to sweat, Deborah felt slightly depleted before the workday up at the surface had even commenced. Uh-oh, this was not a good sign. She didn’t want to have to take her lunch outside again, practicing deep breathing exercises in just enough fresh air to not feel like she was going to vomit or faint, while the skyscrapers turned into a kaleidoscope. She’d been meaning to see a doctor about that again. But Klonopin wasn’t a solution. Deborah preferred solutions. She failed to mention last time that she used to eat her lunch in high school by herself down in the secret maintenance tunnels under the building, subterranean corridors that reminded her of the subways.
Her BlackBerry buzzed thrice more in rapid succession, and since her head was starting to spin and ache a little she had to stop herself from immediately checking it. She steadied herself on the railing. That’s better. Can’t have any of that today. She did look forward to seeing her boss. A whip-smart, kindly man in this mid-60s, he was demanding but almost fatherly, and seeking his approval made it easier to lose herself in work. She’d have to thank him again for being so understanding about the surgery. He’d gently but firmly insisted she really take the time off when she tried to start working remotely from bed.
With each stop she’d checked out of the corner of her eye to see if the sleeping girl was still there. Deborah wondered if all she did was ride the trains back and forth all day. She must have somewhere to be. Something about her still seemed as vulnerable and precarious as a glass egg, though Deborah couldn’t tell what it was or why. Just another homeless kid, and it was terribly unfortunate what happened to them, yes, but most usually transmogrified eventually into hardboiled creatures of some sort who could at least bounce around the city.
Maybe it was the way she was lying there, deflated, or holding that gigantic backpack like a belly pregnant with her child, or something else, but for whatever reason Deborah could sense something inside this girl that indicated she hadn’t. Something was familiar and yet different about her. Maybe she’s new to this? But she does kinda look like a veteran at the same time. God that’s sad. They’re so young now. She kept a constant peripheral eye on her, and with each stop Deborah found herself increasingly, inexplicably drawn to this half-horizontal young woman at the edge of her vision.
Her curiosity intermingled with her magnanimous save-the-world instincts, and as a river of commuters passed through the car doing their best to pretend not to notice the girl, Deborah almost began to imagine trying to start a conversation with her. She tried to humor the raving transient types—usually harmless schizophrenics—whenever they started babbling to her out of the blue, to make them feel a little less transparent and insignificant in some small way. But initiating a chat with someone like that was unheard of. Seemed kinda dangerous, even. As sympathetic as she was, most were fairly unpredictable and you could never tell when something might set them off. The stoic security guards standing sporadically around the platforms of certain stations were there for a reason.
Then at some point the girl had her eyes open, and was shifting around in a way where Deborah could tell she was awake. She looked a little disoriented. Hmm…maybe. The car was empty enough now that she could probably walk over there without too much trouble or looking too gawky, and strangely enough, talking could sometimes help keep her mind off of how she was starting to feel. There were at least three stops left to go, but the distance between them was the longest of any stations on the line.
This was an odd impulse, to say the least, and Deborah didn’t have the slightest clue where it was coming from, but part of her wanted to throw caution to the wind and approach the girl. Maybe it would help her get out of her comfort zone and work up enough courage to approach the vapid vixens today. Why not? The worst that would probably happen would be that she’d have to hear all about how the FBI was in cahoots with the aliens to take over the White House or some such gibberish for the rest of the ride, or about how so-and-so left yesterday with all her money... She smiled tersely to herself, inhaled deeply and turned to see if the young woman at the back of the train was still there. She was, and for a few fleeting seconds that felt like forever they made direct eye contact. Wow. Her eyes are so…intense. Well, there’s no backing out now.
Shit. She saw you, she saw you looking. What now? Sabina’s heart started racing more than it even had when she realized she had to leave the warehouse. Frozen in surprise, she held the woman’s gaze. Why are you still staring at her? Fuck. Was I that obvious? Okay, don’t panic, don’t panic. Having lost track of the backpack balanced on her body, Sabina shifted and it fell to the floor with a loud clunk. Damnit! At that, the woman began to walk purposefully, directly towards her. Well, now it’s time to panic. Just close your eyes again. Pretend you’re still asleep or nodding out and maybe she’ll go away. Okay. Breathe. Other homeless riders who…weren’t very sane trying to make small-talk with her were a frequent annoyance, and sometimes men commuting to or from work dispensed hair-raising ‘compliments’ and made intimidating advances to her when they thought nobody was looking and she had to pretend to be crazy herself to get rid of them, but a female suit had never once approached her. This one probably intended to tell her off about taking up the whole back row or putting her feet on the seats, or even worse, for ogling her. Calm down. Maybe she just wants to see if she can bum a cigarette or something. Yeah. That’s all, that’s all she wants. It’s alright. Breathe.
