Future Present Tense

A story that both is and is not true

CW: This piece of fictionalized memoir depicts emotional trauma.

I feel myself fraying.

There’s no other way to put it—it’s as if I’m coming unraveled around the edges, bit by tiny bit, the thin thread of my existence running into the nothingness of possibility. Plausibility. Implausibility. Impossibility.

They said this might happen, that it was the main risk of time travel. Tinker with the past, and a different future might come to be. If I change the wrong thing in the wrong way, the me I am now will cease to be.

Apparently, less than one person in ten who begins fraying can stop it in time, because ultimately you’re the only person who can repair the damage you’ve done to yourself. You have some time to try to fix things, for all the bizarre paradox of that phrase, but when you start to fray it means that somewhere downstream from where you traveled to, where you stepped out of the future and influenced the past, a butterfly flapped it’s wings. You-then changes your mind in some important way, and it causes you-now to never happen. Oftentimes, the change isn’t climactic or significant. The largest of decisions can be tucked into the quietest of moments, and because you-then making that decision causes you-now to be different, or to not be at all, there’s no way to know which moments in a lifetime of moments is the crucial one, or how you can change the course of your life back. The only way to get those memories is to go back to your own time, reintegrate with the timestream.

If you exist in your time at all. Which, obviously, is a bit of a problem. Go home and, unless you’re really lucky, you won’t be going anywhere ever again.

But I had a pretty good idea of when this moment might happen, if it ever would. It’s why I took the risks I did in the past. If things are going to go wrong, this is the moment they’ll go wrong.

I hope. God, I hope.

My hand turns the polished nickel doorknob of her bedroom, but I hold the door a sliver open, imperceptible to anyone but me. Just enough for time to start looping, a thread milliseconds wide. Out one door and into another. It’s only been moments since I left the thirteen-year-old-me’s bedroom, and her agony thrums in my chest like I’m a cello, reverberating.

“Zoe!” the scream bellows out of the bedroom with enough force that I almost flinch back, almost shut the door and sever the time loop by sheer reflex. “Where the fuck are you, Zoe?!” Her pain, shouted again in a ragged tenor. She never raises her voice. Even if she did, it’s two in the morning. B— is in the next room over, asleep, clueless, exhausted. Eleven days of gender crisis, one of joy and euphoria and self-acceptance, and then three days of the roller-coaster ride of realizing the implications of what being trans means for her life, even if she hasn’t figured out that she’s a woman yet. Two weeks of total chaos.

Exhausted, I know, doesn’t begin to cover it.

But the door was open in the face of her rage, her pain, and the time loop holds. Me-then’s rage bounces off impervious walls of tachyons, and B— will never hear them.

I open the door. The walls are slate-blue/gray, indistinct and muddy, the beige-carpeted floor littered with the exhausted detritus of weeks that’ve tired me-then even more than B—. Shorts. Shirts. Tears. So many tears. The only light in the dim room is the same faux-Japanese lamp I saw a moment and/or twenty-three years ago, the same lamp she’s been using her whole damn life.

And her, of course.

She’s silent, stunned, maybe, that I’m actually here, but her face is too puffy and red for me to be sure. The red sequins on my dress glitter and flash in the nighttime half-light, my shoes quiet on the cheap carpeting.

“Hi,” I say softly, and close the door behind me, sealing us in. She stares at me from the floor where she sits, back against the side of a bed whose covers are a shambles, and half-curled into a fetal position. I wait. She stares.

“You’re… real,” she eventually says, eyes darting down to my bust, then back to my eyes. A flicker, one you’d never catch unless you know to watch for it. I can’t help but smile a little. She learned her manners. Eventually.

“Yeah,” I say, and take a step toward her. Wrong move, and I know it instantly. Her eyes harden, flash, chill to glaciers, and I feel the fraying pull at me again.

“You’re real,” she snarls, rolling to her knees but not rising yet. A beat. “Fuck you.” I close my eyes.

“For what it’s worth—” I start, but now she’s rising, loose tee shirt and rumpled shorts rustling against the side of the bed.

“Fuck you,” she snarls, and advances toward me. I fight to not flee, because running means dying. Worse than dying. Never-being.

And probably worse than that. Worse for her.

