Part Seven: ...And back again

Opening the Black Box

M—’s warm, worried face fills the screen of my computer. The morning light plays off her blonde hair and glints from the golden wiring of her hoop earrings. As ever, her light makeup is immaculate. I am nowhere near so put together. I was up before the sun was, again. I’m groomed this time, and a lot less tired than I should be, but there’s a speck of fire burning behind my breastbone, to the right of my heart. It’s been there all morning, growing brighter as my therapy session drew closer and closer.

“Hi, Zac,” M— says, and smiles her warm smile. It’s just a little strained, and I can see the worry in her eyes.

“Hi, M—,” I say. It’s not the tiny softness I had… what? Five days ago? Surely it was a year, five years, a decade gone. It can’t have been five days. I’ve lived more in the last five days than in the year before it. There’s a quaver in my voice too, one I can’t hide. It’s fed by the heat of the ember inside me. It’s growing hotter and hotter—not painful, not really, but insistent, undeniable.

“How’re you doing?” she asks. A big question, and we both know it.

I don’t give her the socially-correct nonsense that we both know would be a lie. I look away, out the window and to the bright play of the late-July sun on the hill in my backyard. Birds are singing. The trees that overhang the house sigh, a susurration that’s always made me feel at home. Tomatoes are ripening in the planter on the hill, a promise for later this week. A perfect day. Perfect, by any possible measure.

I could tell her things that I have come to realize she already knows. The results of her test—her trap, I can’t help but see now, with the benefit of hindsight. Baited for an academic all too good at ignoring their own feelings and focusing on something else—anything else—so that they could ignore the plainly obvious truth of their life and play a role that was never for them. A trap with one purpose, and only one: if there was something there, to force me to look at it squarely, and to see it for what it was.

My mind still shies back from the fullness of that truth, but the grinding rock-tumbler of the analytical half of my mind, the drilling habit of obsessive truth-seeking that they press into your soul in grad school, has been dumping out thing after thing from the half of my life I’ve conveniently forgotten. Conveniently, I know, because acknowledging them together would force me off the easy, steady path I’ve been trying to walk my whole life. M— must have seen this long ago. She couldn’t not have seen it. I can barely believe I didn’t.

The quiet between us grows awkward, then excessive, then ominous. I don’t know how long I stare out that window, seeing but not really seeing the backyard, the grass, the birds. None of it. I watch the memories of the life I’d lived slide by, now that I’m finally ready to see the truth,. I close my eyes and slowly, slowly, turn back to the camera. M—’s still waiting there when I open them. Quiet. Patient.

The fire inside me is a flare-signal, a cherry-red phosphorous pinprick that tells me that now, right now, is a moment that will change my life forever.

“I don’t think I’m cis, M—,” I say, and it’s as close as I can come to saying trans right now. It feels too big, too scary, a one-way ticket to god-only-knows where. Part of me knows that there’s no difference, but words have power, and they’ve always, always mattered to me.

“I don’t think you are either, Zac,” M— says gently. My heart leaps in my chest, because there it is. It’s not just me. I’m not just weird. I start crying. It’s not from fear or happiness, but an unexpected surge of relief. The full story of the weekend begins to spill out of me, slowly at first but with more and more speed as the tears fade. M—’s gentle, kind smile is my companion as I share each of the little truths I’ve learned about myself. I don’t tell her my the name yet. It’s too much. Too far. Everything else, though, comes spilling out.

I’m not cis. That means, by definition, that I’m trans. I’m not ready for that word yet, but I will be.

I will be.

After an hour that stretches an eternity and paradoxically seems to take less than an eyeblink, I stand, shaking. This new truth I have thrums in me, relief and dread fighting an escalating war. I know, now, and that means I have to tell B—.

She’s standing in the kitchen when I leave the office, and turns from the sink to face me. Her expression is worried, pensive, unsure, and the fear inside me swells. The phosphorous-fire pinprick inside me, this blaze of something I’ve never felt before, grows at the same rate as the fear, keeping it from overwhelming me. B— spreads her arms, and I fall into them wordlessly. She holds me tight.

I have to tell her.

I can’t tell her.

I’m trans not cis, and that means that the man she fell in love with doesn’t exist. That he never existed. That sixteen and a half years together was founded on a huge, shared misunderstanding. We couldn’t have known. It’s nobody’s fault. It doesn’t matter that it’s nobody’s fault.

I know, I’ve heard so, so many times, that relationships smash on trans identities like ships on hidden shoals. She’s bisexual, has known she’s bi for longer than we’ve been together, but I am intensely aware that it’s a person you fall in love with, not a body.

And I am not the person we thought I was.

I can’t look her in the eyes. I have to tell her. I bury my head in her shoulder and hold in tight. I’m afraid it’s going to be the last time. I take a breath to say the words that the rest of my life will pivot on.

“M— wants me to start going to Own Your Gender. It’s the local support group for—,” I say, and trans is a word I absolutely cannot say right now. I breathe again, and finish. “—for people like me.” I squeeze my eyes shut, and wait for the world to end.

“Okay,” B— says softly, and squeezes me. I have the weirdest sense of déjà vu, remembering when I told her I was questioning what felt like a century ago, but was only a week and a half.

“Okay?” I ask softly, hoping, praying that it’ll go the way it went last time.

“Okay,” she says, still softly, but with firmness this time. The fear in me dies, the fire flares, and I bawl in her arms with relief as she gently rocks me back and forth. After a minute or two, she shuffles me to the living room and sets me in the loveseat, then settles down in the couch next to it, both of us sprawled toward each other, hands linked and dangling, as I settle down into myself again.