As she made her way across the car, as if propelled by an invisible fan somewhere, the girl came into focus much more clearly and Deborah observed that the phrase "young woman" could definitely describe her. She still looked youthful, and vulnerable, but more mature and…solid? than she had from farther away. Still. Upon reaching the seats at the back, Deborah noticed that she’d closed her eyes again and was covering her forehead with her forearm as if trying to go back to sleep, her other hand holding the strap of the backpack on the floor. Had she imagined the glance? Just a few seconds ago she’d been wide awake and squirming around agitatedly. Well, this is awkward. Instead of sitting down on one of the seats perpendicular to where she was lying as originally intended, Deborah planted herself in the space next to the girl and grabbed the railing again. Oh, well, that was a dumb idea anyway.
But then Deborah allowed herself to gaze over the still-intriguing form spread out next to her. Dressed all in black, her super-faded jeans were in an attractive, fitted style but not skinny-tight like a lot of the teenagers wore, accentuating wide hips, what her aunt used to call “childbearing hips”. They had ragged tears in several places that didn’t look like they were done on purpose, and the thick denim had been worn into cottony softness. Definitely seen better days. She was wearing some kind of heavy combat boots, it looked like, thickly caked with dried mud. Extremely pale, milky-white skin for someone who probably had to spend most of her time outdoors, which gave her an almost translucent, ghostly visage. Her long jet-black hair wasn’t thickly matted with grime or anything and looked relatively clean, but it was frizzed out with lots of split ends, disheveled. She was wearing glasses with thick black frames, in an obsolete yet cute style that nonetheless wasn’t at all flattering to her face. They made her look like a stereotypical intellectual, a student. Where did homeless people even get glasses? Deborah made a mental note to herself to look that up sometime.
She smelled fine—at least from where she was standing Deborah couldn’t smell her, which was good, but her entire body was covered lightly head-to-toe with a fine, chalky white substance, like a powdery dust. It made her look kind of ethereal, like a visitor from another realm. She was beautiful. Huh. Her overall appearance did seem somewhat thin and waifish and malnourished, but she still had curves. Her sizable breasts made a prominent outline in the black turtleneck she was wearing, and from the way her nipples poked through the fabric, it was obvious that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Deborah didn’t know if this made her feel sorry for her, or…kind of turned on? Umf. Not ‘kind of’. Woah! Hold up there. Is this common after surgery? You don’t even know how old she is, she looks like she could still be in high school, you creep. Her mouth felt dry and like it was full of sand, her face was hot, and her head started pounding. She caught herself, cleared her throat and looked away in embarrassment.
The girl opened her eyes, and Deborah caught her glance once again. She didn’t know why she wanted to speak with this girl so much, but something strongly compelled her to. Now or never.
“Hi.”
“Um, hello.” The girl’s voice was so quiet and nasally—kind of scratchy and uncertain, as if she wasn’t used to using it or hadn’t in days—unlike anything Deborah had ever heard. She shifted and sat up, and it looked like she had bedhead after a long nap. The effect was strangely adorable to Deborah.
“Meah? Yeah, alright, mnm…” She shifted and mumbled faintly, rubbing her eyes, and yawned. She somehow managed to look way out of place, but in her element at the same time. It defied description. Something in her eyes gave the impression of being very scared.
“I’m Deborah.”
“Sabina. Deborah, not Debbie?”
Deborah giggled. “My boss calls me Deb. And Sabina, not Sia?”
“Never heard of Sia, but touché.”
“Are you okay? I noticed you back here since I got on. Do you usually sleep on the trains? You seemed kind of out of it. I wanted to make sure you were alright.” Partially true, and a good excuse. What else can I say?
The girl kind of half-smirked and sighed to herself, though whether out of exhaustion, irritation or something else Deborah couldn’t tell. “Sometimes, sometimes. I’m ‘between homes’ if that’s what you mean. So can I ask if you can spare some change?” Looking pointedly at the briefcase, she added “or some cash?” She seemed a lot more confident in that question, and Deborah couldn’t discern if she was being sarcastic or not. Now more grounded and louder, her voice was high and definitely had this distinct, nasal quality. It was unique. In a good way.
Deborah laughed out loud in spite of herself. “No. But I can lend an ear if you’d like. There’s a ways to go still before I get off. So what’s on the agenda for you today? I’m just headed to work.” She doesn’t look strung-out or like an addict of any kind, but one can never know. Realistically, most are. They’re still human, Deborah thought hesitantly, but you can’t feed it. That wouldn’t be kind either.
“I have to get some medicine today.” Her eyes became glassy and damp, and she gazed off into the distance as if past everything.
“Ah. Well, that’s honest of you. I won’t judge, but may I ask…”
“—it isn’t like that. I have a condition.” She swung her legs back up on the seats and reclined uneasily, bringing her backpack up like a shield. “Really.”
“Oh.” Long pause. “Well, good luck with that!” Probably—well, maybe?—a line, but come on, Deb, don’t be mean. Was that mean? “Hopefully you can get your needs met.” What? You weirdo. Maybe just a tad patronizing. Do I sound like that to everyone? God, no wonder it’s hard to make friends then.