“I’m—” I try to continue, but she won’t let me, she’s in my face, breath hot against my face as she leans in, eyes just a bit below mine because of my pumps, and almost glowing with her rage.

“Fuck your apologies!” she screams, voice skittering up an octave. I fight to stay. I have to stay. “You left me there to die! To worse than die!” she shouts.

“I—” I try again, but there’s no chance, no hope of anything.

“You knew I was trans and you didn’t tell me!” Her grief—not rage, grief—is a hurricane, a blizzard, and she’s as caught up in it as I am. Still, I’m fraying, and I can feel it going so fast, my existence flying away. This moment matters, and all I have are words, all I’ve ever had are words. All the words in the world, and in the face of this almost-incohate rage only the perfect combination of them, made in the perfect way, can possibly save me. I need the ideal argument here, not a shadows cast on a cave wall to imitate. Plato, the smug bastard, would be proud.

I have no argument. My arms fly around her, pull her close, the embrace a lifeline to, I hope, us both. I burst into tears, sobs of a shared grief and sadness from what feels like a lifetime ago to me now. She stiffens in surprise, the scratchy sequins of my dress digging into both her skin and mine. Her rage and grief turn to wordless wails, sobs as she holds me fiercely. How we keep from falling down together is a mystery I couldn’t solve if I studied this moment for a hundred years. We two, two bodies and one bleeding, weeping, shared heart, mourn together.

All the words in existence, and I use none of them.

The fraying slows. Slows. Slooooooows.

Fuck you, Plato.

Doesn’t stop.

Fine. Almost fuck you, Plato.

Time passes. God only knows how much. Tears fall, mix between us, and soak our clothes. If she’d kept tissues in here, we would’ve run out the box for sure.

“How could you?” she sniffles, eventually. Her rage is played out now, and our shared exhaustion carries us to the edge of the bed, where we sit, shoulder to shoulder and aching heart to aching heart. My eyes unfocus and I flit around the things I could say.

“That’s a really big question,” I say, after a bit. “Here’s a better one for you: why do you think I actually showed up here?” She blinks, confused, and looks over at me.

“I… don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t really think you were real until you came through that door. Just…” she trails off.

“Just a half-remembered whisper from a waking dream on the worst night of our lives, right?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says and shakes her head. “This one’s pretty bad.”

“Not that bad,” I say. She doesn’t respond, and we’re both lost for a long moment in memories of police-issue leather and the sound of a tearing paperback spine. “Anyway, that was the idea. Give you—myself—a little comfort, but make it seem, in memory, like a dream.” A beat, and then I nudge her shoulder with mine. “You didn’t really answer my question. Why do you think I came tonight?”

“Phrasing,” she says half-heartedly. I can’t help but laugh; the pop culture reference is so out of place, so inappropriate. It’s just like her.

“Lana!” I mock-shout, and now she’s giggling with me. This—something about this absurd moment—the fraying is glacially slow now. The laughter peters out eventually, and I look at her properly now. “What were you deciding to do when you shouted for me?” She blinks and meets my gaze, surprised.

“I— I was going to just stuff all this trans shit back down,” she said, surprised. “To spite you. Me. Whatever.” I wince. It’s worse than I’d thought. A delay, hesitation, something—that had made sense to me. I’d run so hard towards transition once I knew I was trans that any delay, any pause, any hesitation early on would have a ripple effect that would undo me. She might get to the same place eventually, but it wouldn’t be me at the end. Not the me that stepped through her door, anyway.

“Well, that’s why,” I say, fighting to hide my fear. “If you don’t transition, I never get to exist.”

“What? No,” she says, pulling away. “It can’t work like that. What about paradoxes? If I don’t become you, then you can’t be here talking to me.” I’m already shaking my head.

“It doesn’t work like that. Remember Thief of Time? ‘Whatever happens stays happened,’” I say.

“How can that—” she asks, but I cut her off. Temporal mechanics are fucking stupid.

“My timeline dies, and a timeline where someone from a different timeline drops in and has a couple of chats with you comes into existence,” I say. “There’s no paradox because in your timeline, nobody went back in time, and in my timeline, it’s all been continuous,” I say.

