You threw yourself off this cliff a long time ago, kid.

He popped the pills and texted Leah. I just ate some estrogen and I’m still a dude these pills are bullshit

Leah: The PMS Factory regrets the delay in your delivery, we are working quickly to address your order. PS ENJOY YOUR LAST SURVIVING DAYS OF SANITY WOMAN

PPS Love you <3 I’m really proud of you <3 <3

He texted Iris: I got those hormones today. Thanks again for setting me up with Ridwan. I really appreciate it

Iris: Of course! What you doing Friday? Let me buy you the world’s stupidest cocktail.

He saw Iris around every few weeks. He’d text her when he was passing by the Lower East Side, or she’d call demanding brunch. “You look good, mama!” she’d always say.

How to even talk about how those early months went by? How gruelling was the adjustment to life on hormones with grinding workweeks and no time or energy—not just the wringer of bar work but also the basic physical demands of living here, of taking the stairs and riding trains and carrying groceries up four flights. Yet this was paradoxically not without positives: the obliterating tiredness that now lived in David’s body became a passageway through which he learned about that body. His internal self was no longer solely some blank oval of maleness; it was like now, suddenly, he had flesh and muscles and he could feel them and it wasn’t bad. His chest became tender, his skin softer. His mood swings were different, organic somehow, like they belonged to the rhythm of the earth. There had been an electric, feral frenzy inside him all his life that was now so clearly tamed, placid and lying on the couch, raising its hands as if to say, Hey, I don’t want any more trouble, a frenzy that had run relay with the rolling blankness that, too, had all but vanished. This all set David’s metaphorical jaw: I’m never going back.

The clarity that he had done the right thing. It was refreshing, you know?

The street harassment, though—oof. It was starting to get weird. David would just go out in boy clothes, no makeup, without his hair done, no big deal, and he would hear that he was a faggot. It was like suddenly they could tell, like they could smell it on him.

Also, he’d told Connie he’d gone on hormones and—fucking granddaddy of our patron saint of Mistake Town—had that been the wrong idea. He began to get texts and emails about how they were dangerous, and how no one knew what they did to your body, and how did David know he wasn’t doing irreversible damage?! Because he didn’t know! And it freaked David out, and he ignored a few calls from her, and that made Connie really mad, and now every time they spoke, they almost bit each other’s heads off, and …