The girl kind of snorted at this and mumbled something inaudible, but then returned to looking frightened and cornered. It was a look that whimpered Please don’t hurt me. Deborah’s heartstrings vibrated as they sank. Poor thing. Maybe she really is sick, physically. The girl just shrugged and sat there looking uncomfortable.
“So do you go to school?”
“No. Not anymore.” There was something unusual and refreshing about this girl’s candid, straightforward answers. Deborah could tell that she was long past the point of having to put on airs for anyone. That must be nice.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, where do you spend the rest of the day then? It must get boring being down here after a while.”
The girl’s lackadaisical half-smile returned, and beyond a thin layer of defensiveness, she had something curiously searching and thoughtful behind those ill-fitting specs. Perhaps in another, more mythical age she would’ve been considered an oracle, or soothsayer. Or a witch.
“Usually the library downtown. They don’t kick you out until after nine on weekdays. And it’s free. Since I never leave with anything, I don’t have to worry about overdue fines.”
Was she kidding? Serious? Both? Deborah chuckled just in case, and the girl smirked and shrugged. Does she think I’m laughing at her? “Hm, I suppose not.” Pause. “So do you like to read?”
“Yeah. And I use the computers.”
Deborah leaned in and grimaced in concern. “So, um, listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have anywhere else to sleep tonight? Or anything warmer than what you’re wearing, a coat? The forecast says it’s supposed to be freezing tonight and security usually sweeps the trains…I mean, I’ve seen them kicking people off whenever I work late.”
The girl frowned, really defensive now. Oops. “I have a couple parkas in here,” she said, pointing to the bulging backpack.
“Parkas? Like the kind at the dollar store?” The girl nodded, looking…little, and scared again. “Oh, honey, those aren’t nearly warm enough.” Yikes. Super-patronizing. “Honey”. What am I, an old lady? But I’m worried for her. I don’t know why, I’m sure she can take care of herself. But I am.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but uh, what do you know about…this? You sound like a social worker. Are you?”
“I’ve volunteered at shelters a few times. I know…some things. I’m still learning. I try to…give back.”
“Oh, I see. That’s nice. Good for you.” There was a slight edge to her tone, but otherwise, this sounded genuine.
“..speaking of which, there are two women’s shelters that I know of you could probably get a bed at. Traveling by yourself must be dangerous. They’re safe places.”
“Not for me. I can’t stay there.” Her eyes got that moist, distant haze again, like she was a million miles away.
“Are you sure? It’s just, like I said, the forecast says…”
“—I can’t stay there.” Brusque, sharp, almost gravelly. Deborah racked her brain for how to respond, but decided not to press the matter. Maybe something bad had happened to her at a shelter.
“There might be something I can give you, help you with.” Deborah blushed and faltered. “Ah…so, hmm, this is totally random, I know, and kinda personal, but…” She leaned in even closer, and lowered her voice. “Do you need any…feminine hygiene products? I know, I know, weird question, but…I was just told that that’s a common concern, something it really helps to have access to…” Deborah thought of the several pads in her purse. She had to wear them for a while after the surgery, and now that the bleeding had stopped, they’d go to waste otherwise.
“No. I don’t; trust me.”
Deborah floundered, feeling suddenly, extremely self-conscious. What did you expect? She had read or heard somewhere that heavy heroin addicts often stopped having periods altogether. Maybe that’s it. But this girl didn’t look nearly that far-gone.
“May I ask you a personal question, now?” Back to being polite, vaguely contrite and uncertain. What happened to this poor girl? She seems all there. Deborah almost wanted to hug her and never let go.
“Sure, go for it.”
“Do you have any kids?”
How do I answer that? Does she think I’m trying to play mother? Damn, I guess I do sound like one right now. This isn’t really how I wanted this to go. Or is it? What did I want? Oh, this is hard. Part of Deborah really wanted to say “I can’t…” but came out reflexively in reply was, “Oh, no, I’m not that old.” Though, at 27, she was acutely aware that there were plenty of people with young kids around her age, maybe a little older. They could never shut up about it at the office. Gah, awkward, awkward. I meant to say…I don’t think we’re that far apart in age, if she was implying that I was acting like a mom, but—ah, never mind. That’s your problem, you always overthink and everything gets tangled. This is just…practice. She glanced at her watch. You’re almost there. You’ll never see her again... But rather than being comforting as it usually was, this thought was strangely sad to Deborah.
Predictably, the girl was giving her a very queer, sideways, quizzical look. Can she…tell? Quick, change the subject.
“Do you ever see your parents?” Why do you think she’s homeless, you idiot. Of course not. But to be fair, she thought, there are fuck-the-system traveler types who are more by choice than anything. She has glasses and is clean—oh, so beautiful, actually—stop it! there you go again—so maybe? You never know.
She sighed sadly, and a shadowy, reflective look came over her once again. “Nah, not at all.”