“So… you and I are never going to be the same person?” she asks. I shake my head and try to not sigh with frustration. Try to get her off of the stupid science questions and she gloms on even harder. Someday, she’ll learn to not intellectualize to avoid her pain.

“Maybe. Maybe not. No way to know until I go back home, if there’s a home to go back to,” I say. “Time’s like a river. Throw a rock in, and it generally just flows around it. Events have a momentum to them. But if you throw a big enough rock in at the right place…” I let the implication hang.

“Oh,” she says. “So if I don’t decide to transition, I’m basically killing you?” I shake my head.

“Time travel doesn’t work like that,” I say. “Look, hun, we can spend all night talking about about causality loops and probability braiding, but all that crap makes my head hurt, and it’s not actually important to you, is it?” She blinks, then shakes her head slowly. “All you need to know is that this is happening right now, and whatever you decide to do with your life? Those are your decisions. I made mine when I stepped into your bedroom and changed the past. If I never get to exist, it’s because I made a stupid choice, not because of anything you did or didn’t do. I knew it was a risk when I did it. I did it anyway.”

I let the silence stretch for a bit, and sigh, tiredly. They don’t tell you how tired, how stretched-thin the fraying makes you feel. Butter scraped over too much bread, I remember with a small smile. I wonder if anyone ever went back and talked to Tolkien.

“Why didn’t you tell me I was trans?” she asks, voice small.

“Because…” I draw the word out. This bit’s hard. “I don’t think either of us would be here if I had. I don’t think she would’ve survived her teenage years.”

“She?” she asks. I wince. Right. She knew she was trans, but it’d be about another week until her first skirt arrived and she’d realize she was a woman. I look over into her hazel eyes, and I almost pull out a lie to cover for myself, but I’m too tired.

“Surprise,” I say, wiggling my hands in the air in a weak parody of celebration.

“So, I’m a wo— a girl?” she asks, ‘woman’ too much for her right now. It will be for a year or so.

“I’m supposed to say ‘if you decide you are,’ here, but… yeah,” I say. “Keep experimenting. You’ll see for yourself.” She nods slowly.

“Why do you think she’d—we would’ve died?” she asks. I sigh, and kick at a pair of shorts distractedly.

“You remember Steve? Our psychologist, after all that?” I ask. She blinks, brow furrowing.

“Yeah?” she says, confused.

“About a year after our attempt, he told Mom and Dad that our life was basically textbook LGBT, right? And Mom and Dad spent the next couple of years telling us that they’d love us if we were gay,” I say.

“Okay?” she says.

“Remember what ended all that?” I ask. She blushes and looks down, unable to meet my gaze now.

“Mom found out that I’d been stealing her Victoria’s Secret catalogs,” she said. I nod, and pull her close, squeezing her shoulders with one arm.

“We like girls,” I say. “That ruled out gay, but Steve put the whole question of us being LGBT to bed from that, remember?” She nods. “It was the late ‘90’s, hun. They thought you had to be straight to be trans.” Her head snaps up in confusion.

“But I am—” she starts, but then shudders to a stop, her eyes widening in realization. “Oh,” she says.

“Surprise,” I say again, and this time I can’t keep a little mischievious smile off my face. She swallows, and I can see that the new truth goes down hard. That, too, I remember. It’d taken me weeks to accept I was trans, but almost a year—and a lot of encouragement from other lesbians—to feel like I was allowed to be a lesbian.

“If you’d told Steve you were trans, right there at the start, what would’ve happened?” I ask after a moment.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“I do,” I say. “You haven’t learned this yet, but the standard thing for trans kids in the ‘90’s was conversion therapy.” Her face goes ashen, so completely bloodless that even in the dimness of the bedroom I can see it.

“O—oh,” she says in a small voice. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah.” I remember years ago, but for her only two or three, the psychology student who spent a whole semester railing against the dangers of conversaion therapy. How all it was good for was turning sad kids into dead kids. I can’t help but shiver when I think of how close we came to that.

“We were so close to the edge back then,” I say, and look down. God, this carpet is awful. I miss the almost-hardwood flooring I have in my time, even if the installation was a giant pain.

“Yeah,” she says, and then sniffs. I look over, and tears are flowing again, quietly, but with the pain of understanding now. I reach around her, pull her close. “There was no way out, then?” she asks.

