In the pic she blushed and my dark eyes looked off into the distance. At Cress, who watched us.
Restlessly I wandered the Cathedral. Other girls touched my arms, my face. Smiled and held for a moment and let go. Their touches clung to me, tingling, a second skin spun from electric frustration and want. I found Blythe dancing alone, her hair ice blond in the frozen light. I watched her as I’d watched Armin. What made this girl so sure of herself, of her place in the world? Every day she took shit for being a woman, and queer, and bipolar, and faced it without apology or shame. Her whole personality was a middle finger to the universe. I’d seen her stand up to strapping frat boys, throw a drink in a jerk’s face. Argue TERFs into the ground. Blythe was pure id, acting on every impulse, fierce and feminine at once.
A face floated through the crowd, eerily familiar: one eyebrow cocked, a knowing slant to his lips.
Was it real? Or was I just seeing him in every man?
“Are you babysitting me?” Blythe purred as I drew closer.
“No. You’re an adult. Technically.”
“Then let’s dance.”
Her fingertips glided against my neck, a smirk coiling the edges of her mouth. Her smell was dizzying, dark and sweet, blackberry wine, and for a moment I forgot my fears. It was hard not to fall in love with Blythe McKinley. I’d thought I’d fallen for her, once. But it was the T. Spend five minutes with any pretty girl and you’ll fall in love.
Before transition, I had preconceptions about men. Thought they experienced emotion less acutely, with less range. That they felt only horniness and hunger and hate. Fuck eat kill. What I found once my T level hit cis male average was that emotions, for men, were single-minded, slavish. Intense to the point that they could not be processed mentally, only felt in the body.
Armin told me about emotion maps—images that showed where people physically experience emotions, where the actual blood flows and nerves fire. Sadness is primarily in the lungs. Anger is in the fists. Happiness permeates the whole frame. It struck me how certain feelings—pride and anger, for instance—looked almost identical.
Women are better at this, he’d said. There’s wholeness in the way they feel things. Their maps are diffuse, more evenly spread. For us, it’s a lightning strike. A discrete devastation.
What stuck with me was the way he’d said, so casually: for us.
“What are you thinking about?” Blythe said.
“How you’re more of a lightning strike than a thunderstorm.”
She grinned. “Don’t know what that means, but I like it.”
We danced close, her slimness sliding against my muscle. I felt the weight of others watching. From afar we looked like two beautiful people, anointed with sweat and rainbow glitter, completely without care. Inside I was a depressed mess and Blythe was barely staving back bipolar disorder.
So much of a person lies beneath the skin. You never know what you’re really seeing when you look at someone.
That familiar man’s face drifted in the crowd again. When I looked at it, it turned.
“I need air,” I told Blythe.
Outside, the pavement was still warm and sun-softened, like a body settling down to sleep. Wind wove ribbons of coolness down wide streets. You could never see stars in the city but the moon was clear, and the lights of cars and shops and lamps made a cosmos at ground level, as if I waded through spindrift full of stardust. People passed me, snippets of dialogue floating by like I was walking in and out of a hundred films.
For someone so haunted, I felt pretty fucking alone.
At the Adams Street Bridge I took the stairs down to the river. An oil painting of the city lay reflected in the water, gently melting into pure light. I stepped close to the edge and let my toes hang off. My center of gravity was still in my hips. When I was learning how to pass I practiced walking with my weight held high in my chest, which felt ridiculous, like some cartoon bodybuilder. Later I realized it wasn’t just biomechanics that made men move differently—it was sociological. The way men took up space in the world was different from the way women did. They took it without permission or hesitation, took as much as they could get away with. I watched them manspread on trains, their legs in wide Vs, devouring extra seats while women folded themselves up like Swiss Army knives. I watched them play chicken and shoulder-check each other on the street, coldly refusing eye contact. If you didn’t participate in these little violences it only made them keener to target you, dominate you. Put you in your place. So I took up more space than I needed. To avoid attention. To pass. And I thought: What a simpler, saner world this would be if men were socialized like women.
I balanced on the wharf’s edge and walked along the river. In the damp darkness beneath the bridge, there were too many echoes. Someone else was there.