"If it makes you feel any better, me neither. I—" Deborah almost choked around the sentence that formed in the pit of her stomach and rose to her lips. “I haven’t spoken to my mom in six years.” My god, it’s been that long. Keep it together, Deb. Anxiety, concern, desire (!), now this--why so emotional today?
The car was completely silent. When did everyone get off? Just one more stop to go. The girl looked sympathetic, but lost for words. She tentatively pointed with a bent index finger to Deborah’s purse.
“I just asked because…I noticed the…”
Huh? Oh, she must mean Sarah. I guess it is weird that you carry a stuffed bunny around. Maybe it is time for some meds instead. “Oh, no, she’s just something I bring with me. For my desk,” Deborah added, as if that explained everything.
“Oh. She’s cute. I had…when I was little…” she trailed off.
“You have now reached ___ Station. Please remove all your belongings from the train when disboarding if this is your destination. The next stop is ___, the final stop on the ___ line…”
Already? Her BlackBerry had been going off the entire time, but Deborah hadn’t bothered to check it, engrossed in the conversation. It didn’t seem like a good time to leave, somehow, but—
“This’s my stop. I have to get off here. It’s been wonderful talking to you…” Deborah turned toward the doors.
“You too. …have a good day.” The girl’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates, as if stunned, processing. Deborah hadn’t noticed before, but they were pretty bloodshot.
“Be safe out there tonight, okay? Stay warm,” she yelled from across the car before practically jumping off the train. Her head was whirling differently now, but it wasn’t aching, and she wasn’t nauseous anymore. Feeling better, she briskly straightened her skirt and scrambled for her BlackBerry to check her messages one last time before the short walk to work.
Close your eyes. Maybe she won’t be there now. Like a child cheating at hide-and-seek, Sabina allowed her eyes to flutter open just enough to see the woman’s legs, very close to her face. Okay, might as well.
She sat up to the woman peering down at her, curiously, dreamily, concernedly. “Hi.”
“Um, hello.” Sabina felt like she had to clear her throat, her voice contorted by the uncomfortable position she’d been half-sitting, half-lying in. It always took a few moments to find it. The longer she’d been in The Situation, the harder it seemed to be able to find it at all. At this rate, someday, I won’t be able to speak at all, mute. Sabina yawned and felt like she was shedding an exoskeleton. The exhaustion was in part an act, to buffer whatever was coming, but it came from a very real place.
“I’m Deborah.” Three distinct syllables.
She sounded…friendly enough, but Sabina continued to brace herself for the impact of whatever this woman intended to throw at her.
“Sabina. Deborah, not Debbie?” Why did you say that? Sabina cringed inwardly at herself. Where in the hell did that come from? But she supposed it slipped out because of how cute the woman standing above her seemed. She just seemed like a Debbie, suit or not.
“My boss calls me Deb.” The woman’s laugh was nothing short of mellifluous, musical. It matched her. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes the most put-together, dignified people would suddenly pick up the phone or get nudged by a friend and burst out sounding like hyenas on crack. It was another bit of information she’d learned people-watching while constantly riding the subway system. A useless one, but hey, it was amusing and broke the tedium and the tension in the air sometimes. Remembering this, Sabina almost cracked a smile. Somehow, it made her feel much more at ease, however this interaction would play out. Back to this mystery woman. Oh my, is her laugh...beautiful. Sabina found herself blushing again. It must be so nice to have a voice like that. The woman sounded so clear, melodious and pleasant.
“Sabina, not Sia?” Sia? She was used to people pronouncing it Sabrina, adding an ‘r’ where there wasn’t one. But…Sia? It seemed like she regretted saying this, too, immediately. Sizing her up with the thorough agility left over from fight-or-flight mode, Sabina got the first inkling that this woman was as socially awkward as she was. It was disarming, and yet…What does she want, then? Why is she here?
Most people who confronted her—never the suits, who were above even acknowledging her existence—didn’t have a problem snapping, “Hey! Get your feet off the seats!” as if to a disobedient dog. Or “Hey! What the fuck you lookin’ at?” if they were trying to pick a fight with her. Which happened a lot more rarely than “Hey beautiful. You happen to know where ____ is? On what block? Oh, you see, I’m new in town. Why don’t we go for a little walk? Some change? Sure, why don’t you walk me over there and we can work somethin’ out…” By now Sabina had a database of these memorized, and could anticipate and start reacting before they were even uttered. But not with this. Sometimes people were sneaky about it and gave her a run-around first, but they always wanted something, invariably. Just roll with it.
“Never heard of Sia, but touché.”