“No,” I say, fighting back my own tears. “I know it sounds horrible, but this was the best possible outcome. We’re living in the golden timeline.”

“But what about college?” she asks, desperate. I almost give the quick answer, but then I remember when I lived through these questions, this horrific night in my own timeline. The comfort I was able to finally find for myself.

“Go through it,” I say. “Year by year. What would’ve happened if you’d realized? Really think it through.” She blinks and looks down, eyes unfocusing, the dim light casting her face in shadow.

“In college…” she starts slowly. “When I was playing World of Warcraft and they thought I was a girl.”

“It was great, wasn’t it?” I ask, smiling.

“…Dad was still on about gay marriage. We had that big argument over Christmas,” she says.

“It was 2004,” I say. A bad, bad year to be queer.

“And B— wasn’t out to her parents,” she says.

“You think she would’ve been ready to bring a trans girlfriend home to her conservative, evangelical parents?” I ask, and she winces. That question doesn’t need to be answered.

“So, grad school,” she says. “There was A— and R— and K—.”

“Mmm hmm,” I say. “And if we’d realized partway in…?”

“I never would’ve gotten into technical writing, would I?” she asks. I don’t answer, giving her a beat to think about it. “I barely finished my PhD. This would’ve derailed everything.”

“Yeah,” I say. “None of all this would’ve happened. We probably wouldn’t have gotten enough help with the wedding to get married, even.” She looked down, nodding slowly. Back then, R— was the only trans person we’d ever known who hadn’t been disowned by her family after coming out. Cis folks were still getting used to the idea of gay marriage.

“And then Dad got sick,” she says, and that’s the crux of it. Dad. I worshiped him. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Tried so, so hard to overwrite myself with him, to be him. Used the idea of him to suppress the woman in me. That’s the small omission I make tonight, the kindness I can offer her here. She doesn’t deserve to lose that yet.

“There really wasn’t even the opportunity until now, was there?” I ask. She leans into me, lets her head droop onto my shoulder, and sniffles. Silent tears again. We sit there for a long time.

“I guess not,” she admits eventually. “But… my hair. My face. It’s too late. I’ll never look like—”

“Like me?” I ask, an eyebrow arched. She sits up and pulls away.

“Is it a wig?” she asks.

“Nope. It’s all mine,” I say, with satisfaction I don’t bother trying to hide. “Face too. Turns out makeup’s fun.”

“And the uhh,” she glances down at my chest for a moment. This time I can’t hide my smile.

“What if I told you that you researched the surgeon who did them almost a decade ago? Your time, not mine.” I say. She gapes at me.

“No,” she says, not believing. I nod, smiling. She shakes her head and looks away, rumpled gray Star Wars shirt rustling against my dress. She doesn’t look back for a long, long moment. I wonder if she remebers that night long ago, searching up the best top surgeons out there, but completely unable to articulate why she needed to find someone. How she bookmarked his website. Deleted it a week later.

“Does B— stay with me?” she asks, a hitch in her voice, and with that question I’m back in the uncertainty, the terror she’s living with. B—’s bi, but transition is a big thing. Attraction isn’t enough. Not by half. I look into her closet, messy and disheveled as the rest of the room, and bite my lip.

“Do the work,” I say, and squeeze her nearest hand. “Invest in her well-being. Care for her when she struggles like she’s caring for you now.” I pause, and she looks back at me, worry in her eyes.

“Did she leave you…?” she asks.

“No, but I also don’t want to spoil anything,” I say, and wink. “It’s worth the wait. Promise.” A smile creases her face, the tension between her eyes eases, and it’s the first actual relief I’ve seen in her all night. She draws away, takes in a deep breath and sighs it out, then pulls her wire-rimmed glasses off, stained and smudged with her tears, and starts to clean them with her T-shirt.

“So,” she says after a while, “How do I become you?” There is is. Her commitment to my future. Easy answers here, I know—buy this kind of skirt on Amazon, call Dr. D— to get an intake for HRT, come out to these people first. The rest will snowball from there. Once she gets going, she’ll drawn forward in the tide of her own gender euphoria. So easy.

So, why does my heart feel like lead in my chest?