“I was so afraid—” I say eventually, my voice quiet and a little hoarse from all the emotions pressing out of me. “I was so afraid that you’d leave me. I know this isn’t what you signed up for, and if you need to, that’s okay. I’ll understand. I will. This isn’t what I—”

“Zac,” she says firmly, squeezing my hand as she interrupts me. The words in me tumble to a stop, and I look at her, waiting. She squeezes my hand again, and stares at me until she’s sure she has my complete and undivided attention.

“Whether you’re Zac or Zoe, I’ll love you just the same,” she says with a gentleness that is as firm and absolute as the Earth itself and I never told her what my name is might be.

I burst.

If I’d cried before today, this weekend, in my whole entire life, it’s nothing like now. Some primal terror in me was dealt a death-blow with those words, and my whole world is relief and whatever this fire in my chest is. I cry and smile so hard my face hurts. I’m barely even aware of B— it’s so intense now; just her hand in mine, relief, and the rough fabric of the loveseat’s upholstery. I don’t know how long I spend like that.

“My name,” I eventually manage, the words spilling out of me. “The name I decided I’d have if I was a girl, I mean,” I correct myself, even if it isn’t really a correction. “It’s Zoe.” B—’s smile is the sun itself, and this feeling inside me is so huge that I can’t contain it. I pull my hand from hers, fumble for a pillow, and clutch it to me, hoping to keep myself from flying apart. B— looks impossibly pleased, then pulls out her phone and snaps a picture of me.

“What is it?” I ask when she sets her phone back down.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you really smile before,” she says. “I wanted to remember it.”

“Really?” I ask, and it’s the first dash of ice water on this whatever-it-is. I still struggle to contain myself, but this is something that matters to me intensely.

“Yeah,” she says. Something shifts inside me, something huge and grim and determined. A decision without any consideration. This will not stand. I don’t know where any of this might take me, and the fear whispers at me when I consider all the ways it might go, all the things that I might someday decide to do, but there in that moment, I find myself wholly and absolutely committed to wherever this truth will take me.

I will not condemn the woman I love to another sixteen years without ever seeing me really smile. I won’t condemn her to another hour of it.

“Okay,” I say, and I can tell that B— knows I’m saying something more there, but she doesn’t ask.

The day passes in a wonderous crawl. We spend most of it in each other’s arms, talking softly about nothing. We eat. We kiss. We laugh. We make love, and it’s so beautiful, so perfect, that I weep. The day stretches to infinity, cocooning us together.

It is, by far, the best day of my life.

Late that evening, I’m sitting on the ground in front of the couch. B— is brushing my hair, the stiff wire bristles firm against my scalp. The sensation is divine. I’ve never had my hair taken care of by someone else. Just quick, cheap trims when the split ends get too bad. I’m lost in the sensation, my eyes closed, head tilted back and utterly, completely at ease.

“I’ve had this hot, full feeling in my chest all day,” I say to her, murmuring softly with the pleasure of it all. She doesn’t stop. I take my time before I continue. “It feels so good. I… I think it’s joy,” I say. The brush pauses.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“Kind of messed up, huh?” I say, a little wryly. The brush picks up again. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt joy before. Until today.” It’s a sad thing to say, but it doesn’t make me feel sad. B— reaches down and hugs me, and I hold her arms to me. Eventually, she releases her hold, straightening up and returning to the brushing. We’re quiet for a long time, the darkness of the late evening swelling with an intangible texture that holds us tight.

“I love you,” I say eventually.

“I love you too, Zoe,” B— says, pausing for long enough to kiss my upturned forehead. “To the end of the world and back again.” It’s the first time I’ve ever been called that name. It lodges deep, deep inside me, and something blossoms inside. I twist to kiss her back, lips to lips. We hold there for a long, long time.

“To the end of the world and back again,” I repeat, and her eyes glitter like starlight.

An afterword about B—

B—’s response to my questioning and coming out to her are exceptionally unusual. She agrees with this.

In the years since my gender crisis, I’ve talked to hundreds of trans people as they question, come out to themselves, come out to their partners, and transition. A lot of partnerships make it. Some don’t. But in almost every case, there’s a level of shock, of stunned confusion at the very least, on the part of the partner. Even in the healthiest relationships between the closest, most loving partners whose love only deepens through transition, that first moment is usually a very difficult one for both people.

So, why did B— have such an easy time with it?

We’ve talked about it a lot since, in no small part because her immediate love and acceptance of my trans heart sparked in me a profound love of being trans—not just being a woman (which I wouldn’t figure out for another week), but of being a trans woman, specifically. B— says that she thought, when I told her both times, “what would I do if someone on my roller derby team came out to me like this?” That she thought, “Well, I’m bisexual. What would the actual problem be with this?” That she is, by nature, a very grounded and accepting person. That she had enough other things to worry about that this just didn’t seem like a big deal, by comparison.

Yeah. It boggles my mind too.

I think the truth is that, while she didn’t have the words for it any more than I did, on some level B— knew I was trans over a decade before I came out to myself.

One day about four years into our relationship, B— turned to me unexpectedly, and said “It’s weird, Zac. When I look at you, what I see is a little kid sitting inside a couple of circles of mirrors and pictures, and you’re spinning them as hard as you can so that nobody sees you inside.” We just stared at each other after that, neither one of us knowing what to say about it—but I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more perfect observation of a trans person masking to hide their dysphoria.

In that sense, she had more than a decade for the idea that I was trying desperately to be someone I wasn’t to settle in and become a comfortable background truth of her understanding of me. When I finally realized I was trans, then, it wasn’t the shock of “My partner is trans?!” that most people get, it was more of a “Oh, that’s what it was.” An answer to a long-open question, rather than the presentation of a new one.

I cannot say how lucky I am that that was the experience I had coming out.