“Are you okay? I noticed you back here since I got on…” Ahh. The concerned onlooker. I see. Occasionally, this happened too. People would see her trying to sleep on the train, curled up in a stairwell, catch her red-handed behind a door marked ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’ or somewhere else she wasn’t supposed to be, and ask, “Ma’am, are you okay?” It was Sabina's favorite reaction by far, because it gave her the opportunity to seem normal for a few seconds—just diabetic (“I must’ve wandered in here and passed out! Better watch my blood sugar today! I’ll just eat a few cookies and be fine…”) or drunk (“Ugh, what time is it? No, no, I’m fine, I just had a little too much to drink—“) or simply exhausted ("Just got done working a 14-hour shift! Sorry, so sorry…”) and easily slip away. Sometimes she was even able to finagle something out of them beforehand, milking it.
She imagined that such people had to be sheltered, more recent arrivals to the city. Transplants from a more innocent time and place. Like maybe the Midwest. She pictured it being asked in an exaggerated, bad Minnesota accent--“Arrrrre youuuuuu okaeeeeeeeeay?”--and almost giggled again. Beyond its utility, though, she had to admit…it was nice saying those things as if they were true. Letting even herself believe for an instant the fantasy. That she was just temporarily lost, and that The Situation was something that only happened to others.
“Do you usually sleep on the trains?” This question knocked Sabina out of this reverie space that she kept slipping into for some reason. Huh. I must feel safer with this woman than I thought. Usually sleep on…? Oh, she knows. Not that naïve, then. That’s weird. Or—eek—maybe it’s past time for another shower. She subtly tried to smell herself to no avail. I could try to—but last time was a really close call.
“…you seemed kind of out of it. I wanted to make sure you were alright.” Ugh, just say it. Yes, I am, alright! I’m a street urchin. ‘Usually sleep on the trains’, what kind of roundabout bullshit is that? Might as well just sew a scarlet ‘H’ on my chest. Sabina surprised herself with the burst of defensiveness and irritability. She didn’t know where it was coming from. Embarrassment? Hormone fluctuations, needing a shot? Why did she care what this woman thought of her? But…she did. At least none of it was said aloud…right? Hopefully? Settling back down, she softened and felt guilty. For someone like that, for a suit, a surface-dweller, it wasn't like there was a tactful way to ask outright. And she had sounded so kind. It wasn’t malicious at all. Something about being asked if she was okay multiple times in rapid succession touched Sabina. This woman was sincerity personified.
“Sometimes, sometimes. I’m ‘between homes’ if that’s what you mean. So can I ask if you can spare some change?” Sabina immediately felt terrible asking, even tongue-in-cheek, reverting to techniques in the panhandler’s playbook. But hey, she went there in the first place, and these odd little flushes of sensation reminded Sabina that she really, really needed to get her estrogen ASAP. It must’ve been longer since I did my shot than I thought… Since it was well into the morning commute, she’d missed one of her most lucrative times of the day. Still…shit, don’t say that. You’re better than that, you have to be. Just play it off…She looked google-eyed at the briefcase she’d first noticed from afar. “Or some cash?”
That beautiful laugh erupted again, as if the woman was totally taken off guard. Good. You’ve redeemed yourself. And well, maybe she would get something out of it to boot. People were a lot more likely to share if you were entertaining.
“No. But I can lend an ear if you’d like. There’s a ways to go still before I get off. So what’s on the agenda for you today? I’m just headed to work.”
I don’t even know where to begin…Sabina thought. Something about this casual question made her feel…respected. Seen. Nearly normal. Most people just wrongly assumed The Situation entailed laziness and endless free time and were all bitter about that. “Get a job!”, etc. She could almost physically feel her shields sliding down, away. Her eyes welled up all of a sudden.
Sabina had never once cried to her recollection before starting E. Not when her mother spat at her. Not when his fist hit her chest so hard it felt like her heart had stopped. Not after she went sailing across that filthy room like a ragdoll. But then, after her first injection…no, actually, right after she’d taken some sketchy pills another prostitute acquaintance had given her, her eyes would get wet and threaten to dissolve into tears at the drop of a hat. People started giving her pitying looks with the coins. She only allowed herself to sob in exasperation when completely alone, usually in the middle of the night, but ever since starting, it was like she was drifting down a river of tears built up over a lifetime. She just had to keep the dam up as much as possible.
“I…I have to get some medicine today.” Way to sound like a junkie! Now you’ll get it. Now it’s coming for sure…
“Ah. Well, that’s honest of you. I won’t judge, but may I ask…” See? Shit! …wait, 'won’t judge'…?
“—it isn’t like that. I have a condition.” Well, sort of. I guess I’d put it that way. I’ve been called ‘sick’ before, so… Feeling beyond exposed, Sabina grabbed her backpack and put it back on her lap. “Really.”
“Oh.” The woman looked like she didn’t know what to say. You took the wind right out of her sails with that one. But now, maybe she thinks you’re a dishonest junkie instead of an honest one. Is that worse? Is there a difference? “Well, good luck with that! Hopefully you can get your needs met.” Yeah. Needs. Sabina was tiring of her life being all about needs. What about what I want? Nobody cares. It isn’t a matter of ‘getting’ anything met. I meet my own needs... But just then the razor-sharp reality zipped by Sabina’s face, close enough to slice the tip of her nose. Not really, right? I’m at the mercy of…everything…
“So do you go to school?” Do I look that young? I guess I am, but do I look it? People sometimes assumed that she was a college student. Maybe she means college?