“Well—” I begin, then stop, and the words don’t come. They’re wrong, and I can’t say why. She looks at me expectantly. “You—” I try again, and again, nothing. I tilt my head and look at her, really look at her, for the first time tonight. It’s uncomfortable. The face, the hairline, the brow ridge that I spent years fleeing from, fixing. Hopeful eyes, and so wounded. Hoping for better.

And I remember just how eager I always am to follow directions. How safe it makes me feel.

And I remember the anguish I struggled with as I came to terms with what I needed for my body. The waves of internalized transphobia I had to realize, face, and fight through.

And I remember the triumph, the joy, of new discovery. Joy in places I never imagined.

And I remember the fear I felt—so much fear—and the leaps of faith I had to make, over and over

“Well?” she asks, and I’m back in the moment. I open my mouth again, and nothing comes. I close it, smile, and shake my head just a little.

“Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t,” I finally say. Confusion, I can see, and fear, in her. My heart eases back into its place.

“What?” she asks.

“I’m not telling you. There’s no right or wrong way to be trans, and that applies to you too,” I say, and this is right.

“More future stuff?” she asks, disappointed. “Can’t tell me or it won’t happen?” I shake my head.

“No,” I say. “This, right here? This is how I fix what was going wrong with me. Convince past-you to walk your path, and then you-now gets to exist. Everything else is wild chance.”

“Then why aren’t you telling me?” she asks. I set one hand gently on her near knee, my red-painted fingernails almost black against the paleness of her skin, and squeeze.

“Because I don’t have that right,” I say. “I found the best way to be me, but… well, maybe you find something better. Maybe not. But I’m not going to hold your present hostage to my future.” Her mouth falls open slowly as I speak, incredulity washing over her.

“But you’ll die,” she breathes. I shrug.

“Maybe,” I say, standing up and turning to face her. “Maybe not. Time’s like a river, remember? Maybe I’m throwing a little stone here, and your present finds its way to my future anyway. Maybe it’s a big one, and something different happens.” The fraying-feeling spikes, swirling, and it feels different this time. Maybe I’m losing myself. Maybe I’m getting it back. My whole tiny corner of the timeline aflurry with possibility and improbability now. I pause, and smile. “I trust you.”

“Why?” she asks, alarm in her eyes. Poor girl. Trusting herself has never been her strong suit.

“Oh, honey,” I say, and bend to kiss her forehead—that hateful spot where brow meets brow, casting my eyes in shadow, that I traveled halfway around the world to remove. “Here’s the one part I’ll tell you: every part of transition is a leap of faith. Trust your heart. You’ve got a good one. It won’t steer you wrong.” I step back again, dress glittering like a red disco ball. I didn’t notice putting it there, but I find my hand’s already on the doorknob. My heart flutters a little, and I fight to keep my fear off my face, but this is a familiar fear, an old friend. I’ve felt it every time I’ve gone under for an operation, not knowing if I’d wake up again after. The fear of death in the face of rebirth.

I could still change my mind. Tell her how to become me.

I turn the doorknob instead.

“Thanks,” she says, tired and if not at peace yet, then at least no longer hating herself for opportunities missed. I pause, one foot out the door.

“Thank you, Zoe. For getting me this far,” I say. The door closes on the sound of happy tears and a static sparkle of might-bes and could-haves as I turn to see what kind of future she’s made for me.

For herself.

---

Afterword: If you haven’t read This Is How You Lose The Time War, you really ought to.

A version of this night happened, and it happened three years ago, to the day, from the publication of this story. Of course, I didn’t get to meet my future self, and she had no kind words or fearful hopes for me. I cried alone that night, until three or four in the morning, hating myself so intensely, so absolutely, for not having realized I was trans younger. For missing out on so much of a life I might have lived as myself, a shell I made to survive, not thrive.

Then I sat down and talked myself through what would’ve happened if I had realized sooner.

One of the hardest parts of early transition, for me, was making peace with the lost time. It’s one thing to know that any other path would’ve led to disaster, but it’s something quite different to come to believe it.

In the end, though, transition is about trusting your heart. And that means trusting the decisions you made before you were ready to face who you really are. That person protected you, loved you, got you to here and now.

I can think of no greater act of kindness and sacrifice.