“No. Not anymore.” Sabina missed it sometimes—well, almost—no matter how many Fuck school! Fuck indoctrination! Fuck work! Down with the post-industrialist kyriarchy-perpetuating structures! zines she read. But it just wasn’t practical. She loved to learn, and had educated herself enough since that she could probably get a GED at least. From time to time she sat in on university lectures that seemed interesting. She’d never planned on being what people called ‘street smart’ to feel better about themselves, but…it wasn’t even about the knowledge school purportedly imparted. She could get that for free.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking, where do you spend the rest of the day then? It must get boring being down here after a while.”
…but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing anyway. All she had to do when this feeling started surging up and threatened to break the dam was talk to an anti-establishment punk or anarcho- kid—they could usually be found at copy shops and Starbucks aplenty—and be regaled with starry-eyed propaganda about how much romantic adventure life could hold in the gritty margins, if one only rejected the System. They’re just like the suits sometimes, Sabina thought. They think it means perfect freedom. But it isn’t…as she’d been coming to recognize recently. Not really. If only it wasn’t one or the other…
“Usually the library downtown. They don’t kick you out until after nine on weekdays. And it’s free. Since I never leave with anything, I don’t have to worry about overdue fines.”
“Hm, I suppose not. “So do you like to read?” Anything I can get my hands on. Text was not only an escape, it was a window into this strange society Sabina clung to the underbelly of. Her host. She remembered lifting that book of lesbian erotica stories, just out of pure shame, and then being ashamed of herself anyway that she’d taken the risk for something so frivolous. Too sensitive to even think about checking out, too expensive to even think about buying, and that would’ve been mortifying to be caught with.
“Yeah. And I use the computers.”
“So, um, listen, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you have anywhere else to sleep tonight?" No, and I have to get right on that. God, don’t remind me. The hairs on the back of Sabina’s neck almost started to rise again. When people asked ‘do you have anywhere to sleep?’ that usually wasn’t a good sign. But this was obviously different. "Or anything warmer than what you’re wearing, a coat? The forecast says it’s supposed to be freezing tonight and security usually sweeps the trains…I mean, I’ve seen them kicking people off whenever I work late.” She had cheaply thrifted a nice, long, wool trench coat once that scraped the floor and made her feel really elegant. Then she’d tripped over it and landed in oil or something, removed it to try and clean it somehow, and it disappeared. The dam had broken then.
“I have a couple parkas in here.”
“Parkas? Like the kind at the dollar store? Oh, honey, those aren’t nearly warm enough.” Honey. Feeling put on the spot and frustrated to have her nose rubbed in The Situation like she wasn’t fully aware of it herself every waking minute, Sabina was split in two directions. On one hand, she felt talked-down-to—this one was different, a lot nicer and well-meaning, but this was much closer to the attitude she’d expect from a suit. How irksome, and she felt herself getting surprisingly angry, almost feeling…betrayed, somehow? But that doesn’t make any sense.
No, it was probably just that with questions like “Do you like to read?” she could transcend context and almost begin to imagine for a millisecond that she was normal, that she was just conversing with a friend or a classmate or a date, a peer, The Situation someone else’s distant memory. But not being grilled about it like this—that made it impossible to escape even in tiny little gasps for the air that everyone else breathed. On the other hand, however, the way the woman said it was like warm honey, sweet and almost affectionate. Sabina felt compelled to acknowledge her compassion at the same time as she felt like jumping out the window.
Really, though, it wasn’t about any of that. What frustrated Sabina most of all was simply the hopeless reality-check that this was how this woman saw her, throughout the whole interaction, as a scrub, a pathetic vagrant that didn’t even have a coat (or a consistent way to shower) and had to sleep on the trains. That that was how she would always be perceived, all she’d ever be seen as. If I wasn’t, she wouldn’t have even talked to me in the first place, she thought sulkily, stomach acid rising in the back of her throat. For some reason, this bothered her more than anything—more than being patronized and pitied, more than being ignored, more than being reminded of everything and put in her place. She noticed herself scowling and tried to lighten her expression so as not to scare the woman off, but this complex feeling without a name, somewhere between anger, frustration, self-loathing, sadness, neediness and surprise, continued to wrench its way to the surface, her surface. Before she could catch herself, she said, almost sputtering,
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but uh, what do you know about…this? You sound like a social worker. Are you?”
It must not have sounded as vexed and hostile as she’d thought, because for once the woman didn’t miss a beat, though her voice dropped a little as if scolded. “I’ve volunteered at shelters a few times. I know…some things. I’m still learning. I try to…give back.”
“Oh, I see. That’s nice.” It is, really. That explains a lot. She’s sweet. They might be clueless, but the world needs more people like that. But then: “Good for you,” brimming with bile. Sabina! Control yourself! Don’t be sarcastic, or that mean. Since when do suits even care at all? And this woman is so…cute. She must mean it. Fuck, what are you even thinking?
“..speaking of which, there are two women’s shelters that I know of you could probably get a bed at. Traveling by yourself must be dangerous. They’re safe places.” …in any sane society, yes, but—
“Not for me. I can’t stay there.” So much for procrastinating…she kept my mind off of everything more from yards away—what does that say about me? What does that say about her? Just that she wants to help you. She talked to you, she laughed with you, and now she feels guilty. It had happened before. People felt obligated to say or do something once you were a person to them. But this woman had a way of—accidentally, Sabina was sure—pushing all the weakest, darkest buttons in the course of her concern and guilt.
“Are you sure? It’s just, like I said, the forecast says…”
“—I can’t stay there.” No matter how many shots I do. Even though that’s why it’s like this at all. Don’t. Let. It. Break. Breathe. Don’t capsize. Just keep drifting. She gritted her teeth. She almost felt like bearing them, like fangs. Vampires. She had read that once in some ‘feminist’ anti-trans polemic at the library, in the gender studies section. It had been almost funny then. It wasn’t funny now. The woman physically receded and cocked her head to the side in confusion or sympathy.
“There might be something I can give you, help you with.” Oh, here we go. Definitely the guilt. Unless that briefcase is full of estradiol and chips, I doubt it. But might as well hear her out. Sometimes people offered to buy food for her or whatever else. Out of everything food was less of a problem, but she always had to accept or she would look like a junkie. Maybe I am, in a way. I need money. I need to do injections or I’ll start feeling like shit. It’s my only reason for staying alive, for that matter. Huh. Uncanny.
“Ah…so, hmm, this is totally random, I know, and kinda personal, but…Do you need any…feminine hygiene products?”
Ha! That is a new one. Seriously? Sabina couldn’t help but feel weirdly flattered, in a way. That hadn’t even occurred to her. Well, I probably do sound like I’m PMSing today. “No.”
“I know, I know, weird question, but…I was just told that that’s a common concern, something it really helps to have access to…”
“I don’t; trust me.” Oh man, this is awkward. I guess it was inevitable, but since when does anyone offer…? We’re not even in a bathroom. Is this what it all comes down to? Is this why she came over here? Sabina didn’t know if she wanted to laugh hysterically—hysteria, root word meaning ‘uterine’, oh god—jump up and down in celebration or cry. Her would-be benefactor of materials absorbent looked a little defeated, and that brought Sabina back to the moment. Unexpected twists and personal angst aside, this woman was so…good. Sabina felt completley safe now, and she wanted to keep talking to her for as long as possible. She had the bizarre thought that she wished she could fit in her briefcase, to be carried wherever it was she worked and lived, instead of having to face the day. This flight of fancy made her feel warm and tingly and breathless. Maybe I am starting to lose it.
“May I ask you a personal question, now?”
“Sure, go for it.”
“Do you have any kids?” Haha, now I put her on the spot. Maybe too much? But it can’t be too personal after…and it kind of seems like a good segue, periods…Besides that, she remembered the stuffed rabbit. Sabina didn’t know how much time had passed, but they must’ve been about to reach the end of the line, and it was like a final mystery that had to be solved before they parted company. Who knows why. But I want to know.
“Oh, no, I’m not that old.” Sabina scanned the woman’s countenance for clues as to what this could possibly mean. Old? She looked truly in the prime of life, and seemed very maternal. Not that I would know. But…what I hope ‘maternal’ is like.
“Do you ever see your parents?” Huh, I guess I do look young.
“Nah, not at all.” The dam wasn’t in any danger of breaking here. Sabina sighed. At this point, she felt nothing but detachment around this subject. Just numb.
“If it makes you feel any better, me neither. I—I haven’t spoken to my mom in six years.” For the first time, the woman looked like she was about to cry. Now we’re even, I guess. Sabina forgot everything else—the dwindling passengers, the motion of the train, The Situation, dams breaking, being lost at sea, her own rambling interior monologue—which dissolved into thrumming irrelevance. For a lingering second, she almost felt like she knew the woman. She wanted nothing more than to console her, somehow, to wrap her in her arms like the backpack and hold her tightly for eternities, or at least until the last stop in the line. She’s showing this vulnerability…this weakness...to me. Something about this was extraordinarily fulfilling, and the frustration she had felt earlier began to smudge and lift off of her shoulders as if it were being erased.
“I just asked because…I noticed the…” Sabina pointed very cautiously to the bunny in the woman’s purse. It was beyond adorable, and somehow knowing that she didn’t even have children herself made it all the more lovely. Sabina's body felt light and she could barely find her voice. She didn’t know if she envied the stuffed animal for getting to ride in her purse or the purse itself for its privilege of being wrapped across her body.
“Oh, no, she’s just something I bring with me. For my desk.” She. Sabina smiled to herself at hearing the woman use this personal pronoun for the rabbit. Even cuter. Is this normal? Do people usually decorate their desks with stuffed animals? Sabina didn’t think so. But the woman sounded so sincere in her reply…actually, Sabina realized, she was affecting a false casualness if nothing else. Did I embarrass her? Aw.
“Oh. She’s cute. I had…when I was little…” Sabina struggled to remember any of her stuffed animals or toys in childhood and came up empty. She didn’t know if she’d even had any, actually. But suddenly, she wanted one.
“You have now reached ___ Station. Please remove all your belongings from the train when disboarding if this is your destination. The next stop is ___, the final stop on the ___ line…” The crisp voice droned in from above, reciting the prerecorded message that Sabina could imitate backwards in her sleep.
“This’s my stop. I have to get off here. It’s been wonderful talking to you…”
Sabina froze. This encounter was unlike any she’d ever had, on the subway, at the surface, or…anywhere. She didn’t want it to end, and it felt like hours had gone by even though it also seemed like the conversation was just beginning.
“You too…have a good day.”
“Be safe out there tonight, okay? Stay warm.” The woman exited the train as if she was launching into orbit, or diving…diving into the ocean, into the sea of the city. Likewise—stay warm! Sabina almost yelled out, after the woman was gone and the train—the world—was moving again, after having come to a standstill in her presence. She had seemed like warmth itself.
After work, Deborah loosened her scarf on the platform and waited for the next line home, hunched over from enervation. The day had been decent. No attacks, no migraines, no kaleidoscope-world at lunchtime. Her boss had personally thanked her for taking so much initiative. The women she’d been dodging hadn’t ever approached her, surprisingly, to her relief. And yet, she was spent, utterly drained as if everything had gone the opposite way. She mentally prepared herself for dilation later, pulled her hair back and put it up before boarding the train.
My god. Is she still there? The girl from earlier—it felt like a lifetime ago since they’d spoken, though she’d never fully left Deborah’s mind all day—was in the same spot Deborah had found her in during the morning ride, at the back of the car, in much the same position, same backpack, taking up four seats. Rationally Deborah knew that wasn’t possible, but it really appeared to her as if the girl had never left. She wasn’t trying to sleep, this time, though, and something about her posture and the expression on her face was different. Crumpled, resigned, frail, almost fetal. The inside of Deborah’s chest felt like it had been suddenly brushed by someone who had been dragging their feet across carpet, discharging static electricity, and she nearly gasped. But…why? It isn’t that unexpected, she said she sometimes slept on the subway… Even underground, beneath the surface of the city, there was a frigid chill, which splintered the air with something ominous. Try again. I have to do something. She looks like a fallen angel. Poor, poor girl. Poor beautiful girl covered in dust.
“Hey, do you remember me?” Deborah reached out and lightly pressed on her shoulder to get her attention. “We spoke earlier, this morning?” The girl smiled, and swiveled to face her with that glassy, distant, fragile expression Deborah remembered so well, but said nothing. Does she remember me? I can’t tell…
“Look, it’s getting really cold. Supposed to break records tonight. I know you said—well, I can’t remember if—but please, get to a shelter, just tonight. Here, the place on 32nd, I know someone who works there, I’m sure she’ll get you a bed. Just for tonight, okay? Please take this.” Deborah propped her briefcase up on her knee and withdrew a single white business card. As she thrust it out toward her, the girl—what did she say her name was? Sabrina, Salina, something like that?—extended an arm as if to stop her and their hands touched. Deborah’s vision blurred and she caught the railing with her other hand to stabilize herself, almost collapsing as the train lurched forward, but without fear, without head-pounding pain. Her hands are so soft. She looked straight into her eyes—whirlpools of intensity, they really were—and it seemed like she was gazing into a majestic waterfall. Eons passed.
Deborah didn’t know if she pitied this girl, or envied her, or what—Would I have traded my home for having been born correctly? When I was her age, would I have? Would I now, still? Has it ever even occurred to her that that’s something she has that I don’t? She didn’t know whether she wanted to adopt her or make love to her, listen to her or talk to her, kiss her or hold her, brush the dust off like a mother or like a girlfriend, give her money or simply lie down next to her in the train. But all the girl said was, gently but firmly as if for the first time,
“—I can’t stay there”
and whatever invisible conduit or lifeline between them that had allowed Deborah to lose herself in her eyes broke off, which felt like a bone was breaking. In one fluid motion she stood up, swept the backpack onto her shoulders like a black sail being released, opened to the wind, and passed Deborah by a hair’s width to get off the train, before she knew what was happening. The doors closed, and the entire space Deborah now had all to herself echoed with tangible separation. Between the train and the platform, between motion and staying still, inbound and outbound, between the subterranean tunnels and the surface of the city; between young woman and girl, between desire and need, between helpful and helpless, the seen and unseen, known and unknown, real and imagined, sheltered and homeless, day and night.